Last weekend, my son went with friends to Karen’s Diner in Sydney. Karen’s bills themselves as offering great burgers and rude service.
The diner has been named for the slang term Karen, which gained notoriety in the early days of the pandemic. Karen has become a pejorative term for a white, middle-aged woman with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.
Karens are infamous for demanding to speak to the manager, for refusing to wear masks, and for getting unreasonably irritated at any slight inconvenience.
But here’s the rub … Karens are usually asking for what they want, and shouldn’t we (by we, I mean women) all be doing a little more of that?
Data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency continues to show that women are vastly underpaid over their lifetimes and are missing out on top management roles.
Even in the best workplaces, if you don’t ask, you often don’t get.
We don’t have to ask for what we want with a Karen attitude (a “Karentude”); it can be done with courtesy. In my negotiation courses exclusively for women, I teach a model of Courteous Defiance that gives women confidence to negotiate for themselves.
My challenge is to those of you who don’t always ask for what you want … summon up some Courteous Defiance (or some Courteous-Karentude, if you will) and give it a shot. You might be surprised about what you receive.