Transcript of Sexism, Lies, and Fairy Tales: A Conversation with Dr. Anne Beall
Cathy: Welcome to Parity, a podcast for everyone ready for a workplace of true gender parity with equal numbers of women and men at all levels of organizations including the coveted top positions. Women have had the right to vote for 100 years, but most experts believe that we will not achieve workplace parity for another 135 years! 135 years is a long time, friends, to wait for equality. The goal of this podcast is to accelerate this change by being a coach, mentor, and trusted friend for all of you who are ready now.
I’m Cathy Nestrick. Waiting for 135 years until we achieve workplace parity is not ok with me, and that is why I was motivated to start this Podcast with my good friend Deborah.
Deborah: Today we’re welcoming Anne Beall to the show. Anne is the founder and CEO of Beall Research. Previously, she was part of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) conducting large-scale, complex strategic studies for Fortune 500 companies. Anne received her M.S., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in Social Psychology from Yale University and she is the author of Cinderella Didn’t Live Happily Ever After. So listeners you might be able to guess why we are having Anne on today.
Anne, welcome to the show! We are so excited to have you on. Can you tell our listeners a little more about yourself?
Anne: Sure, thank you so much for having me. It is such a pleasure to be on your podcast. Yes, I am a researcher and I have been very interested in women’s issues forever and outside of my job where I do research for 100 companies. So outside of that work, I decided to do some research to understand the hidden messages in fairy tales. I use research to explore some things that really matter to me.
Cathy: Anne, we are so glad to have you with us today. Your new book, Cinderella Didn’t Live Happily Ever After really resonated with me and it matched so many themes that we talk about on this podcast. Listeners, in her book, Anne analyzed the Grimm’s fairy tales and looked for patterns about marriage, power, suffering - who suffers and who causes the suffering - all from a gender perspective. I want to ask you about each of these elements, Anne, but first, let’s just talk about fairy tales. Why did you decide to analyze them? What is it about fairy tales that caught your attention?
Anne: Well, fairy tales are really important because they’re often the first stories we hear as children. They are some of the most beloved tales in our culture. Cinderella grossed hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. These stories are core in our society and they are told and retold, and they’re core to many societies. And they’re core to many societies. There are more than 1500 versions of Cinderella told around the world.
Cathy: Wow, I did not know that.
Anne: Yes, there are many Cinderella stories - there is Chinese Cinderella and many more. The thing about these stories is that they are really important in terms of how we view the world, they are important in shaping our desires and what we want out of life. So they’re incredibly important. Like I said, Disney has obviously made tons of money using fairy tales in their movies and books. So they’re important and that’s why I wanted to take a look at them.
Deborah: And Anne, as you were speaking I was remembering that there were really only two movies that were on prime time that were in color, and one of them was Wizard of Ox and the other one was Cinderella. So Cinderella was replayed every year so I saw it countless times.
Anne: Yes, I don’t know many people who don’t know about Cinderella. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who does not know that story. It’s ubiquitous.
Cathy: That’s a good point. It’s really baked into our culture.
Deborah: Yes. So one of the things we’ve talked a lot about this year is gender stereotypes and how these stereotypes are baked into our culture and affect our behaviors and goals whether we want them to or not. And you just said that - that they affect what our desires even are. What are your thoughts on gender stereotypes and fairy tales from a “chicken and an egg” standpoint. Did the stereotypes exist and that drove the creation of the fairy tales, or did the fairy tales help to create today’s gender stereotypes?
Anne: I think it’s a bit of both. Gender stereotypes are nothing new and I’m sure they have been around for quite a long time. There’s been a division of labor for a long time and cultures have spent a long time trying to create that. I do think, though, that fairy tales shaped gender stereotypes because they are so pervasive and as you say, baked into our culture. One of the things about fairy tales that is important is that they do evolve over time and they gain some of the input of some of those who rewrite or retell them. So the example I like to give is about the Grimms. The Grimms were two brothers in Germany who were collecting these fairy tales, often from women - women they brought in to tell them these stories. The focus of these stories was to create a sense of nationalism and to promote German culture. When they wrote these stories, though, they started to revise them. So in the original story of Cinderella that they penned, Cinderella actually had many more speaking parts. Over time, she lost her speaking parts. The evil stepmother gained speaking parts.
Cathy: Oh my goodness.
Anne: So the Grimms brothers actually made Cinderella even more passive and even more of a victim than she was. And they made the evil stepmother even more evil. So they exacerbated some stereotypes that are out there and that’s part of the revisionist things that happened with fairy tales. It is the case that they do shape behavior, and if you are a little girl growing up and you’ve been told that this is really wonderful and that Cinderella is a lovely story and you see the movie, and your mom mentions it and you wear the costume for Halloween, you know, are you now looking for Prince Charming as you start to think about a marriage partner when you’re in your twenties. And does that sort of effect some of the things you want out of life. I would say that it has a huge effect.
