Socialite Huddah Monroe. Many socialites have been able to monetise
their personal brands, no matter how questionable their origins. PHOTO |
FILE
Women like Huddah Monroe and Vera Sidika may be ridiculed for
their life choices, but they have one thing many women don’t:
unquestionable confidence in their ability to receive wealth. What can
they teach career women about success?
The
Kardashian sisters. Vera Sidika. Huddah Monroe. Zari Hassan. All these
women have one thing in common: They have parlayed off their looks to
build businesses and an enviable income.
The
common word to describe women without any discernible skills or
educational qualifications on which to base their income is ‘socialite’ –
and the public loves socialite lifestyles. Like them or hate them, the
fact is that they have a rare skill: the ability to ably monetise their
personal brands, no matter how questionable their origins.
The
world of the socialite has always been associated with money and power;
they first appeared on the scene in the 18th and 19th century,
populated by the wives and mistresses of royalty and wealthy
industrialists who hosted gatherings of the elite upper class.
FAME AND FORTUNE
First among the modern socialites of our time was Paris Hilton, heiress to the Hilton dynasty.
Hilton
garnered her fame from a leaked sex-tape, and for her notoriety in the
New York party scene. She managed to turn this into a personal business
empire with music, deejaying, reality TV and most recently, a fragrance
and fashion line. Today, she is said to earn over $10 million a year
from product sales alone, and not less than $500,000 for club and event
appearances.
What, if anything, can these socialites teach the impressively qualified but often overworked and underpaid professional woman?
“They
have an enviable amount of confidence,” says 35-year-old Ruth Karimi.
Ruth is a public relations professional, currently pursuing a Masters’
degree. For her job, she works with celebrities and socialites.
“We
hire them (celebrities) because the public recognises and associates
them with a certain kind of aspirational prestige,” she says. Ruth adds
that it does not matter whether these celebrities actually represent
that aspiration, or are just faking it for desired effect. “It’s not
important whether XYZ can actually afford a BMW in real life, or whether
they personally care about a cause.”
In a 2014 interview on NTV,
Vera Sidika pointed out that she doesn’t go out to entertainment spots
to socialise. “You,” she told the interviewer, “you go out to the club
just like that. Me, I get paid to be there.” She mentions that her rate
for club-hosting is $2,500 (approximately KShs250,000) for an hour or
two of what she describes as, ‘just sitting there and looking pretty’.
She has been known to remark that her body is actually her business, and
that she therefore heavily invests in her image.
Meanwhile,
professional women find it hard to toot their own horn, while
socialites spend their every waking moment showing off their attributes.
45-year-old Patricia K.* runs her own real estate investment company.
“We are raised to be modest, so we don’t say how accomplished we are.
Men (or very confident women) will say, ‘I just got this project and I
am going to kill it!’ Most professional women will say, ‘Ah yes, I just
got this project and it’s nice but it’s no big deal’. It’s almost as if
they are embarrassed. As I got further in my career I realised when I
say ‘I am awesome!’, even if it comes from a place of false bravado,
people actually believe it.”
Psychologically,
self-deprecation is one way that people deal with insecurities. But
Patricia, who has sat in various recruitment panels in her capacity as a
manager, says that this can be quite the gamble.
“When
you are qualified but not self-assured you run the risk of, at the very
least, coming off as boring. And then in saunters this person – and
mind you, this is how most men handle interviews – who is like a
lightning bulb, answering questions off the cuff and stuff. They are
exciting. Women lack a cool belief in their value.”
NEGOTIATING PAY
Sheryl
Sandberg is the COO of Facebook, the fifth most valuable company in the
world. Yet, writing in her book Lean In, she admits she is still a long
way from mastering the art of feeling confident.
“I
was shocked that Forbes ranked me as the most powerful woman in the
world, right after Angela Merkel and ahead of Michelle Obama,” she says.
“Far from feeling powerful, I felt embarrassed and exposed. When
colleagues congratulated me I pronounced the list as ridiculous. When
they posted the link on Facebook, I asked them to take it down. After a
few days, my executive assistant told me that I was handling the
publicity poorly, that I needed to stop subjecting anyone who brought it
up to a diatribe of absurdity. I was showing too many people how
uncomfortable I felt and revealing my insecurity. Instead I needed to
simply say ‘Thank you’.”
