No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It?s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules

A groundbreaking, insightful book about women and power from award-winning journalist Lauren McKeon, which shows how women are disrupting the standard (very male) vision of power, ditching convention, and building a more equitable world for everyone.

In the age of girl bosses, Beyoncé, and Black Widow, we like to tell our little girls they can be anything they want when they grow up, except they’ll have to work twice as hard, be told to “play nice,” and face countless double standards that curb their personal, political, and economic power. Women today remain a surprisingly, depressingly long way from gender and racial equality. It’s worth asking: Why do we keep playing a game we were never meant to win?

Award-winning journalist and author of F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Lauren McKeon examines the many ways in which our institutions are designed to keep women and other marginalized genders at a disadvantage. In doing so, she reveals why we need more than parity, visible diversity, and lone female CEOs to change this power game. She talks to people doing power differently in a variety of sectors and uncovers new models of power. And as the toxic, divisive, and hyper-masculine style of leadership gains ground, she underscores why it’s time to stop playing by the rules of a rigged game.

LAUREN MCKEON’S critically acclaimed first book, F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and was selected by the Hill Times as a book of the year and by the Feminist Book Club as one of their top five feminist books ever. McKeon is the winner of several National Magazine Awards, including a Gold in the Personal Journalism category. Her writing has appeared in Hazlitt, Flare, Chatelaine, and Best Canadian Essays, on TVO.org, and in the book Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault. McKeon has taught long-form writing at Humber College and holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King’s College. She was the editor of This Magazine from 2011 to 2016 and the digital editor at The Walrus from 2017 to 2020, and she is currently a contributing editor at Toronto Life and the deputy editor of Reader’s Digest.