Rosalind Wiseman regularly receives emails from women who think they're going to surprise her with the following revelation: “You'll never believe this: My work is like middle school.”
Ms. Wiseman, however, is unimpressed. “Of course I can believe it,” she said. Her response is a pep talk that goes something like this: “I remind them that they are not weak for being affected by this dynamic. And that even when we are past our teenage years, we want to feel valued by the groups we are associated with and most of us will do everything we can to avoid embarrassment and shame. It’s not an opportunity to retaliate against people, no matter how terrible the other person is.”
Women decades out of high school seek out Ms. Wiseman because they know her as the author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence,” the inspiration for the cult classic “Mean “Girls” in 2004.” The film brought Ms. Wiseman's taxonomy of girl clique roles – the queen bee, the banker (the purveyor of gossip) and the sidekick – to the big screen, comically depicting a range of behaviors that, according to Ms. Wiseman, contribute to Girls are prevalent and women still lack definition and social validation.
Although the bad girls in Tina Fey's films aren't adults yet – the adaptation of the musical “Mean Girls,” out Jan. 12, is also set in high school – Ms. Wiseman's are. These days she spends most of her time in the global speaking and consulting industry, working with schools, government agencies and corporations. Her clients included the State Department, UBS Financial Services and the MIT Media Lab. Fifty percent of her work, Ms. Wiseman says, is with adults.
It might seem a little bleak — or even retrograde — to talk about mean girls in 2024. Female camaraderie seems to be the order of the day, fueling cultural phenomena like Taylor Swift's billion-dollar Eras tour and the box office success of Greta Gerwig's “Barbie” film. The #girlboss movement and Sheryl Sandberg's “Lean In” feminism sought to empower women in the workplace, and the “Shine Theory” emphasized the importance of empowering other women on the path to professional success. But it turns out there is still a lifetime of ingrained social conditioning that needs to be undone, according to Ms. Wiseman.
“The root of many of the challenges women face at work and in interactions with one another is that women do not have traditional paths to power,” she said. “When you are excluded from these powers, you exercise power in more passive-aggressive ways.”
Or as Lindsay Lohan put it in the original “Mean Girls,” “In the girl world, all fights had to be sneaky.”
adult world
One December afternoon, Ms. Wiseman, 54, received a call from a large company about an alleged bullying problem with a group of women that led to some people quitting their jobs. She was home in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with her husband and occasionally her two college-age sons.
Although she is an internationally sought-after speaker, Ms. Wiseman is not fixated on self-branding and avoids catchy slogans. She hasn't reached 2,000 Instagram followers. (She has also accused Ms. Fey and Paramount Pictures of failing to pay her proper compensation for her contributions to the franchise. A Paramount spokeswoman said Ms. Fey was not involved in the first option of “Queen Bees” in 2002; Ms Fey said she had no comment.)
Many of her projects in the years since Mean Girls haven't been particularly commercial and she's strayed away from the subject matter she's best known for. Her most recent book is “Courageous Discomfort: How to Have Important, Brave, Life-Changing Conversations about Race and Racism,” which she co-wrote with Shanterra McBride, a preacher and youth development expert. She seems like a sensible, down-to-earth confidante who you could ask for advice on delicate interpersonal problems, because she has seen it all. She was once asked to mediate for an adult friend group but declined. “I don’t do one-on-one counseling,” she said.
Growing up wasn't particularly easy or natural for Ms. Wiseman. She grew out of being a teenager, she said, after finding herself “having more compassion for young people than for adults.”
“That’s not okay,” she said. “I had to listen to adults about the situations they were in and then develop strategies that worked for them.”
For Ms. Wiseman, this is not complete terra incognita. In 2006, “Queen Bees” was followed by “Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make – or Break – Your Child's Future,” which covered PTA meetings, conflicting parenting styles, and other things were daily “landmines” that adults navigate. Today's social space offers even more forums for potential conflict. In online mothers' groups, for example, there can be “passive aggressiveness, meanness, and off-kilter conversations,” Ms. Wiseman said, made worse by the fact that “what you see in the Facebook group may not be the entirety of it.” is “the situation.”
The modern workplace can bring its own heady brew of social dynamics. When business leaders and human resources representatives call Ms. Wiseman, they typically ask her for help in addressing issues such as hiring, high staff turnover and company culture that can impact their bottom line. She said she particularly wanted to address what many leaders call “scary” topics – namely our emotions and how to manage them.