Cathy: I think that is a really good point. And it is amazing to me that the Grimms brothers made Cinderella even more passive. I wish they were alive today and we could ask them what was your goal? What were you thinking?
Deborah: I’m not sure we’d want to know the answer to that!
Cathy: Probably not, probably not. They probably wouldn’t be my best buddies would they. Another thing that struck me while I was reading your books is how dark some of the stories are. I knew this about Grimm’s fairy tales, but I didn’t remember just how dark they are. In one of the stories mentioned in your book, a man holds his wife down and presses her head into a pillow until she falls asleep. In other words, until she dies. I can’t believe that these stories were told to children! Or were they? Were these stories for children or were they stories meant for everyone to proscribe behavior - like, wives, you better behave or your husband just might press your face into a pillow and kill you in your sleep.
Anne: They were not for children. They were never intended for children. They were actually created to promote culture and they were intended for adults. They are stories that tend to have a certain view of females that is not necessarily positive. In many cases husband and wives, and females who are very stupid or who are very difficult or who are very problematic towards their husbands, causing troubles. One woman pours beer out all over the floor and then she lets the chickens go and does all kinds of crazy stuff, and the husband just has to deal with this. So they tend to be negative towards females, especially towards wives of common folk.
Cathy: Maybe a little bit chauvinistic?
[laughter]
Anne: Just a wee bit. I just don’t know if that was something they introduced or that was already there. I have a feeling that some of this view got exaggerated in the telling.
Deborah: So, let’s talk about marriage. There are many fairy tales to choose from here. Cinderella is probably the most well-known marriage fairy tale - and in that vein, Cinderella is both lucky and unlucky. She’s unlucky to be in a family with a mean stepmother and stepsisters, but she’s lucky to have been born with a beautiful face that led Prince Charming to marry her, especially in contrast to her stepsisters. We don’t have any idea whether she is smart or really anything at all about her personality. Apparently, those characteristics weren’t important to Prince Charming - just the fact that Cinderella is beautiful is enough for him. Is the Cinderella story the blueprint for how most of the fairy tales treat marriage - that beauty is goodness and the primary characteristic driving marriage suitability? Or did you learn something new when you analyzed all the stories?
Anne: So marriage to a royal person is very clear. Marriage for anyone who wants to marry a king or a prince, you must be beautiful. That’s just the basic requirement. If you read the original version for the Grimm’s Cinderella, they don’t have a discussion, they just mention that she’s wearing beautiful dresses and the prince thinks she’s gorgeous, and that’s it. That’s all there is. And that’s the case for marriage to a royal person.
For a non-royal man, he - if he wants to marry the princess - has to be very brave or smart, and he has to do something to end up getting that royal lady.
Marriage among common people is not described in these ways, it’s really described in very negative ways. It doesn’t look like it’s particularly happy. So the goal is to marry a royal man or a royal woman because that will give you the life of ease that you want. And it’s going to require very different things. For the woman, it’s beauty - beauty is goodness - and that's all you need. And in fact proposals in fairy tale land happen often in only a few minutes with in one case, a king comes upon a woman and he sees her. He says “oh, let me take you back to my castle with me.” He doesn’t even ask her if she is married or unmarried. Are you available? It’s just “let’s go.”
Cathy: Well if beauty is the ultimate question, it doesn’t take long to figure that out. I want to follow up on the happiness issue. In the title of your book, you imply that Cinderella didn’t have a happy marriage. And, at least in the stories that I’ve read, the fairy tale ends when Cinderella and Prince Charming say “I do.” And then they lived happily ever after, or did they. Why do you think they weren’t happy?
Anne: When I say that, people say to me, “how could you take that away from me, this is what I’ve been dreaming of”!
Cathy: Right!
Anne: Well, I don’t think she lived happily ever after for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I know from analyzing all the queens - the female royalty who become queens - they are the least powerful characters and they are in fact the saddest. They cry more than any other character and if we assume that Cinderella will become queen one day, she will potentially be attacked by her mother-in-law who will not like her and will not think she is good enough for Prince Charming. She’ll be attacked by other women who want to take her place and want to be queen or married to Prince Charming. And queen’s are the least powerful characters who are beholden to the king who has all the power - or to the prince.
The other reason why she will unlikely be happy is because she will have less power than Prince Charming. We know that if you come to the relationship with less, you tend to have less power. Prince Charming has the kingdom and the power and the wealth and the status, and she is just pretty. And so, will Prince Charming be so interested in her when her looks fade? Maybe not and as I like to say the person who has more resources tends to have more available partners and everybody wants to marry Prince Charming but only one person wants to marry Cinderella.
