Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard

Author:Julia Gillard [Julia Gillard && Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143794295
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

7

Hypothesis four: She’s a bit of a bitch

‘What’s resting bitch face?’ Ngozi asks.

The short answer is that it is something that’s only ever said about a woman. The longer answer is it is one of those ideas that flashes around the world and takes hold. In May 2013, a production company called Broken People uploaded a short video to the Funny or Die humour website.1 Formatted to mimic a public service announcement, it warned about a phenomenon where a woman who is not a bitch looks like one when her face is at rest.

While the comedians also explored a male equivalent, dubbed ‘resting arsehole face’, all the subsequent attention was on the bitch bit. With almost eight million views, the video has triggered a lot of laughs.

But the idea has not stayed where it began in the comedy arena. Instead, scientists have discovered what causes it,2 while plastic surgeons have offered to fix it.3

Ngozi asks this question as we walk away from our Brussels meeting with Erna Solberg, who said:

‘One of the things I’ve learnt is, when you grow older, everything falls down a little bit. Recently I learnt from my communications officer that this is referred to as “resting bitch face”. Even before I knew those words, I worked out years ago to always smile a little bit, so everyone says I’m always in a good mood. You have to combat resting bitch face because it is used to undermine women and portray them as sour, hard and aggressive.’

Intuitively, Erna has been trying to out-smile our fourth hypothesis. In chapter 3 we discussed the difficulties of women owning ambition. In the previous chapter we broke down the way women censor their behaviour to combat or conform with gender stereotypes.

In this chapter we drill a little deeper into the problem of women being seen as unlikeable, as ‘a bit of a bitch’. We are conscious that even using the word ‘bitch’ might be offensive to some, for which we apologise. But we decided to stick with it because it does capture a commonly held sentiment about women leaders. If we are all really honest with ourselves, we can probably remember a moment when that word sprang into our minds about a woman with power and authority. Indeed, at one point we contemplated calling this whole book ‘She’s a Bit of a Bitch’, but we decided the full sweep of what we wanted to explore was more complex than that.

The hypothesis of this chapter is, As a result of unconscious bias, it is generally assumed that women with power are unlikeable, or in the vernacular, bitchy. Have researchers developed a gender nastiness index? Not quite, but a relevant study comes from the Harvard Business School. There, students were asked to read a case study about a businessperson and then select ratings associated with their likeableness. Half the students read a case study in which the businessperson was a woman. The other half read about a man. In all respects other than

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