Every few months on social media, a campaign reliably comes around urging women to stop undermining ourselves at work. Don’t, we’re advised, use the qualifier “just”, as in “can I just float an idea?” Stop apologising for making routine demands or having the temerity to use up someone’s time. Most recently and trenchantly, don’t, we are advised, ground every timorous request with the phrase “no worries if not”.
I say and do all of these things, although less frequently than I once did. Where 10 years ago the qualifiers came out as reflex, these days, I generally catch and delete them before I hit send. I don’t open emails with “sorry to bother you”, unless I’m being deliberately passive aggressive. (This is my preferred tonal mode, obviously, although it gets me nowhere in the US. A snippy email I sent to an American last week hinged on the word “unideal”, a neutral term to American ears, but to a Brit, clearly, signifying a curse on you and your family for a thousand years.)
These exhortations to pull ourselves together and stop vacillating have been a useful alert to behaviours many women engage in at the level of instinct. These behaviours are also strategic, a necessary hedge to what we know is the offputting effect of women making demands. The “no worries if not” habit is a particularly hard one to break, based as it is on a justifiable anxiety that the only way to get what you want is to present it as an act of largesse on the part of the person you are asking.
All of which has been on my mind this week while watching the ascent of Kamala Harris to vice-president-elect. Although the relief and ecstasy at the election results were huge, when she made her victory speech on Saturday night, I didn’t expect to be moved. Harris wasn’t accepting the top job, after all: she was the warm-up act for Joe Biden and celebrating her “first” when the position was still second-in-command seemed to me a bit dismal. And yet, when she gave a shout-out to all the young girls watching, including my five-year-old daughters, urging them to see themselves in ways others might not traditionally have seen them, to my amazement I had to swallow hard and look away.
Harris had, over the weeks and months of the campaign, been subject to a lot of the criticisms that dogged Hillary Clinton. She was too abrasive, too cocky, too full of herself. During the primaries, while Bernie Sanders and Biden shouted and chopped the air with their hands, Harris remained, by necessity, even-tempered and moderately spoken. A man who loses his temper is forceful; a woman who does so is unhinged.
The soft-approach of “no worries if not” isn’t a self-defeating verbal tic, therefore, but has for a long time been the quickest and easiest way for women to deliver a frictionless result, and it is one it would be good to retire. I recently wrote a book with Megan Rapinoe, whose directness – with Donald Trump, with Sports Illustrated, with the governing body of her own sport – has been interpreted by some as monstrous impoliteness, about which Rapinoe doesn’t have a shred of self-doubt.
Why, she says, shouldn’t she and her teammates demand more money, when they win all the time and are, compared with male footballers in the US, chronically underpaid? Why shouldn’t she, while accepting an award from Sports Illustrated, flag up how few women and writers of colour they employ? And why shouldn’t she say, after winning, “I deserve this”?
All of which I understand intellectually, but still find basically socially mortifying. In the writing of this book, we had to go over it, again and again, and each time it struck me as freshly outlandish. How did she not die of embarrassment? Wasn’t she worried these kinds of statements made her appear “ungrateful”? Where did she get the gumption to presume she might take up that much space? “I think about the people I’m speaking for, not those I’m speaking to,” she said, which is a useful reframing. And in a phrase that could serve, admirably, as the title for a book of whimsical essays on female confidence, “I don’t need you to like me to know that I’m right.”
Neither the confidence thing, nor the perception of women asking for things as rude, will be solved quickly, and to that extent “no worries if not” remains a useful approach. But with a woman in the second highest office in the land, it would be nice if a shift got under way: from help me out here, I’m grateful for any bone you might throw me, to help me out here because it’s your job.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York. She is the author of One Life, by Megan Rapinoe More
