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We can be so fearful of falling into one of these categories that we become afraid to be ourselves, afraid of not being liked or accepted, not taken seriously, of ruffling feathers. In the end, it’s tempting to throw all kinds of walls up around our true selves. On a flight recently, I read an article in Porter magazine that once again explored the idea that self-doubt among high-achieving women—a.k.a.,Imposter Syndrome—has become a chronic condition of the twenty-first century. What stuck with me were the words of a fifty-five-year-old CEO of a very successful PR firm who said of her professional self, “I put her on when I go to work.” She viewed the successful professional that she presented to the world as a fake, and was finding it harder and harder to “put her on.” Her closet told the story: she chose clothes to suit the tastes of the people she was meeting that day, cladding herself in hippie suede to meet the creative types, florals for clients, black suits for business. She had dressed to please others for so long she had forgotten what pleased her , which left her angry, feeling isolated and exhausted. I didn’t doubt it. But I take heart in the fact that, increasingly, women are talking openly about the pressures, both internal and external, that they face when they attempt to fit like square pegs into limiting, imaginary holes. The only hope of overcoming these kinds of pressures is to drown them out with smarter voices—our own included. The spontaneous words of women I didn’t even know reminded me of that in those early days at the CBC; with the reach of social media, women’s voices are carrying far and wide.
    At Twitter, the movement to stop defining women by how they look or what they wear is one of the more popular conversations on the platform. #AskHerMore, for instance, encourages red-carpet reporters at the Oscars and other awards ceremonies to ask female celebrities about more than their frocks and accessories. The hashtag was launched in 2014 by the Representation Project, a California-based group that aims to eradicate harmful stereotypes, especially those that hold women back, and it’s not just celebrities whochampion the cause. As one woman tweeted last March: “Bradley Cooper gets asked about the community of actors and Lupita [Nyong’o] gets asked about her dress.” As Reese Witherspoon said, “We’re more than just our dresses.”
    The point is that not only should we not allow outdated ideas to box us in, we should go further and take pride in the traits that distinguish us as individuals, the characteristics, whatever they may be, that make each of us different. To be sure, it’s still a man’s world, and a white man’s world at that, but if today’s chiefs and rulers are any barometer, the winds of change are blowing everywhere. All around us is evidence that leaders can be who they want to be, project whatever image they want to project and be recognized for what they achieve, not judged or held back by their gender, youth or high heels, the colour of their skin or the sex of their partner. The rules are being rewritten, and in many cases, erased. We’re living in a time when the premier of Canada’s most populous province is openly lesbian, where a black man is the president of the United States, where the founder of Facebook can lead one of the world’s largest companies in a hoodie; and a woman can run the CBC in heels—high and red.
    The highest-paid female chief executive in the US is a beautiful case in point: She started life as a man. Martine Rothblatt, who earned $38 million in 2013, and made a previous fortune as a founder of Sirius radio, went on to launch United Therapeutics, the Maryland-based pharmaceutical company she now runs. A recent New York magazine profile of Rothblatt quoted a friend of Martine’s who said the subject of her gender never came up: “Bright