Deborah: Yes, that’s interesting. We do have the sense that if Prince Charming hadn’t come along, she would have been destined to continue the life she was leading, taking abuse from her evil stepmother and stepsisters. That’s fascinating.
Anne: Right, you don’t hear about the wealthy merchant who was driving through town who just has to marry her. You don’t hear that story. It’s just Prince Charming.
Cathy: Right, and he was the hero who saved her.
Anne: Exactly, right?
Cathy: I was also fascinated by your analysis of fairy tales when it comes to power. We cannot achieve gender parity unless power is more equally shared between women and men. What did you learn about the power dynamic in your analysis?
Anne: Well, what I found was actually pretty distressing. What we learned is that powerful characters are usually male. They are usually royal men - kings and princes. Powerful women are usually not queens and princesses, instead, they are usually witches and evil stepmothers. What we see then is that powerful men are usually good and powerful women are largely evil, and that’s a big problem. So if it’s the case that from day 1, we are setting up men to be powerful and to trust powerful men because they are good, we are also setting them up for women to not be powerful, but for the women who are, they are probably not going to be trustworthy. And we see that in our own culture, and in the case of Hillary Clinton, we cannot elect a female leader who is qualified because she is not trustworthy. And people said that to me, “oh I can’t vote for her because I just don’t trust her.” I said why? Because we don’t trust powerful women at the end of the day. And that starts really early with these messages.
There is not one positive representation of a stepmother in Grimms fairy tales - she is a woman who has power and she is always perceived as evil. And any woman who has power is usually coming from the dark arts or is a witch, so it’s pretty distressing actually what fairy tales have to say about gender and power.
Cathy: And you know, that really resonates with me and my career. I would say that as I advanced in my career I could sense - I could feel it - that people were not trusting me as much as I had more power. And so, as a result of that, I don’t know, I smiled a lot more. I was exuberant, I tried to be warm. And I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to be viewed as safe and nice and warm and fun, and I was distracted then from the real work I was trying to get done.
Anne: Yes, there is a lot of research on how powerful women tend to be viewed so negatively if they are not overly solicitous of other people’s feelings - “How are doing” Is everything ok?” It is over the top, but the expectation is that powerful women have to be constantly advertising that hse is a nice person and that she cares about you and that she’s not going to harm you in any way because we are overcoming that stereotype. That’s a big problem, and yes, totally distracting. Totally.
Cathy: Yes, and men don’t have to do that at all.
Anne: I’ve never noticed any of my bosses in all of the time I worked for other people, just so worried about how I was feeling. I never noticed that. No.
Deborah: It’s very interesting to me because I was just talking to a colleague not that long ago, it’s been in the last couple of months or so, and she had been instructed by her boss - not in my organization by the way - she had been instructed by her boss to reach out to an individual and to just call this individual and ask him how is he doing, how are things going for you. She was the manager of this particular individual and that was her specific instruction, was to check in everyday and just have a normal conversation, how are you doing? Everyday, how are you doing. So….
Anne: And we would never ask a man to do that.
Deborah: No! So clearly women business leaders have to walk a thin line - we have to be assertive and aggressive which is how you expect leaders to behave, but we also have to be kind and compassionate because that is how you expect women to behave. So we smile a lot.
Did you find any female characters who were powerful, but their power was accepted because they were also kind and nurturing? Or did you learn anything else in your research that could aid women leaders today?
Anne: So we found actually that there are some good, powerful women characters. A good example is a story called The Seven Ravens where a young girl is born into a family with seven older brothers. And on the eve of her baptism, her father makes some sorry statement like I wish they would all turn into ravens, and then poof, they are all turned into ravens. She grows up and when she is a young girl, she is told that she has these brothers and she goes in search of them on her own and she does all kinds of brave things and actually ends up saving her brothers and they are turned back into human beings. So she is a powerful character.
Gretel is another powerful character. Both of these characters are doing things for other people. They are saving other people and that is one of the things we found is that when women are trying to save another person or restoring a familial relationship like in The Seven Ravens, they can be powerful. They do tend to be young girls, though. So they are powerful when they are young.
Cathy: I also want to talk about your section on agency. I loved one of your sentences: “If you want to experience the most passive people in the universe, then meet Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and a variety of other female characters who let life happen to them. They represent an extreme version of female passivity.” That just blew me away and I loved it. When you looked at who was active in the stories - who triumphed, who solved the problems, who got there in the knick of time. I think I know the answer to this, but let’s get it out on the table, was it women or men?
