Wilson: 3-5

In chapter three of Wilson, the most classic problem of women is pointed out; that looks will always matter to women no matter how much we fight against it every day. From almost the beginning of time there has been a stigma of "sex object" attached to the female persona. While some women have tried to use this to their advantage, and in some cases it has indeed worked, for the most part it harms all of us. Women are looked at as sex objects in our society no matter what. If you happen to be "unattractive" by the standards of our current society, you often begin the battle fighting an uphill struggle. This is yet another barrier that women are forced to overcome when it comes to being in leadership roles. When a man sees a woman for the first time, he almost never takes her intelligence into consideration, than surveys the way she looks. It is almost certainly the other way around.
Chapter four delved into the age old "catfight" tendency of women who are powerful and likely to be leaders. I loved how the book used the movie Mean Girls to point out that women can most certainly defend themselves, but also that they have a very unique approach to the attack. Women can sometimes be suckered into attacking themselves, not the real enemies of stereotypes and typecasts. There is a double standard that women have to face down every day, that they are gold diggers, greedy, shallow, and cold, is an absolute abomination. Men who act in exactly the same manner can be referred to with much nicer language like ambitious, ruthless, and persevering. This is just another obstacle to women in leadership roles.
The stereotypes of women in the workforce is yet another misconception about females and how they take their power which is discussed in chapter 5. The fact that there are certain career paths that women have traditionally been good at and sometimes exclusively allowed to participate in (nursing, teaching, etc.) makes it even harder for women to step outside these roles. Men start out with a blank slate, they can be anything they want to be and never have to face a stereotype down if they tell people, even at a young age, that they want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a pilot, or an astronaut. Females do not have this option. This is just another oppressive notion that women everywhere struggle to erase from society's collective brain.