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(5/2008) - Getting ready for school in the 1960s was a grind. There was the makeup, the hose and garter belt, a white blouse that had been sprinkled down and ironed, and, then, the hair. I'd wash it in the evening, wrap it around huge brush rollers, and put a plastic draw-string bag over my head into which a tube of hot air flowed. If I positioned my head just right, I could fall asleep in that contraption and have bunches of curls in the morning. Of course, they had to be mashed down, gotten under control, and then herded into a "flip" that just brushed the shoulders. Once at school, someone would say, "Your hair looks great!" To which I'd reply, "This mop? It just does this."

I don't know how perfect my appearance was, but making it seem effortlessly acquired was expected. It still is. Duke University has been implementing a number of initiatives in the past several years to address significant cultural ills in campus life. The problems were uncovered as part of the Women's Initiative, undertaken in 2003, which is a campus-wide project to improve college life for women at Duke. In a recent report about the progress of the program, Donna Lisker, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, recalled the findings of the study, which described an expectation of "effortless perfection" for female students. Women were to "look cute, be funny, be quiet," as one student said.ⁱ The women who participated in the study reported that they felt they must be "smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular," all without visible effort.ⁱⁱ

At the heart of "effortless perfection" is the trade-off girls and young women make when they abdicate control of their lives in service of meeting others' requirements in a perfection-obsessed culture. What they sense, quite accurately, is that the textured, variegated, authentic self poses a risk. That is, it doesn't play well in academic settings like college campuses and, as it turns out, in some sectors of the real world.

One of those sectors is the workplace. A recent New York Times article referenced a study conducted by Catalyst, a leading research organization that focuses on women in business.ⁱⁱⁱ In the report titled, "The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't," findings from a survey of senior executives reveal that women are typically viewed through a lens of gender stereotypes at work. If they conduct themselves in stereotypical ways, which the report defines as focusing "on work relationships" and expressing "concern for other people's perspectives," they are perceived to be less competent than male leaders. If they behave in ways that are viewed as traditionally male, e.g., being assertive, they are seen as "too tough" and "unfeminine." A quote in the same article by Joan Williams, University of California professor and author, sums up the dilemma. As leaders, women have to "choose between being liked but not respected, or respected but not liked." What a conundrum for young women who are trying to figure out how to succeed.

At Miss Hall's School we believe that the key for schools and workplaces is intentionally to articulate a core value of authenticity. Once that is done, the work is to encourage students and employees to discover and express their core selves. We have seen that when the School actively values authenticity, girls are inspired to penetrate layers of conditioning, habit, and expectation to find what they really think and believe. When they do this, the entire discourse of the School becomes settled, considered, and creative.

What must accompany the encouragement of individual authenticity, however, is the insistence on respect for diverse opinions and styles of expression and presentation. Even though the value of deep respect seems intuitively to be correct to most people, it is essential to articulate it on a conceptual level. Of course, if individuals feel that they are respected by their school or workplace, they are more likely to respect others. As many studies have shown, what we may know as the Golden Rule is a value held across the world: mutual respect is generated by our behaving toward others as we want them to behave toward us. In summary, this respect, when practiced broadly, has a profoundly cohesive effect on the community.

At Miss Hall's School, girls know that they are developing their strongest, most authentic, and honorable selves in a richly diverse setting. They nurture their capacity not to get caught up in biases themselves and to see beyond the stereotypes to engage with each other in meaningful work. We believe that our young women will, therefore, have the courage and confidence to challenge the status quo and work to right this topsy turvy society that discourages broad participation in solving complex problems. Getting back to "effortless perfection," the better definition, of course, is acting from your core self.