She sees women shy away when a colleague steals their ideas because they are too afraid to face them. She sees women who avoid celebrating their successes for fear of making other women jealous. In other words, she sees some of the same themes she documented in “Queen Bees.”
“'People will be mad at me if I stand up for myself,'” is a common refrain, Ms. Wiseman said. “'If I say no, then I'm being mean,'” she said.
Water cooler drama
There is no loss of trust in Ms. Wiseman's practice. Instead, through workshops and presentations, she is equipped with an arsenal of questions to coach women on how to deal with feelings like anger and jealousy.
“Part of Rosalind's magic is that she makes people feel seen and nod in agreement that this is my lived experience in the workplace,” said Jenna Lange, the founder of Lange International, a global business communications company .
Over the past year, Ms. Wiseman has collaborated with Ms. Lange on several presentations for women at major technology companies. “The flow of the experience is that we ask questions like: Why do you hold back from expressing your anger? Where did you learn that?” said Ms. Lange. Then she and Ms. Wiseman form a tag team and play through different scenarios with the participants.
Instead of silently storming out in anger after a workplace disagreement and telling another colleague or friend, “I can’t believe she did that,” Ms. Wiseman suggests saying, “The way you talk to me is “That’s not the case.” Come across as if you really want to know my answer. Is that true?” If someone doesn't give you proper credit in a meeting, Ms. Lange suggests saying, “I'd really appreciate it if next time you didn't take my idea and promote it as your own.”
Expectations of how women should behave in the workplace have subtly evolved. Fifteen years ago, Ms. Lange said, the corporate world encouraged women to behave more aggressively. Now the focus is more on assertiveness – which is different from aggression – and on giving women tools “to set boundaries and communicate clearly when someone has wronged them,” Ms. Lange added.
Since Ms. Wiseman's bad girl theory suggests that power imbalances between men and women are a root cause of inequality in the workplace, the duo's lessons on assertiveness can also be aimed at helping women ask for raises and promotions. This month she gave a talk to Microsoft's Women in Tech group, focusing on how to return to the bargaining table after getting a better title or more money.
Ms. Wiseman is not the only one who believes that overcoming these challenges in the workplace will require unlearning some childhood lessons. Rachel Simmons, a certified career coach who published a book about the “hidden culture of aggression” in girls the same year Ms. Wiseman released “Queen Bees,” said she has seen women with old, youthful tendencies overwhelm had to struggle with sympathy that could hinder their career advancement.
“I see that the way women are socialized as girls is at odds with the workplace, but I think women are largely cut off from that understanding,” Ms. Simmons said.
The Bad Girl's Legacy
The bad girl figure is both consistent and ever-changing, and some say Ms. Wiseman's archetype should have been torn down from its pedestal long ago.
Charlotte E. Jacobs, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education who is familiar with Ms. Wiseman's work, argues that the social freedom to be spiteful and devious can be an expression of privilege.
“The connection between girlhood and femininity is much more intersectional today than it was when Rosalind interviewed girls for her book – there is much more consideration of race, religion and sexual identity and how girls of color have to navigate their lives,” Ms. Jacobs said , who is also co-founder of the EnGenderED Research Collaborative, an organization focused on the developmental and academic experiences of girls of color.
“The 'mean girl' archetype is a product of middle- and upper-class white girls,” she said.
Ms. Wiseman says she recognizes how racism and other factors can contribute to tense social dynamics, such as “the terrible stereotype of the 'angry black woman'.” But at the same time, she expands her understanding of mean girls and develops new methods for dealing with them. Even when he defeats her, the archetype remains a powerful and, yes, even charismatic cultural icon.
“Look, this is hard, and often I put my head down and say, 'I can't do this anymore,'” Ms. Wiseman wrote in an email. But their goal is not perfect social harmony, and what keeps them going is not a grand ambition to spark a new wave of feminism or even to create something on the scale of Ms. Sandberg's “Lean In” concept.
Ms. Wiseman said she believes small, everyday interactions can begin to break the façade of mean girl culture. This could be as simple as overhearing a parent gossiping about a child or another parent and, rather than getting involved, saying, “That must be terrible for that child/family/person.” What can we do do to support them?”
Nevertheless, the social incentives remain tempting. In her work in elementary schools and as an observer of the media her 6- and 8-year-old nieces consume, Ms. Jacobs said that even 20 years after the release of “Queen Bees,” the mean girl is still seen as “very smart and cunning.” “
“People respect her,” she said.
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.