And, as you might expect, the claims don’t support the campaign’s mission.
Claim 1: “By middle school, girls are 25 percent less likely than boys to say they like taking the lead.”
This study was conducted between 1992 and 1997, so it's already out of date....
In a much more recent study, called “Change It Up,” girls were more likely than boys to say they wanted to be a leader....
The study never says what percentage of boys thought they could learn leadership skills or already possessed them. When asked about the missing information, Kamla Modi, an analyst at the Girl Scout Research Institute (which commissioned the study), said the reason boys weren’t included in that question is because “there is not a leadership problem for men in this country, but there is a leadership problem for women.”...
Sheryl Sandberg said she was called bossy once and it really affected her. Maybe it did, but she’s a billionaire now and the chief operating officer of Facebook, so it couldn’t have hurt too badly. How did she actually deal with it? By kicking butt and taking names – that’s how. Why isn’t she teaching girls that?
◼ Dear Sheryl Sandberg: There Are Far Worse Things Than Being Called Bossy - Micheline Maynard/Forbes
I’ve got news for her: there are far worse things for women than being called bossy. And, I don’t think banning bossy does much to help young girls, either.◼ Celebs sign on to campaign to ban the word 'bossy' - FOX
For one, bossy isn’t only a word that applies to women. It’s gender neutral. There are plenty of bossy men out there, too. Bossy is bossy — dictatorial, unyielding, telling people what to do and expecting them to do it without any input.
Bossy is not the same thing as being a leader, even though Sandberg might view it that way. Leadership is an entirely different category. There are bosses who are leaders, and bosses who are bossy. We’ve all worked for them. We know the difference....
But, we don’t have to ban words to make young girls feel better. Instead, teach them to believe in possibilities, no matter what anyone says about them, and keep finding ways to move forward.
“The word ‘bossy’ is more PC gibberish. It demonizes an ordinary word without really putting much thought behind it. Instead of banning, we should be promoting positives like leadership, ambition, faith and self-respect,” Katie Yoder, staff writer for the Media Research Center, told FOX411. “This is not about female empowerment, it’s about indoctrination. Their strategy is to make young women play the role of victims, which undermines instead of helping them.”
