Megyn Kelly and the Case for Cultivating Your Own Power

February 22, 2017

There’s something to be said for not thinking about gender.

Megyn Kelly tells a story in her book, Settle for More, about joining a boy’s baseball team as a kid in 1978, when there weren’t any girl’s teams to join. “I wasn’t trying to break a gender barrier, or make a statement,” she says. “I just wanted to play.”

A few years earlier in southwestern Pennsylvania, another youngster was also the only girl on her local baseball team. I don’t know how Kelly’s early baseball career went, but I was terrible. Couldn’t hit the ball to save my life. Relegated to second-string right fielder. But that’s not the point. The point is that even though baseball was off-limits for girls, I wanted to play. Why limit myself?

There was already enough of that to go around. This was the 1970’s in a right-of- center lower-middle class neighborhood, where as a girl you were regularly reminded by teachers, neighbors, your friends’ mothers — everyone (sometimes with a veiled threat of violence) — that you were not to step out of your place.

I was compelled to step out anyway. This is why I know that Kelly’s “Deal with it.” approach to the obstacles faced by women in the workplace (from simple dismissiveness, to sexual harassment, to stalking — all of which she has faced) is the way to succeed. It is not an equal playing field for women and men in business — and sometimes it can be downright hostile — but, well, too bad. Find a way to win anyway.

Look at any groundbreaking woman you choose — Sojourner Truth, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Katherine G. Johnson, Margaret Thatcher — and it’s clear that it was personal power that helped her get where she was going.

As for Megyn Kelly’s Settle for More, it’s a master class in knowing your own power.

Take the story of her trip to the Fortune Most Powerful Women event with her daughter. Her daughter asks where they’re going. Kelly’s answer: “This is a gathering of a bunch of women…who have done amazing things. They are coming together to celebrate their power and how strong they are, and how much they’ve accomplished.” Well, ok then. That’s clear, and unequivocal, and unapologetic. A stirring exchange between a mother and daughter.

Or Kelly’s reaction, years before, to being offered her first full-time job in broadcast journalism at the local ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. with less than one year’s experience in the field: “…rather than simply say yes, I decided to roll the dice. I figured, if I was good enough to be full-time there, maybe I was good enough to be full-time someplace even bigger.” Indeed. She sent her audition tape to the Fox News Washington Bureau Chief and got a call back within 24 hours.

Interestingly, Kelly spends time in the book making sure we understand that she is not a “feminist.” (Ok, Megyn, except that you kind of are.) She rightly claims that feminism “has become associated, de facto, with liberal politics,” and wrongly asserts that “feminist messaging…treats gender issues as a zero-sum game — [and] assumes that to empower women, we must castrate men.” No matter. Anyone who can wipe the floor with Lou Dobbs on Fox News while handily refuting his claim that women in the workforce are the downfall of Western Civilization is ok by me.

Whether Kelly is a feminist or not, you can’t argue with her self-made success. Or the larger point of her book, which is that the fact of gender will always be present in a woman’s working life, but you don’t have to let sexism defeat you. Ultimately, the driver of your success — and of your life — is you.

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