Women’s Online Communities Offer Strength for Strong Women
Support Your Fellow Woman Through a Women’s Online Community
One frustrating stereotype that successful women in business continue to face is being labeled, often completely inaccurately, as tough, cold, and calculating. Fortunately, forward thinking women have already created several effective strategies to address this problem, and one of the best is to join an authentic women’s online community. It can be both painful and demoralizing for a woman to work hard, keep her nose to the grindstone, take full advantage of her significant mental and professional faculties, and make big sacrifices all to advance in her career, only to be insulted and accused of being unwomanly.
This is just a sign that many of the commonly held beliefs about appropriate gender roles do not fit the way life and society work today. More than one expert on the issue of women and business has pointed out that through a thorough examination of what it has meant to be a woman throughout time, women can wrest control of their construction in society, take the good and discard the bad parts of that historical image, and attempt to reconstruct gendered definitions of appropriate behavior and success for modern women.
This isn’t about some revolutionary process. In fact, one of the best ways to be a part of this change also plays to a strength that many women already bring to the business world, and is at the same time an effective coping technique to make those labels more bearable: participate in social collaboration and conversation. Many women already do this, but for some highly successful business women, opportunities to participate in the kind of genuine, inspirational conversations necessary are few.
That’s where joining a good women’s online community can be a boon. Successful business women approaching the upper echelons of power often confront a “double bind.” If they take charge and lead through assertive decision-making, they are seen as acting like a man, yet if they seek consensus, they are seen as lacking backbone. These problems arise from paradigms that were constructed without female input. Through effective examination of the history and rational behind these roles, coupled with deliberate, success-oriented collaboration, women can both suffer less from the kind of negative labels they may experience and play an important part in shifting social constructs away from these labels.
