Outspoken: Why Women's Voices Get Silenced and How to Set Them Free by Veronica Rueckert

Author:Veronica Rueckert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Patricia Finn is one of those people who could read the phone book and still have you dreamily wanting her to go on forever. Her voice is beautiful, as mellow and as rich as hand-churned butter. But she didn’t always sound this way. A former vice president of global public policy at a computer software company, she made the deliberate choice to lower the pitch of her voice. “When I heard myself on tape, it wasn’t the way I felt on the inside,” she says. “It didn’t come from a place of security.”

Finn made the choice to change her voice on her own, without outside pressure. Still, she acknowledges, “For women, the cards are already stacked against you. I felt like whatever I could do to be myself but to conform to social convention . . .” She shrugs. “And voice matters.”

Earlier in her career, Finn had learned the country-specific etiquette and cultural codes of communication for women and men. In one meeting with the CEO of a company in Taiwan, strict gender roles dictated that she not speak at all. Finn walked into the room and introduced herself. The CEO tipped his head toward one of the chairs ringing the conference table. Finn sat. She knew that the most powerful person in the room had to speak first, and further, she knew that person wasn’t going to be her.

“It was excruciating,” she remembers. After an entire half hour ticked by, during which Finn sat quietly while the CEO spoke, at last he paused and stood up. “We can work with you,” he said, and ended the meeting. That was it.

Finn had succeeded by saying nothing at all. Sometimes for women, the most surefooted way to the top is to bury the voice, to be the go-along gal who doesn’t mind taking the back seat. Other times it means being the hype man, or rather hype ma’am, instead of laying down the lead track, even when you know you’ve got the chops. There may be moments, like Finn’s, when the intentional decision to be silent feels like the right choice and other moments when going dark is toxic to your sense of self.

When it comes to the question of letting your voice be heard, you have to decide on your own what you’re willing to sacrifice and what winning means to you. No one should lightly surrender the right to speak.

But for women both in and out of the spotlight, there are murky waters to navigate, when surrendering your voice doesn’t look like a complete silencing but instead a kind of warping, when the voice twists into an ersatz version of itself. There is no simple answer to the question, When is silence discipline, and when is it concession? Even having the most toe-curling voice won’t save you from having to confront those issues for yourself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.