Beta: There is More Than One Way to Be the Boss by Rebecca Holman - review

Are you an Alpha woman at work or a Beta? Alphas are the super-confident, immaculately dressed queen bees who shout the loudest, rule the roost and are prone also to mentioning the 7am gym class they squeezed in before work. Betas are the people-pleasing drones who are just as capable but tend not to brag about it in the weekly team meeting and consider 5pm a perfectly reasonable time to clock off and head to the pub.

Before well-adjusted readers wince at splitting the working female population into two such reductive camps with names redolent of some sort of noxious enzyme, admit it. You know a bit of what Holman speaks.

Beta was written by Holman after years of feeling that by being the sort of un-flashy team player who quietly got on with her job, she was somehow doing things wrong. Partly this is because, as she rightly points out, the dominant popular image of a successful career woman tends to begin and end with a platinum-bobbed ball-breaker, à la Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, who cries into her high-thread-count pillow at night because her personal life is such a mess.

But her book also paddles in the slipstream of Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling Lean In, the much debated manifesto from the Facebook chief operating officer which advocated, among other things, that aggressive self-belief was a crucial tool for ambitious women in the workplace.

Holman, however, is Beta to the core: this is a touchy-feely book that basically argues that if you are nice, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. It’s OK. It can even be good.

She has some interesting things to say about how classic “Beta traits”, such as flexibility and a willingness to collaborate, will serve Beta women well in the emerging gig economy — although I reckon most people in the gig economy will spend more time worrying whether they’ll ever be able to afford to go on holiday than giving themselves high-fives for their people skills.

Mainly though, her book is a lot of waffle masquerading as a vaguely feminist careers manual. Firstly because, after acknowledging the problem of talking about women as types, she repeatedly reinforces that approach as a useful way of talking about women. More fundamentally, after identifying her two groups, Holman has no real further argument to make.

So we wade through chapters devoted to debunking the tired old “having it all” myth, covered many times before. There are lots of case studies, surveys and interviews with women talking about how their female co-workers make them feel, how they’ve struggled against “imposter syndrome”, how hard they’ve had to fight against gender and racial stereotypes etc.

Holman isn’t interested in sparking a revolution in the workplace, she simply wants women to feel better about themselves so they can achieve more. The question is how helpful, really, are her observations?

There’s a long, indulgent chapter on how our obsession with social media sites such as Instagram amplifies feelings of insecurity. But surely the only sensible response to Instagram is: if looking at photos of other people’s perfect lives makes you feel crap, don’t look at Instagram.

Holman is clearly no slouch in the career department — she is editor of women’s website The Debrief. But reading her book is mainly enervating. For me it contained only one really useful sentence: “If we all took the energy we put into questioning ourselves and used it elsewhere, think what we could achieve.” Quite.

£18.99, Amazon, Buy it now