The everyWoman Blog: 3 Career Mistakes Young Women Make (And How To Smash The Competition)

Taken from here.

Jennifer Dziura career advice Fridays on TheGrindstone and life coaching advice Tuesdays on our sister site, TheGloss.

Leggings. Leggings leggings leggings. If April Fools ever falls on a Friday, this will be the entire content of Bullish:

Leggings are not pants. A reader wrote in, asking “Can I wear leggings to the office as an accompaniment to a shirt? Do you want to see my vulva as I walk towards you and then my cellulite as I walk past you?” No. In conclusion, wear other pants, or a skirt or dress. Even a skirt or dress over the leggings. Thank you. The End.

There is a young woman I regularly see in an office setting wearing leggings with tops that extend over the top fourth of her ass, at best. Sometimes, I see her and think, “By now, I could pick your labia out of a lineup.” They are like a beautiful flower that ONLY YOUR LOVER AND DOCTOR SHOULD SEE.

I’m convinced that women who wear leggings as pants are deciding that this is okay by looking over their shoulders into a mirror and deciding, “Sure, that’s a nice ass.” Okay, great. But then you should take a video of yourself walking away. If you haven’t seen yourself in motion, then you haven’t seen the rolling haunches and jiggly bits that result from this most basic of bipedal acts.

So, let’s get that out of the way. And let’s get out of the way that I have messed up some pretty major things myself – see Bullish: Three Career F*ckups I Made So You Don’t Have To. They’re some serious fuckups.

Now let’s talk about mistakes endemic to young people, and how to be a gentlewoman instead.

Mistake #1: Acting Young but not Consulting Young

Some people really like to fit in, and want to have “friends” at the office. Regular friends who are fun, not colleagues or mentors or allies. This is a high-school-level mentality that leads some groups of employees to form a subculture that doesn’t serve any of them well.

If you work in an all-women office, trendy or high-fashion choices can be a way of displaying dominance over other women, or just keeping up with the higher-ups. Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli once famously said, “Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.”

But if the decisionmakers above you are mostly men – and you don’t work in fashion – youthful fashion flare will probably backfire.

How does a forty-year-old man view cage booties? As bizarre, and wildly inappropriate for the office. A lot of men still aren’t even on board with peep-toes (they think it looks like you have hooves). If you even mention “booties” to most men – you often have to describe what you’re talking about – they tend to get this look of disgust, and sometimes share an anecdote about some woman they saw wearing stupid boots that don’t even have toes.

I’m sure you’ve already heard the advice to “dress for the job you wish you had.” What seems normal and fun and “technically” within the dress code to young women often looks insanely distracting and loud to older men. Whoever wrote the dress code that allows jeans was not imagining the kind that are skinny or the kind that are bright orange. Getting away with technicalities isn’t helping the career of the woman with too many rivets.

Also, men’s work clothing tends to serve as a sort of “team uniform.” You wear the tie because you’re on-board and ready for orders, sir. So if your male boss is wearing an uncomfortable dress shirt/tie/undershirt/slacks combo every day and you are wearing slouchy things exclusively, you look as though you are not ready to work as hard as people whose clothing demands good posture. In sum, you should be about as uncomfortable as your boss.

Many young people also make the mistake of developing a social circle at work exclusive to other young people. Unless you all get promoted en masse (suuuper likely in a recession!), this is just going to further identify you with people in your cohort instead of those at the next level.

All those other employees your age? Be nice to them, of course! Help them out as appropriate. But dress ten years older than them. Act ten years older than them.

Now, I wrote in Bullish: Three Career F*ckups I Made So You Don’t Have To about going too far in the other direction – I was actually lying (up!) about my age. This is going too far. I think the ideal position is one in which everyone knows you’re, say, twenty-four – but they can hardly believe it!

Instead of expressing your youth through fashion and social choices, use your youth as a reason why you are very good at technology: you will volunteer yourself to manage the Twitter account. When someone over thirty-five says, “What’s Reddit?”, you have the answer. I don’t care if you don’t like technology; the assumption that young people are better at these things is the main competitive advantage to being young. I mean, sure, young people are also, in general, more up on the latest style pop culture – that’s you and fifty million other girls. You can’t build a competitive advantage out of that.

There are enough prejudices against young people; you have to use the only prejudice in favor of them. You are not youthful, so much as a grown-ass woman who is also well-known as a valuable consultant on youth matters.

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