“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman… hot and understanding because Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time, Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”
-Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (Cool Girl Monologue)
***
I am that girl who can play it cool, I can wroth from the inside, jump with joy on the inside but my face will not betray me, if I speak my voice will not fail me. I wear nonchalance in my eyes and sugar on my tongue and can say “I don’t care, whatever you think is best”. I am that girl.
Because the truth is: I am a Cool Girl. I have watched far too many movies, and each one has taught me just how to charm a man; a casual compliment here, a shy tuck of hair there, a sassy yet delicate (to ease the ego) remark here, while a “please” and “thank you, you’re the best” there.
I feel like I must use these tricks because I am a girl living in a man’s world. It doesn’t help that growing up I didn’t see any women I knew in STEM fields that aligned with who I wanted to be. It doesn’t help that I decided to pursue engineering, a traditionally male dominated field. It doesn’t help that I was the only woman on the team in my first internship, or the next two after that. Or something as recent as the job I have now, the first one I landed after graduation, where again I am the only woman. Imagine that. A young girl, so naive, so… vanilla knowing little of the real world, navigating corporate world being led by men with no “baseline”, no representation.
If I am being honest: it isn’t just the female underrepresentation, it is also the simple and unsettling fact that I am insecure. In my abilities. In my knowledge. In my technical skillset. So these tricks are, in a way, a disguise. My strategy is simple, first I make them like me, then I make them take me seriously.
I remember a conversation I had with a girl friend, only friend at the time also in a technical role such as myself. I had asked her if she ever felt the need to charm a male colleague before meaning business, studying her expression scrupulously with every word I said because I was not willing to expose myself to someone of her caliber, someone who carries themselves with so much confidence. Before I even finished my sentence she had said, “oh yeah! I call it the cuteness mileage”
Cuteness mileage. That’s it. While this one conversation is not enough to conclusively say all women in STEM drive on cuteness mileage to start off their careers, it is enough to let me know that I am not the only one and that I don’t need to feel embarrassed for talking about it.
Of course it’s easier to talk about anything once it becomes a “thing of the past”. My insecurities are slowly becoming a thing of the past. I am metamorphosing out of the Cool Girl cocoon. By now I am starting to become confident in my own achievements and the value and quality of the work I produce. I no longer seek validation as I learn self-assurance and recognize my own skill set.
I have dwelled on this and thought of the two possible reasons for why I felt the need to use cuteness mileage as a base to establish any professional relationship: was it the lack of another woman in sight, or was it my insecurities? It was then that I realized: my reasons didn’t matter. As I continued my metamorphosis a new perspective began to present itself.
To risk being controversial by oversimplifying an important historical event, I thought about how women got basic civil rights because men shared it with them. Of course women fought hard for those rights but throughout history we have seen that somebody with more privilege was an ally to and supported a minority group to enable them to overcome the barriers and injustices they suffered.
Which led me to think about my dad who helped me push my barriers farther by encouraging me to pursue engineering. Who wholeheartedly insisted I study engineering at the best school in Canada instead of settling for the one close to home, even if that meant I moved away to a different city. This speaks volumes when you consider immigrant desi parents with an only daughter, while both of their sons still lived at home.
I thought about my husband and my brothers who hype me up whenever I tell them about a new prospect I want to pursue. Who constantly remind me I am capable of doing it all: manage my career, handle administration of my husband’s business and a family when the time is right and encouraged my mindset change that, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
On a professional level, I thought about Vijay from my internship at Indigo who spent his lunch hours teaching me SQL joins, and David who hired me, an environmental engineering student, over all other computer science students for a Junior Programmer internship because he believed in my capabilities, recognizing where I lacked and encouraged me to self-teach and be a match for the rest of my cohort.
I thought about all my male bosses, managers, or superiors, which is all of them really, who have helped me develop professionally.
and I thought about my boss now, who has played the most pivotal role in my career to date. He consistently challenged me by putting me on difficult projects out of my scope to mentor and train me. He allowed me to navigate corporate politics on my own, for important clients, so I’d have to defend my logic and quit the Cool Girl act. Truthfully, if I were forced to pinpoint one specific reason for dropping the cuteness mileage bullshit, it would be because of him. His trust in my abilities is what truly sculpted my sense of self-assurance in my skillset.
So once I put all of that into perspective, I owed it to all these men who encouraged me, supported me, enabled me, empowered me, to be confident and speak my mind. Yes, I am still a woman living in a man’s world but for every man not willing to put his misogynistic beliefs aside, there was one that saw the value I brought or the potential I possessed. And I knew just the difference between the two. The latter never made me feel like I had to be the Cool Girl to earn a seat at the table.
So, here it is. I used to be that girl who could play it cool, I could wroth from the inside, jump with joy on the inside but my face would never betray me, if I spoke my voice would never fail me. I used to be able to wear nonchalance in my eyes and sugar on my tongue and be able to say, “I don’t care, whatever you think is best”. I used to be that girl.
