Rosalind Wiseman regularly receives emails from women who think they will surprise her with the following disclosure: “You'll never believe this: My job is like high school.”
Mrs. Wiseman, however, is unfazed. “Of course I can believe it,” she said. Her response is a pep talk that she says something like this: “I remind you that you are not weak because you are affected by these dynamics. And that even if we've left adolescence behind, we're driven to feel valued by the groups we're connected to, and most of us would do anything to avoid shame and embarrassment. It’s not an opportunity to lash out at people in revenge, no matter how horrible the other person is.”
Women decades past high school seek out Ms. Wiseman because they know her as the author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescents,” the inspiration for the classic 2004 cult hit “Mean Girls.” .” The film brought Ms. Wiseman's taxonomy of the roles of female cliques (the queen bee, the banker (the gossip purveyor), and the sidekick) to the big screen, and comically portrayed a set of behaviors that, according to Wiseman, they were widespread among girls. and women still lacked social definition and validation.
While the mean girls in Tina Fey's movies haven't grown up (the musical adaptation “Mean Girls,” which opens Jan. 12, is also set in high school), Wiseman's have. Currently, he spends most of his time on the global speaking and consulting circuit, working with schools, government agencies and corporations. His clients include the State Department, UBS Financial Services and the MIT Media Lab. Fifty percent of his work, Wiseman says, is with adults.
It may seem a little depressing, or even retrograde, to talk about mean girls in 2024. Female camaraderie seems to be the order of the day, fueling cultural phenomena like Taylor Swift's billion-dollar Eras tour and the bonanza Greta's box office. Gerwig's “Barbie” movie. The #girlboss movement and Sheryl Sandberg's “Lean In” feminism sought to empower women in the workplace, and the “glow theory” emphasized the importance of helping other women on the path to career success. But it turns out there's still a lifetime of deeply ingrained social conditioning to undo, according to Wiseman.
“The root of many of the challenges women face at work and in relationships with each other comes from not having traditional paths to power,” she said. “When you are restricted from those powers, you assert power in more passive-aggressive ways.”
Or, as Lindsay Lohan said in the original “Mean Girls,” “In the girl world, all fights had to be sneaky.”
adult world
On a recent December afternoon, Wiseman, 54, received a call from a large company about a bullying problem it said it was having with a group of women, leading some people to quit their jobs. She was at her home in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with her husband and occasionally her two college-age children.
While she is an internationally sought-after speaker, Ms. Wiseman is not obsessed with self-branding and avoids catchy sound bites. She has not reached 2,000 followers on Instagram. (She also accused Ms. Fey and Paramount Pictures of not giving her fair share for her contributions to the franchise. A Paramount spokeswoman said Ms. Fey was not involved in the initial option of “Queen Bees” in 2002; Ms. Fey has said she has no comment.)
Many of her projects in the years since “Mean Girls” have not been particularly commercial and she has moved away from the subject matter for which she is best known. Her most recent book is “Courageous Discomfort: How to Have Important, Courageous, and Life-Changing Conversations About Race and Racism,” which she wrote with Shanterra McBride, a preacher and youth development expert. She has the air of a no-nonsense, no-nonsense confidant who can be turned to for advice on thorny interpersonal problems, because she's seen it all. She was once asked to mediate for a group of adult friends, but she refused. “I don't do individualized counseling,” she said.
Adults did not sympathize with Mrs. Wiseman particularly easily or even naturally. She expanded beyond teenagers, she said, after discovering that she “had more compassion for young people than for adults.”
“That's not right,” he said. “I needed to listen to adults about the situations they were in and then create strategies that worked for them.”
This is not completely terra incognita for Ms. Wiseman. In 2006, she followed “Queen Bees” with “Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make – or Break – Your Child's Future,” tackling PTA meetings, styles of conflicted parenting and others Adults navigate “land mines” every day. Today's social territory offers even more forums for potential conflicts. Online mom groups, for example, can be rife with “passive aggressiveness, meanness and off-track conversations,” Wiseman said, compounded by the fact that “maybe what you're seeing in the Facebook group isn't the entirety of what you're seeing in the Facebook group.” the situation.”
The modern workplace can bring its own heady mix of social dynamics. When corporate CEOs and human resources representatives call Wiseman, it's usually for help addressing issues like recruiting, high employee turnover and company culture, which can affect his bottom line. Above all, she said, they want her to deal with what many executives call “scary” topics, namely our emotions and how to manage them.
