"All hail the ice queen"

"Why can't I be both ambitious and soft?"

A few months ago, I was part of a women’s health research team, which funny enough was dominated by males. I found it baffling that the team leader didn’t think to include many women in the team considering that the health conditions we were looking into, mainly affected women. Anyway, I pushed that thought aside and concentrated my effort on the work at hand.

During one of the team meetings, I interjected the team leader while he made a point I did not agree with. Actually, I was not the only person that did so, but for some reason he turned to me and said “I find your approach to be cold and too sharp, maybe you need to tone yourself down a bit”. The whole room gasped. I think I mumbled; “what the hell?” I was perplexed not only with what he said, but because he did not say anything to the other person who had also interjected, who by the way happened to be a man. The said man, was actually the most vocal in the team. I hardly said much during the meetings other than during the presentations I was responsible for. Later on when I confronted him regarding the comment he made, he said he didn’t think it was good for women to be too ambitious because it compromises our femininity. “What a prick, is all I can say”.

This encounter got me thinking that the world wants women to be likeable. We are expected to be soft, gentle, nurturing and care for everyone around us. We are expected to be made of sugar, spice and everything nice. Our roles in society seem to be narrowed down to just being care givers. The traditional role of caregiving and sacrificing ourselves for others, and being submissive I believe is the reason work places and society at large still can’t seem to put the word ambition and woman together.

I still don’t understand why women are sometimes sneered at when they say they are ambitious. But yet men are not met with the same reaction when they profess to be such. For some strange reason, an ambitious woman is thought of as bossy, aggressive, cold, bitchy, hard and I could go on and on. And I must emphasis that it is not only men who have this view of ambitious women, but other women too. We women can at times be our own worst enemies. We sometimes reinforce the biases that exist. We can sometimes look harshly at another woman who dares to climb to the top. Instead of encouraging each other to go for the top, we at times join the societal band wagon that still thinks that men should be the providers and women should be the main caregivers. “Why can’t we both embrace these roles?”

So, I will unequivocally say I am ambitious to the bone. I learnt this from my own mother who told me it was okay for a woman to have goals and dreams, and go after them wholeheartedly. My mother was both a homemaker, a caregiver, wife and a business woman who ran her own day care centres and a catering company. Just like her, I take my work very seriously and would like to be taken seriously too. But at the same time, I am also soft, tender, gentle and a nurturing mother to my daughter.