Tough Love

Every fall for the past 10 years or so the student affairs staff invite me to talk to their student leadership group which meets once a week throughout the academic year. The participants are all women who were nominated by faculty or administrators because they are seen to have special leadership potential. Over the years my talk has come to be known as “tough love” by the staff. I am not sure I would label it thus but that’s what the students seem to think best describes both my approach and my content.

What do I talk about? Well, as a sociologist who studies gender I am keen to impress on them that they will face challenges as women leaders and as women in the workplace; that it is unlikely (unfortunately) that they will be treated as equal to men with similar talents and intelligence. I talk about how gender shapes issues like careers, salaries, decisions about marriage and family. In truth, I am just giving them an overview of extant sociological data but, because I begin with these realities, they tend to find my news depressing– a “downer” as some describe it in their comments later. Over the years I have learned to anticipate that they do not particularly like to hear what I have to tell them. I explain that part of the reason they find my points so unpalatable has to do with the fact that the data cited do not match their own life experiences yet. These young women have grown up being told they can be anything they want to be—the sky is the limit. Also, they are currently at a stage in life where they experience relatively little discrimination as women. Consequently, to hear that things will likely change when they leave college and enter the world of work or when they marry and have children is not happy news. They have an understandable “let’s shoot the messenger” reaction! Yet, in the end almost all agree that they have been given very useful information that will help them make critical decisions in their lives: decisions about careers and about relationships.

One of the aspects of the talk that students seem to really enjoy is a hands-on exercise that I call “identifying your non-negotiables.” I give each of them a blank card and ask them to proceed as follows: imagine that you have just committed to marry or to enter a long-term relationship with someone. You must convey to your loved one three things that are extremely important to you, things about which you feel so strongly that you will not change your mind – even if your partner disagrees. I give the students examples of my own non-negotiables when I entered my marriage almost 30 years ago (and I tell them that, luckily, mine were totally acceptable to my future husband). My three non-negotiables were: to not change my name in marriage, that my career must have equal weight with my husband’s and, lastly, that I would visit my family in Ireland on a yearly basis. I tell the students they are free to pick whichever values they hold most dear—they will be personal to them. The results are fascinating. Students write about topics such as the importance of career choices, of the requirement that their partnerships be equal on all scores, of what they expect from partners when it comes to balancing work and family (and some decide that they want to be stay-at-home mothers), of spending time with parents and siblings, of raising children in a particular religion, of having parents live with them. We then talk about the importance of communicating these non-negotiables to their partners. Better to have these realities known earlier than later, I advise.

We end the session by my telling them that “knowledge is power” and that now they have some facts and tools at their disposal that will help them face their future lives in a purposeful way. If this is “tough love” so be it!