Why women can be likeable or successful – but not both

Every few years, it seems, another business publication posts the results of a study on ‘successful women’ and ‘likability.’

The data is always the same; you can be liked, or you can be competent, but never the twain shall meet.

‘Many academics have written about it. It’s a pretty simple but unfortunate phenomenon,’ Hillary Clinton told William Kristof at Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit.

‘With men, success and ambition are correlated with likability, so the more successful a man is, the more likable he becomes. With a woman, guess what? It’s the exact opposite.’

Then the entire internet told her to shut up, because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton, the first woman ever to win a major party’s nomination for the presidency, and everyone hates that bitch.

But framing this as a problem with ‘successful women’ is misleading.

It makes the problem sound like a hollow gripe from the sort of woman who is so well-insulated from life’s problems that she has the luxury to complain about not being beloved by her subordinates.

Yet the issue is not solely relevant to Cruella DeVil and/or Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Loves Prada.

We don’t hate ‘successful women.’

We hate women, period – it’s just that, the more visible a woman becomes, the more appealing she becomes as a potential human sacrifice.

While researching my book, Trainwreck, I found myself knee-deep in the history of how we’ve policed women’s public self-expression.

Sometimes that policing was literal; the United States and Great Britain both had ‘common scold’ laws, which made it illegal to be a woman who ‘frequently or habitually causes public disturbances or breaks the peace.’

A New Jersey woman was convicted of the offense as recently as 1972.

In other instances, like the 19th-century ‘hysteria’ epidemic – it was a dread disease that seemed to afflict literally any woman who was remotely inconvenient to the men in her life – women were controlled by pathologising their normal emotions and desires.

But more often, we’ve penalized women’s public life indirectly, through social weapons like shame — picking some particular unruly or ‘unlikable’ woman, tearing her apart in the media, and hanging her out to dry.

Mary Wollstonecraft, perhaps the first professional feminist in the West, initially went down in history as a ‘maniac’ with ‘much amiss in the head’ after her husband published the story of her extramarital affairs and suicide attempts; The Anti-Jacobin speculated that she’d had thousands of lovers.

The same loony-slut rubric would later be imposed on figures as disparate as Sylvia Plath, Monica Lewinsky and Britney Spears.

The point wasn’t just to shush those women, or make them feel bad; the point was to keep all women aware of the humiliation and mass disapproval that awaited them if they stayed out of line.

Which brings us back to those ‘successful women.’

If a woman is successful, it’s because she’s made herself visible.

She can speak, and – what may be worse – she can make others listen.

All of those are privileges that men have taken for granted for centuries, but they’re also things that women are supposed to approach with guilt or trepidation, if at all.

We call successful women unlikable because they’re rupturing the rules of femininity.

We do the same thing to all sorts of loud or public women, every day.

The way to stop it is not with more workplace sensitivity seminars.

It’s by getting comfortable with women’s voices – and maybe even heeding what they have to say.

Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, And Fear is available from Waterstones and Foyles.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.