Crybaby. Tattletale. Mama’s boy. Kids can be nasty little name-callers, can’t they?
It’s easy to deflect some schoolyard slurs — the ones we know for sure aren’t true. Scaredy-cat? In your dreams. Goody Two-shoes? Puh-leeze. But other labels — shorty, for instance, or carrot-top —are so obviously, undeniably true, there’s no point in even ducking their well-aimed wallop.
For me, bossy was one of those labels. The no-denying kind. The kind you can only answer with an “Oh, yeah? Well, so what!” and go on about your life.
I’m bossy. It’s not an endearing quality, nothing to brag about. But my classmates and I can attest that it’s absolutely accurate. It’s also the reason I’m about to put Sheryl Sandberg in her place.
Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and the author of Lean In, has joined forces with the Girl Scouts in a campaign to retire the word “bossy” from public lexicon. Their argument: It quashes girls’ leadership instincts.
“We know that by middle school, more boys than girls want to lead,” Sandberg told ABC News, “and if you ask girls why they don’t want to lead, whether it’s the school project all the way on to running for office, they don’t want to be called bossy, and they don’t want to be disliked.”