She sees women recoil when a colleague steals their ideas because they are too afraid to face them. She sees women who avoid celebrating their achievements for fear of making other women jealous. In other words, you see some of the same themes he documented in “Queen Bees.”
“'People will get mad at me if I speak up for myself,'” is a common refrain, Wiseman said. “'If I say no, then I'm bad'” is another, he said.
water cooler drama
There are no breaches of trust involved in Ms. Wiseman's practice. Instead, in workshops and presentations, she comes equipped with an arsenal of questions with which to coach women on how to manage feelings of anger and jealousy.
“Part of the magic of Rosalind is that she makes people feel so seen and nod that, yes, this is my lived experience in the workplace,” said Jenna Lange, founder of Lange International, a global firm business communication.
Over the past year, Ms. Wiseman has collaborated with Ms. Lange on several presentations for women at large technology companies. “The flow of the experience is that we ask questions like: Why do you refrain from expressing your anger? Where did you learn that? Ms. Lange said. Then, she and Ms. Wiseman team up, playing out different scenarios with the attendees.
After a workplace disagreement, instead of silently sulking and then getting angry and telling another coworker or friend, “I can't believe she did that,” Ms. Wiseman suggests saying, “The way You don't sound like you really want to know my answer. Is that accurate? If someone in a meeting doesn't give you proper credit, Lange suggests saying, “I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't take my idea and run it next time.” promote it as its own.”
Expectations about how women should act at work have subtly evolved. Fifteen years ago, Lange said, the business world encouraged women to be more aggressive. Now, the focus is more on assertiveness, which is different from aggression, and on giving women tools “to set boundaries and communicate clearly when someone has hurt them,” Lange added.
Because Wiseman's mean girl theory points to power imbalances between men and women as the root cause of workplace disparities, the duo's teachings on assertiveness can also be geared toward helping women ask for raises and promotions. This month, she gave a presentation to Microsoft's Women in Tech group focusing on how to get back to the negotiating table after getting a better degree or more money.
Wiseman is not alone in believing that facing these challenges in the workplace involves unlearning some of the lessons of childhood. Rachel Simmons, a certified career counselor who published a book about the “hidden culture of aggression” among girls the same year Wiseman released “Queen Bees,” said she had seen women struggle with old teenage hangups about niceness. could hinder your professional advancement.
“I see how the way women are socialized in childhood is in tension with the workplace, but I think women are largely removed from that understanding,” Ms. Simmons said.
The bad girl's legacy
The bad girl figure is enduring and ever-changing, and some say Wiseman's archetype is long overdue to be taken off a pedestal.
Charlotte E. Jacobs, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education familiar with Wiseman's work, argues that having the social freedom to be malicious and treacherous can be a reflection of privilege.
“The connection between girlhood and womanhood is much more intersectional today compared to when Rosalind was interviewing girls for her book: there is much more attention paid to race, religion and sexual identity and how girls of color have than navigate their lives. ”said Ms. Jacobs, who is also co-founder of EnGenderED Research Collaborative, an organization focused on the academic and developmental experiences of girls of color.
“The 'bad girl' archetype is a product of middle- and upper-class white girls,” she said.
Wiseman says she recognizes the way racism and other factors can contribute to tense social dynamics, like “the horrible stereotype of the 'angry black woman.'” However, even as he expands his understanding of mean girls and develops new methods for defeating them, the archetype remains a powerful and, yes, even charismatic cultural icon.
“Look, this is hard and there are many times when I hang my head and say, 'I can't do this anymore,'” Wiseman wrote in an email. But its goal is not perfect social harmony, and what keeps it going is not some grand ambition to incite a new wave of feminism or even create something on the scale of Sandberg's “Lean In” framework.
Wiseman said she believed small, everyday interactions could begin to break down the facade of mean girl culture. That could be as simple as hearing a parent start gossiping about a child or another parent and, instead of getting caught up, saying, “That must be terrible for that child/family/person. What can we do to support them?”
Still, social incentives remain attractive. In her work in elementary schools and as an observer of the media her 6- and 8-year-old nieces consume, Ms. Jacobs said that even 20 years after “Queen Bees” was published, the mean girl was still portrayed as “ very intelligent and cunning.”
“People respect her,” he said.
Audio produced by sara diamond.
