(4-minute read)

The first woman was also the first “nasty woman”.  [I refer to the misogynist insult—famously leveled by Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in the October 2016 presidential candidate debate—now co-opted as an empowering feminist battle cry.] Just as women still experience today, the mythical first female human was punished for the sin of having ambition.  

Some 3000 years ago, a priest in Jerusalem wrote down an old etiological myth about the human condition:  Chava (“Eve”, in English) ate from the figurative “Tree of the Knowing Good and Bad”. Her nameless male companion also partook. God perceived this as an attempt by humans to become wise like a god.

But, as the story unfolds, we read that it is Eve who gets most of the blame. Yahweh metes out horrific retributive intergenerational punishment of all women: increased pain in childbirth and permanent loss of gender equality. For his equally ambitious act, the as-yet-unnamed male companion of Eve incurs the punishment of . . . farming difficulties.

Laws are symptomatic of the need for laws. A given society’s rules tell us what is common behavior in that society, in that a rule was deemed necessary to curb or prevent that behavior. This startlingly profound solipsism yields some important realizations about Biblical times. Two such examples:

• Homosexuality was common (. . . as, of course, it has been in most cultures in most historical periods). We know this because the authors of the Hebrew scriptures felt the need to proscribe homosexuality (though they did so unevenly, and not as brutally as right-wing apologists’ cherry-picked text quotations would suggest).
• Men knew that women have high sex drives (. . . as most cultures through most historical periods have known, with the notable exception of present-day America. In fact, evolutionary biologists posit that pro-sex female physiology reflects the social incentive that primitive women had for multiple sex partners in order to achieve partible paternity to ensure offspring survival under resource scarcity). We know that men knew this because it is reflected in men’s need to create myriad rules to control women sexually: keeping us covered up, out of sight, and generally separate from what could tempt our wanton sexual appetites. Hebrew scripture says that women are to be more severely punished for adultery than are men. Why? Because (implicitly and allegedly) women are proactive in seeking those adulterous encounters. (Similarly, today men often accuse women of having “wanted” sex in the form of rape. They can only make that mistake if they believe that women really want sex pretty badly. But, at the same time, men also often whine that women don’t really want sex very much at all. That self-serving, contradictory logic deserves its own essay!)     

Similarly, we see that, since pre-historic times, women have been blamed as overly-ambitious for doing the exact same thing as a man does. Men have always felt the need to punish women for being ambitious because . . . well, . . . women are in fact ambitious. Just like men are. The reason why God punished women in the Bible is that Eve showed ambition (which was perhaps more threatening coming from her than from her male companion). 

I was recently up for a job to be the first woman in a senior-level position at a prominent, Philadelphia-based national consulting firm. After four months of promising discussions, I was informed that I “seem too ambitious and enthusiastic”. Ironically, I had meanwhile actually been thinking how to make sure to convey more enthusiasm to the prospective employer, lest my gentle female aura be misinterpreted as lack of ambition. 

Such unfair, gendered criticism is commonplace. And at this point its ubiquity should be common knowledge. In this particular instance, it is even more absurd, because consulting businesses depend on their advisors being forthright and often contrarian to powerful clients, as well as ambitious and tenacious in the never-ending task of prying open reluctant corporate wallets to secure new 6- and 7-figure projects to fill the pipeline. Consultants without ambition and enthusiasm don’t last very long in the business.

However, the male cabal that installs and assiduously maintains glass ceilings usually feels that the intangible emotional cost of de-biasing themselves towards women (A) is greater than the tangible financial cost of missed business opportunity (B). Irrationally, the men in power prefer to reach twice as deep down into a pool of male candidates than to hire the top people from a combined, gender-agnostic candidate pool. And, by conveniently ignoring their own false negative rate of rejecting competent women, they convince themselves that this scraping-the-bottom-of-the-male-barrel hiring system “works perfectly well”. 

Women are forced to put far more effort (and “enthusiasm”?) than men into conveying our competence, and motivation. We have to combat the pervasive a priori bias among mostly-male corporate gatekeepers that women are less inherently competent, less hard-working (because surely I have children and am their primary caretaker, or will clock out early to pursue my true passions of scrapbooking and knitting, or will slack off when I’m “bleeding out of my whatever”), and less in need of a job (because surely I am just some man’s secondary income, or it’s simply audacious for me to aim to thrive and I should suffice with mere survival). However, once we “lean in” to demonstrate those desirable qualities, we are often punished with accusations of being aggressive or arrogant (it is considered unseemly for women to tout accomplishments, or to ask for a market-level salary at parity with male peers), or too emotive or enthusiastic . . . or too ambitious. 

The frustrating, enduring reality is that if that the owners of that consulting firm do not want a woman in their inner circle or upper ranks, they will continue to get away with it. I have no realistic recourse other than to toss a blog post into the void. They can safely look down on me through their impenetrably thick glass floor, smugly congratulating themselves for honoring a 3000-year-old paradigm of prejudice against women’s ambition. 

January 2017