Hello beautiful soul
He expected this to hurt, and it had the opposite effect.
A man came into my comments (yet again 🙄) recently to explain that girls "more than half my age make more money" than women from my generation. Aaaaaaannnnnd that they're smarter than me at this point.
Bless him. He really thought that one would land. Especially the "dress like the young team part". The audacity. I have never loved my body as much as I do right now, and I will wear as little as I please.
But unfortunately for most of us, a woman's nervous system clocks an angry man as a threat, largely because it LITERALLY is. That wiring didn't disappear when I found my voice. Usually there's a jolt. Heart up. Jaw tight. A few breaths before I can think straight.
Not this time.
This time it was pride. Full-chested. Unbothered. Pride.
Because let me be real clear here: I LOVE watching women in their twenties ask for the number in year one that took some of us 15 years to even attempt.
No apology. FUCK YES.
No over-explaining. LFG.
Just the ask. Plainly. Like it was always going to be that simple.
He wanted that to threaten me.
But baby. Those women are me. Just younger. Because we stand on the shoulders of every woman who came before us.
EVERY woman who went first.
And that's the bit he really missed.
My mum is my biggest fan. No part of the woman I get to be today detracts from her, she radiates pride. I get to be who I am today BECAUSE of the woman she is.
That's how it works. That's how it has always worked. We only get to be who we are right now because of the suffering of the women who came before us.
Comments like his are one of the oldest moves there is. Make the older woman feel replaced. Make the younger woman feel like she's above it all. Keep us separate. Keep us competing. As if generations of women hate each other.
We don't. I don't. My Sisterhood is multi-generational baby and I love that for me.
But here's kinda magical the thing. He isn't totally wrong.
In New York young women working full time now earn slightly more than young men their age. Pew put it at 102%. In the UK the pay gap for women in their twenties sits at around 4%. Practically a rounding error. But by our forties and fifties that gap is around 20%. Same women. Same brains. Just older. And this year it moved the wrong way for that group again. The overall UK gap shrank. For women aged 40 to 49 it GREW.
Side note: Don't get it twisted though, whilst the tiny Queens might be nailing things like salary in some places, women across ALL generations are truly not okay OR safe across the board. That is a hill I will die on.
So no. We are not less smart than the tiny Queens.
We WERE the tiny Queens. And we gave it everything we had.
But we had something different to contend with in the middle.
Some of it is the system. Babies. Caring. The part-time role that never quite became full time again. A whole economy quietly running on women's unpaid hours. I am not going to pretend that away. But some of it is what we were taught to do with our own worth. Be grateful. Be reasonable. Be accurate about everyone's value except our own.
Let me tell you one of my own.
I sat on a leadership team that decided not to use C-level titles. Less hierarchy. Very progressive. My actual job was Chief People Officer. Same level as the CEO. But on LinkedIn I called myself "Practice Lead" because that's what we'd agreed.
One of the men on that same team called himself a CXO anyway. Nobody agreed it. Nobody granted it. He just took it.
And I stuck to the letter of it. Because somewhere deep in my body I believed that telling the exact truth meant making myself smaller than I actually was.
That is what my generation got so good at. Getting paid in praise and saying thank you. Building a better business case for next time. Waiting for someone to notice.
And to my utter and SWEET RELIEF, many of the tiny Queens didn't get that memo. Or they got it and binned it. They put the title on LinkedIn the day they sign. Many of them say the number first and then they stop talking. If the place won't pay it they leave. Not as a threat. As a fact.
That's not indicative of higher intelligence though darling. That's permission. And I hope that they stay just like that.
But here is the bit I reeeeeeeeeally want you to hear.
None of us are too old to be a tiny Queen.
You don't need a 24 year old to show you how it's done. You have been doing the hard part for twenty years. You know your value better than anyone in that building. What's missing isn't the business case. It's the permission. And a body that can say the number out loud without shrinking it on the way out.
So go give them hell tiny Queens. Ask for more than we ever dared to. Make it look easy. Make it look boring even.
And to the women in the middle. Your turn. Come and get yours.
Tiny Queens: go get your money.
Rooting for you always QUEEN
Ruth x
Ps. If you want to dial up your "tiny Queen" energy this season, I'm hosting another Ask for More session THIS WEDNESDAY October 20th at 11am EST. Come and be in the room with me QUEEN.
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