Anne: It was the men. The male characters are the ones who take the initiative, they’re the ones who get out and do stuff, they are the most active characters in the fairy tales. And females, like the ones you just listed, are the most passive.
Deborah: So, what is going on here? Because some of the most curious and courageous people I know are women. What does it say about western culture that the women most admired or venerated are passive? And that it is only the evil women who seem to have more robust thinking skills or are agents - I am thinking of the Queen in Snow White?
Anne: She has a lot of initiative, she is definitely out and about! So, the reality is these are the most extreme versions of the feminine stereotype. The most passive things happen to them, they’re victimized, they don’t complain, they are basically waiting for someone to save them and eventually, they get saved because they’re beautiful.
Cathy: And of course, these stories were written by men and they tell us something about the importance of representation when we’re writing history or stories, or retelling stories. We need all the genders involved, and not just men. Anne, I also wanted to tell you about the Parity Prescription which is a framework that we can all use as we work towards gender equality. The Parity Prescription - which spells SCRIPT - is:
Stop Trying to Change Women
Create Diverse Teams
Recognize Unconscious Bias
Intentionally Include
Partner with Men as Allies
Talk about the issues
Today, I want to ask you about the first element: Stop Trying to Change Women. In today’s world, there are so many resources out there trying to change women so that we better match organizational culture. Deborah and I have been adamant that this is not productive and is holding us all back. Do fairy tales try to change women?
Anne: I think fairy tales give us a very scripted version of the feminine ideal. And they suggest that women be passive, be victimized and not complain, they suggest that women look to marriage as their saving grace, that they essentially try to marry Prince Charming to try to get out of bad situations - that they not save themselves. And they give us a prescription that hey, my life is rough, maybe I should go to find Prince Charming rather than why don’t I get an education or a better job or take some initiative to create the life that I want. It’s all about finding the guy, and he’s going to give me all that I need. I think those are very problematic, and fairy tales like Cinderella have a clear message.
Deborah: One last question: Disney has been modernizing some of the fairy tales and the women and girl characters do have more agency - for example, in Mulan, a girl character joins the military and helps save her country from invaders. Of course, she has to hide her gender in order to do this, but she is the hero in the story. Are these more modern tales that kids today read and watch more balanced - are we moving in the right direction?
Anne: So actually that tale is not a modern tale. It is a tale from another culture - there is an African version of that tale and the is also an Asian culture where she saves her community. But we call it modern. And some of these tales have been modernized, but some of the more beloved tales have not been modernized very effectively. I look to the recent version that Amazon put out about Cinderella where she is an entrepreneur and wants to start a dress-making business, and that story was a flop. People didn’t really like it. Some modernization has worked. There are great collections of tales that feature strong heroines. There’s a great book by Jane Yolen, Not One Damsel in Distress which is a collection of strong female characters. So, they exist, but we have not embraced them to the degree that we should have. And I do think it is a very positive trend.
Cathy: I do want to give a shout out to a book that I recently read, and I picked it up Anne, after I read your book. It is called Cinder and Glass by Melissa de la Cruz. It is a retelling of Cinderella with a female character with agency. In this book, Cinderella rejects Prince Charming - she doesn’t want him - and she gets her way in the end. As I was reading that book, I was thinking about the concepts we talked about today.
We can’t thank you enough for being on today’s show and sharing your wisdom with our community. Listeners, if you would like to read Anne’s book, Cinderella Didn’t Live Happily Ever After, you can find a link in our show notes.
Deborah: Anne, thank you so much for today’s episode. Anne, before we go, do you have any new projects in the works?
Anne: Well, as it happens, I’m finishing up my new book which is called Only Prince Charming Gets to Break the Rules. Now I bet you’re wondering what that book is about. But in that case, we analyzed 200 fairy tales around the world and spoiler alert: we found that male characters break the rules more than female ones, and when they do, they tend to get rewarded, but when female characters break the rules, they actually get severely punished. And we looked at not only folk lore data but also real world data and we found that how women and men are treated in the medical, legal, and financial services industries and we found the exact same thing. That when females break the rules, they are punished much more severely than men who perform the exact same behavior.
Cathy: Wow, I’m really excited about reading that book. Deborah and I often talk about the fact that boys can be boys but girls cannot. Listeners, please know that we are here to help you.
We now have time-stamped show notes. You can find links to resources that we mentioned in today’s episodes, as well as links to find us on social media and our webpage.
Deborah: Thank you for supporting the Parity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, then please:
1. Rate and review us on Apple and Spotify; and
2. Give us a shout-out on social media and with your friends
With your help, we are finding the perfect community for our ongoing discussions.
We hope to connect with you again soon so that we can make progress with the Parity Prescription!