Patricia
says that one way of raising confidence is by simply becoming very good
at what you do. “But I don’t feel it’s that kind of confidence problem
that a lot of us suffer from. It is the much deeper thing about our
value in the world. That ‘who do you think you are’ voice inside, I have
to figure out how to silence her.”
Today’s
socialite is confident enough to ask for what she thinks she is worth –
and expect nothing less. In her interview, Sidika let it be known that
her boyfriend, who she then identified as a Nigerian tycoon, spoiled
her, giving her amounts to the tune of $10,000 (almost Ksh1 million)
just to go shopping.
What
baffled the professional women we talked to was how It-Girls managed to
not only place such high value on themselves but also how they managed
to convince their clients to they were worth such astronomical figures.
“I can’t even let my date pay for dinner, let alone ask for or accept
money from him,” quips 38-year-old Angela, a lawyer and entrepreneur in
Nairobi. Angela’s reasoning is that she does not want to owe the man
anything. “But, I also have this colleague, she is an associate like me;
we graduated the Bar together. She is constantly making noise about a
raise. On the one hand I find it irritating but on the other hand, I am
jealous because she actually believes that she deserves the raise. And I
am quite sure she makes more than I do.”
Socialites
do not stand down from the monetary figure they feel they deserve.
However, many professional women do not bring their bargaining skills to
salary negotiations, neither do they think they will be accepted if
they refuse to compromise.
Facebook’s
Sandberg herself admits that when she was negotiating for her
compensation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made her an offer that she thought was
fair. “I was ready to accept the offer but my husband kept telling me
to negotiate,” she explains, “but I was afraid of doing anything that
might botch the deal. I could play hardball but then maybe Mark wouldn’t
want to work with me.” Her brother in-law, without even knowing the
details of the deal, convinced her that no man at her level would
consider taking the first offer. “I negotiated hard, followed by a
nervous night wondering if I had blown it. But Mark called me the next
day, improved my offer, extended the terms of my contract and allowed me
to buy into the company.”
She
adds that one of her previous bosses, a chief executive at World Bank,
once told her that men consider any time they spend thinking of about a
work issue – even time in the shower – as billable hours. On the other
hand, his wife (an attorney) and her female colleagues, “decide that
they were not at their best on a given day and discount their hours so
as to be fair to the client”. His advice to his wife was to ‘bill like a
boy’.
NETWORKING
Studies
across the board indicate that women negotiate less than their male
counterparts, primarily because they are afraid of being unlikable. “I
know many female friends who are employed who, before they ask for
something at work, have to have gotten to a place of anger and
resentment, which then compromises the energy with which they negotiate.
Mostly, they walk away from the jobs,” Patricia, the real estate
investor, notes.
Socialites
are queens of networking. They get their name known through any means
necessary. 27-year-old Stella Oloo says she is a ‘struggling creative’.
“The other day, my friend told me, ‘you know Stella, you could really go
places if only you would get out of the door’. He felt that I was too
complacent about knocking on doors and getting myself out there.”
Gacheri
G*., a 39-year-old producer at an advertising agency, says she always
cringed at the thought of networking. “I didn’t go to after-work events
because I viewed them as a chore. I also found them to be fake; I hated
walking up to strangers with a nervous smile plastered on my face.”
Later
in her career, she realised how effective networking was at making
relationships with people who could help her. “I interviewed for a job
and didn’t get it. Then a friend who was on the inside told me, you know
what, they still want you. So and so is earning this so that’s what you
should ask for. It was 50 per cent more than what I was making so I
wouldn’t even have dreamt of quoting such a figure.
Without
this back information, I wouldn’t even have had the confidence to go
back to them let alone be ready to walk if not given what I wanted. This
is the value of knowing what’s brewing behind the scenes and such
things are often whispered about in industry events.”
Research
shows women do not make career contacts at the same rate that men do,
which is one of the reasons cited for the lack of women in companies’
higher rank. “I think it’s more about how we have been nurtured to
unpack our relationships,” says Angela the lawyer.
“In
a business setting you are very likely to be networking with men –
socially, men are expected to approach women so in a work situation,
this is awkward. It is also about how we have been nurtured to present
ourselves – if you shade outside the box you will be cast out. If you
ask me, socialites, in their own weird way, are people who have managed
to shamelessly shade outside of this box. I don’t think I have that X
factor. Only my work can speak for me.”
* Names have been changed.
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