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Women who will be hurt by entitlement

wellesleyunderground:

From the day we receive our acceptance letters filled with The List of beekeeper-astronaut-juggler prodigies who are to become our new classmates, to the day we are inducted into the “most powerful women’s network in the world” (yes, they said that) upon graduation, Wellesley students are masterfully instilled with a sense of accomplishment, expectation, and entitlement. We are accomplished because we’ve made it into a community of successful women, which, we are constantly reminded, includes the likes of Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and  Diane Sawyer. By studying hard and taking advantage of the resources that this community has to offer us, we too can expect to be the Clintons, Albrights and Sawyers of the future. That’s how the thinking goes, and it’s a powerful rhetorical strategy—for better or for worse.

At its best, this Women Who Will tactic is empowering. As a feminist, I believe it’s crucial to undo the social conditioning that has taught us as girls that we weren’t very likely to be politicians, or business moguls, or anyone who had very much power at all. Many of us have taken away from Wellesley the benefit of a reconditioning—a demolition of the barriers we had consciously and unconsciously internalized as children. The “Women Who Will” strategy is a significant piece of that reconditioning. It gives us the confidence and security to chase our professional dreams after Wellesley, knowing that we’ll be supported by a network of women who have done it before us.

At its worst, Women Who Will strategy is detrimental to our ability to cope with declining job prospects. When economic times are tough, and entry-level jobs are hard to come by even for those with marketable skills, it’s crushing and disorienting to realize that your hard work at Wellesley does not entitle you to the position of Secretary of State. In fact, it doesn’t even entitle you to your first job. I would even argue that the effect of this disillusionment is more than just depressing—it is debilitating. It requires us to shift our thinking from a job search focused on our own interests to a job search focused on skills acquisition. It requires us to develop a sense of humility. It requires us to abandon our Five-Year Plans for outside-the-box plans—or for no plans at all. I don’t mean to suggest that this sense of disorientation is in itself harmful. In fact, we’re probably all better in the end for it. No,what’s debilitating is the needless emotional fallout of recent graduates realizing just how ill-equipped they are to join the workforce. 

 At the moment, my fellow Wellesley classmates from 2011 seem to be feeling a mixture of these benefits and drawbacks—simultaneously grateful for the can-do attitude and high-powered networking connections that Wellesley offers, and angry about their unpreparedness for the realities of this economic climate as well as Wellesley’s failure to adjust its message in times of economic hardship. While I don’t believe Wellesley should abandon its message of empowerment, it would do well to supplement that message with a more practical, skills-based approach. This is not to say that Wellesley should stick us all in accounting classes and make us into CPAs just so we can get our first job, but rather to say that Wellesley should recognize and respond to the need for skills acquisition in a time when employers are less likely to invest in training for entry level job candidates.

After all, the purpose of a liberal arts education may not be to get us a job, but the future of Wellesley’s financial strength and position as a leading academic institution certainly requires that more than a few of us do.

—Sarah Turrin, ‘11