Play Like a Girl

Nearly two years ago, I joined the Northwest Arkansas chapter of the Network of Executive Women. I did so, much like my fellow members who are almost all women, to connect and learn. For some time, I’ve had an awareness of some of the challenges women face in the workplace. Close to twenty years ago, I found myself managing and advancing the careers of others. Being able to create opportunities for women began to take on a real priority and sense of doing something right and doing it well.

This week was latest NEW event and at one point in the program, speaker Heather Whelpley acknowledge that as a white woman, when it came to how much safe space she had to operate within in her professional role, she would often find herself walking on a beam two-feet wide and, further, that women of color may find themselves on a beam two-inches wide. As probably the only white male on the webinar, I wondered actively about the width of my beam…. perhaps two-miles wide???

Some years ago, P&G ran a terrific campaign #LikeAGirl. It was brilliant and profound. It’s also a far cry from what has been characterized by society, especially in the workplace, that could be represented by this scene from the Sandlot.

I heard a recent interview about LSU’s recent hire of Kim Mulkey as its new women’s basketball coach. Mulkey’s coaching career speaks for itself but the interview revealed that as early as ages 8-9, Mulkey was played in the boys baseball league and made the all-star team. The interview called out that from her earliest days, Mulkey was a winner.

I will confess, I have much to learn in this space. There’s a big part of me that would like to drop gender as a descriptor such as a great female executive or a great female coach or a great female (fill in the blank); that just wants to acknowledge that she’s just a great executive, coach, or whatever. Yet, the tension I feel is that I may well be part of the system that makes that necessary. That if we are to deconstruct such bias, we need (at least for a time) to keep that gender qualifier in there so that we can highlight that women can excel and that the Sandlot version of #LikeAGirl can be erased from our vocabulary and mindsets and be replaced by the young lady on the P&G commercial who said, “I’d run like me.”