Driving Factors For Success: Do Girls Have to Be Tomboys to Get Ahead?

Guest post by Lisa Selin Davis

Dolly Parton was a tomboy. This might be surprising for some people to hear, considering she’s worked so hard to make herself into the pinnacle of traditional femininity, with her long, painted nails, ample bosom, waves of sparkling blond hair and detailed makeup. But she has often talked about being a tomboy as a kid.

“You couldn’t scare me as a kid because we lived hard and we worked the fields,” she told Interview magazine in 1984. “We were strong little kids. I was always a tomboy.”

What did being a tomboy—to her: strong, tough, unconcerned with appearance—have to do with her later success as one of the most popular and enduring entertainers in American history? 

Actually, a lot. So many famous women say that they were tomboys in their youth. Janet Jackson. Belinda Carlisle. Julia Child. Lupita Nyong’o. Cher. Keira Knightley. Ava Gardner. Martina Navratilova. Reese Witherspoon. Joan Collins. Robin Roberts. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Virgina Woolf. And Jean Jennings, one of the first women in computer coding.

The word tomboy is mostly out of favor these days, but most of these women used it to mean that they didn’t look or behave the way people expected them to because they were girls. And because adults generally expect girls to be kind, quiet, well-behaved, polite, demure and sweet—all wonderful things, but not necessarily traits that lead you to be premier actors, writers, athletes, politicians or scientists—girls who also possessed traits considered typical of boys tended to have more success later in life.  

Science backs this up. A 2002 study noted that “higher self-ratings on the tomboy scale correlated with confidence in career success.” And Alpha Girls, a book from 2006, found higher self-esteem and lower anxiety among girls who possessed both “masculine” and “feminine” traits. They abused fewer substances and were less promiscuous. Girls who had tomboy childhoods might absorb some benefits of male privilege by proxy—but usually they also feel free to access the feminine ones.

Meanwhile, a new study from the University of Cambridge found that boys who resisted pressure to be masculine achieved higher marks, and tomboy girls performed better in math; those who were more traditionally feminine were at greater risk of falling behind.

Let’s be clear: You don’t have to be masculine to be successful. And let’s also be clear that a lot of what we mistakenly characterize as masculine—self-reliance, dominance, leadership, independence—doesn’t belong just to men. 

But not feeling beholden to gender norms, not giving in to pressure to be a girl in a certain kind of way, is good practice for a life as an entrepreneur.

And the most successful people don’t stick to one side of the pink/blue divide in personality traits.

Dominance should be tempered with compassion, and leadership with empathy. But none of them belongs to one sex. 

I interviewed a former tomboy named Natasha, who told me that her tomboy childhood in the 1980s prepped her to be one of the few female creative directors in advertising; only 3.4% of them are women. “I was always comfortable with boys,” she told me. “I’m in a Fantasy Football league with nine other guys and we talk trash to each other and I very much feel like one of the guys, but I’m comfortable with my femininity. I guess I just have the best of both worlds.” 

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Lisa Selin Davis is an essayist, journalist and novelist who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Salon, CNN and many other outlets. She is the author of a novel, Belly; a young adult novel, Lost Stars; and the non-fiction book Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.