Lanna Hill: Give up clinging to girliness, womanhood is so much better

Way back in 2017, I wrote my first published column about the confidence gap — that is, significant, measurable differences between the genders when it comes to negotiation, self-promotion, and self-perception.

While we’ve made significant strides since then, research still shows that 57 per cent of women globally have never asked for a pay rise in their careers, despite most feeling unsatisfied with their salaries.

This gap, widest during the mid-twenties, reaches parity at 40. However, this is also when age discrimination starts for women — five years earlier than it does for men.

And this isn’t just affecting the “everyday” woman — we see this phenomenon occur in Hollywood also, with female film characters over 40 dropping from 20 to 14 per cent from 2014 to 2022.

Last year, only three movies featured a woman 45 years or older in a leading role, as opposed to 32 films with male leads in the same age bracket.

And this is despite the fact that a whopping 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions are made by women, for themselves and their families.

Maybe a part of this problem is that most women over the age of 20 are trying to halt or reverse the aging process.

Pop culture and social media is full of faces that are either young, or look younger than what they are through artificial means.

This is not to say that men aren’t behaving similarly, however, the average Australian woman spends three times as much on their appearance as our male counterparts.

We’ve all heard that saying “40 is the new 30”. I would argue a big part of that is because women spend a lot of time, effort and money looking like they are a decade — or even two decades — younger. Forty doesn’t look like it used to.

Not only is there a societal expectation, but I would argue women also place this pressure on themselves.

Now, lest I be one to betray the sisterhood, but I would also argue some of our most prominent examples of success in pop culture, such as Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande or everyone’s favourite, Taylor Swift and their portrayals of the hyperfeminine ideal, are contributing to the problem.

We’ve seen this play out aesthetically and across social media over the last few years (Barbie-core, anyone?), and my beef is quite simply that these trends verge dangerously on glamorising girlhood, rather than womanhood.

Carpenter, for example, is currently one of the world’s most successful recording artists.

While she’s portraying herself as a feminist, it feels a little bit too familiar. Older millennials will remember the days of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears embodying the thin, blonde, white girl ideal, wearing revealing clothing and portraying themselves as man-eaters.

The formula is tried and tested — and sells millions of records.

As an almost 41-year-old woman, I can’t say that I’ve never wanted to look a healthy handful of years younger than I am.

But why are we still — in professional and popular culture — playing these games when we know better?

And again, it’s easy to dismiss these trends as just that, trends in our social media feeds, catwalks or on the big screen.

But when we look at the numbers, the impact is patently more significant than that. Why are intelligent, confident, educated women trying to look the girlish, 20-something version of ourselves, when quite honestly, it’s so much better on the other side?

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker and founder of Leverage Media