Female Role Models

At one point in our past, the female role model was the perfect housewife. I just see The Dick Van Dyke Show in my head. Although, there was Rosemarie, so the pressure to show women in the workforce was slowly starting to change.

I have met so many incredibly smart women in the past 15 years. Top female lawyers, doctors, accountants, and investors, women entrepreneurs that include restauranteurs, bakers, start-ups, writers, and artists. All looking at the world with a different set of lenses than 15 years ago.

Someone told me this quote that a famous psychiatrist said, “the slower you go, the faster you get there”. It has taken quite a while but the process is something that I have come to respect. I have never taken time out for the process. It has worked for me but perhaps I am at an age that has allowed me to slow down and begin to relish the process. Being at this age is strange enough.

I see countless places where women are breaking glass ceilings. There will be a peak where all the glass breaks. There will always be shards but shards are not just relegated to women. That won’t take another fifty years. It will take twenty. Good things will come over the next twenty years like a more equitable world in everything but true equality will still take time.

If you have watched the Crown, there is this great line that keeps coming back to me. When Princess Anne retorts to Phillip who is asking her to buck up and make the Crown look good because she will be great at it, she says to him, “I am tough but I am not confident”.

Too many women have had to play tough but right now as those ceilings are breaking, you can feel the confidence. Perhaps it is COVID. We are all just getting shit done but the continued confidence is what is going to get us to the place where few shards exist.

From my vantage point, it is starting to appear that young women have a new set of role models with confidence and grace who are rising to the top of their professions. That is not only good for women, it is good for all of us.