Watching the Inauguration yesterday of President Biden and Vice-President Harris, I found myself thinking a lot about role models.  Hard not to do with so much discussion about VP Harris:  the adorable pictures all over social media with little Black and Brown girls taking the oath along with her and the media focusing on the importance of her achievements in the context of being a role model.  But there has been other news, most of if distressing, that has me thinking about role models, as well.  In this first essay of a two-parter, I want to introduce the topic of Role Models—what are they?  Why are they important?  How do you choose your role models and how can they change throughout your life?  In part two, I will discuss the importance of being a role model and share with you a bit about someone who is a very important role model right now in my own life.

I think most people know what a role model is.  It is someone who embodies some characteristic that you admire and strive to emulate.  Sometimes you may focus on that one characteristic or skill, like someone’s humility or persistence or scholarship.  Sometimes you admire and try to emulate the whole person—or, at least, what you view as that “whole” person—the totality of what they have achieved and how they have gotten there.  Many people tout parents or relatives or neighbors or teachers as their role models—people who are in their lives on a regular basis, directly influencing them and impacting their development holistically.  Others note role models that they’ve never met: historical figures or politicians or movie stars or athletes.  All are valid since you need many different role models to help form who you become as a person.  And while we would like all role models to exhibit positive properties, there also is such a thing as a negative role model—either someone who provides an example that you know you should avoid or someone whom you tried to emulate and realized later that, well, it wasn’t such a smart thing. 

You choose role models whether you realize it or not, which is why making this a conscious process is important.  So do your children, which is why you need to discuss role models with them.  This is also why representation—seeing people who are like you—in various roles is so critical to keeping your mind wide open to what’s possible for you.  I remember reading an article by the “back page” columnist of Fortune back in the late 80’s.  This columnist had been a long-time contributor to Fortune and wrote with humor and broad business knowledge.  I looked forward to his article every issue.  This one time, though, he wrote an article ridiculing the need for role models and particularly for representation.  His thesis was basically that he didn’t need any role models to convince him he could be anything he wanted to be.  He certainly felt that if he’d wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or even President of the United States that he could have gone in that direction.  Yes, he was a white man.  No, he did not recognize that every career he may have wished for was dominated by white males so he didn’t even realize he had role models aplenty.  Yes, that ended up being his last column on the back page.  There was a price to pay for tone deafness, even 30 years ago.

I would bet that most people don’t even realize that they are being looked upon as role models.  In most cases that is probably because they don’t see themselves as a role model material so why should someone else?  While that kind of humility can be admirable it can also be dangerous.  Any parent who has muttered “Do as I say and not as I do” to their children knows this, as does any parent who warily watches which public figures their kids obsessively follow on social media.  This is why intentionality on choosing role models is so important, as well as understanding which parts of that person you want to model and which you don’t! 

It’s interesting to me that while we often choose role models for a particular skill or behavior, we tend to put them up on a pedestal that judges their whole person.  That can either lead us to pick up less desirable traits (the sports star that beats his wife) or discount a ton of positive traits because of one negative one.  I struggle, for instance, with balancing my admiration for Jimmy Carter’s amazing humanitarian nature against parts of his stance on Israel and Middle East peace with which I disagree.  It can be hard to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  None of us can be perfect in every way.  Why we feel we can’t admire some parts of someone while simultaneously not admiring other parts is a mystery to me.  I would like to think that there are parts of me that others admire, recognizing that there is no way they could admire it all.  There are parts of my past that I sure don’t consider a clinic on how to live an admirable life.  And many of you could certainly clog up the comments section of this blog with examples of my behaviors that fit into the “negative role model” category.  (Please don’t.  My thin skin is one of those less admirable characteristics.)

Role models can and do change throughout your life, based on what you need to learn and develop at the time.  I plowed headlong into a traditionally male dominated career because of my earliest role models:  my parents and my high school chemistry teacher.  My parents supported me in everything I tried and I can never remember a “you can’t” in any of those discussions.  (Well, at least in regards to a career.  There were plenty of other “you can’t” discussions.  I grew up with plenty of boundaries.  Thank goodness!)  My Mom had initially majored in Chemistry in college, which was a pretty powerful role model in itself!  And my high school chemistry teacher expected more and more and more out of me, never giving me any hint that this was not a typical interest for a girl in the ‘70s.  (One of my greatest thrills in life was sending her a letter of thanks after I finished graduate school, including my new business card as a PhD researcher at a big chemical company.)

Throughout my professional career, my role models changed as I advanced.  The few women in my direct field were mostly my peers, but even those just a grade level or two above mine showed me the meaning of courage and persistence, as well as the importance of competence.  As I moved into management, I had a TON of (mostly male) role models but, honestly, few I would consider positive ones.  Perhaps the most important set of role models I had were a group of highly accomplished senior women who worked tirelessly to push the system and open up opportunities for younger, junior women in the company.  It’s not like they weren’t extremely busy or that they no longer had to deal with their own challenges in the work environment.  It was important to them, though, that they help smooth the way for the next generation.  I would bet that most of the women who moved into senior roles over the next decade had no idea how hard this group of battle-weary women advocated for them.  We all stand on the shoulders of giants, which is why I tried to do the same to pay forward their example.

So, back to the Inauguration.  I want to model Biden’s empathy and decency; I want to model Harris’s competence and persistence in the face of nay-sayers; I want to model Bernie’s fashion independence.  And I want to model the incredible grace, authenticity and general fierceness of Amanda Gorman.  There are lots of excellent role models out there, folks.  Next time, we’ll discuss BEING a role model and how my choice of role models has evolved.