Valuing Female Brains as Highly as Female Beauty

On a recent trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I encountered a new travel phenomenon: an island where your room key is currency. No matter where you are—in a restaurant or a gift shop, on an excursion or at a bar—if you hand over your key, the charge magically appears on your final room bill. Convenient, smart and, for tourists who don’t feel the immediate effect of dwindling cash, perhaps a tad dangerous.

Currency (and not just the kind you can spend) had been on my mind last June when I traveled throughout Australia. As the founder and president of the White House Project, a nine-year-old US-based organization committed to advancing women’s leadership across all sectors, right up to the American presidency (hence the name), I had been invited by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia to speak at its annual conference in Melbourne. I also went to schools in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Sydney to talk about women’s leadership at individual schools. My topic was aspiring to lead and the currency of power.

In Adelaide, the second city I visited, Seymour College conducted a survey of girls in years six to eleven, asking them to identify the issues that most affect them today. I was dismayed to see a striking similarity in the problems that girls have faced for decades in the US: body image, the “mean girls” syndrome, concerns about work and family, and male domination of the workplace, which was identified mostly by the older girls who are set to enter university and the working world.

We’re stuck in many ways and here’s why: the images that girls see, the culture they inhabit, the air they breathe—all of these things tell them that while the key to power for men may be leadership, for women it’s still mostly through men. And men come only if the women are thin and beautiful.

I was immediately thrown back to the ‘80s and my two eye-opening years in the American banking industry. In banking, as in many work environments then, women employees traded heavily on their beauty as a path to power.