The Likeability Trap
Women are viewed as either chilly and powerful or warm and weak. An award-winning journalist and cohost of PBS's Amanpour and Company discusses likability and empowers readers to reject a stale leadership image rather than reinventing themselves.
According to studies, the more successful women get, the less liked they become. When likability collides with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and parental status, the minefield becomes much more dangerous. The Likability Trap is a vital assessment of the pressures placed on women to be agreeable at work, at home, and in public, based on considerable research and interviews, as well as carefully researched personal experience.
Rather than telling readers how to become more likeable, Menendez encourages them to think about how they see themselves and others, and explains how the subjective nature of likability is rife with cultural biases, and how our demands for it stifle everyone's progress and power.
The Likability Trap presents startling, tangible solutions for passing past these cultural habits that are holding us back, written from the perspective of a minority female Millennial. Finally, it inspires us to cherish our distinctive abilities and styles rather than muting them, and to remember that even when we are held back for being unlikeable, we are not ruined as a result.
