Barbara's Blog: Invasion of the Cheerleaders

During my job search for Bait and Switch, I briefly considered applying for a position as a drug company sales rep. Why not? I have a BA in chemistry, which was listed on my resume, and also– although unlisted-- a Ph.D. in biology. I love looking at chemical formulas and learning how a drug, for example, binds to a cell wall or an enzyme’s active site. So I figured I’d be a crackerjack sales rep, capable of explaining to physicians how the addition of a methyl group to an existing drug molecule would make patients happier, more continent, virile, dry-nosed, or whatever the company promises.

There was just one problem: I am not now and have never been a cheerleader.

That’s right, a cheerleader. The New York Times reports on November 28 that drug companies are increasingly hiring college cheerleaders as their sales reps – to the point where there is now a “recruiting pipeline” from college cheerleading squads direct to Big Pharma’s sales force. One attraction of cheerleaders is simply that they’re attractive, and doctors are still about 75 percent male.

But it’s not just pretty faces and toned bodies that make cheerleaders good pharmaceutical sales reps. According to T. Lynn Williamson, a “cheering advisor” at the University of Kentucky, the drug company recruiters who approach him don’t even ask what the cheerleader’s college major was – chemistry, shemistry, it doesn’t matter. “Proven cheerleading skills suffice,” the Times comments, and in Williamson’s words, these include “exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm.”

Cheerleaders, in other words, are the perfect exemplars of the ubiquitous advice to be positive, upbeat, and perky at all times – at least if you want to get a job or hold onto one. Every career coach or motivational speaker will tell you that, if you want to get ahead, you need to act less like a chemist or IT person and more like a cheerleader. Every book in the business advice genre enjoins a relentless positivity of outlook. If you happen to be downsized, right-sized or outsourced again, just grin and bear your smiley face to the next potential employer, as the happy folks in Harvey Mackay’s 2004 book We Got Fired! . . . And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us advise.

All right, you can’t sulk your way through a job interview or wear out your co-workers by moping eight hours a day. We all know that. But the corporations are asking much more from people now; they’re demanding that we all become actors. If you don’t feel a passion for marketing widgets or brokering life insurance, then you damn well better fake it.

This “theatricalization” of business raises all kinds of problems. Will that potentially hazardous, $300 a month, prescription drug actually help you, or was your doctor just charmed by a cheerleader’s dazzling, gloss-enhanced, smile? Are the tires on your car safe, or was someone at the auto company seduced by some Sarah Bernhardt of tire sales?

And then there are the psychological consequences of acting as a way of life. For her classic 1983 study The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild interviewed people who are required by their employers to exude emotions they may not feel -- flight attendants, for example. (This was in the old days, before all the pay-cuts and pension thefts wiped the smiles off the flight attendants’ faces.) She concluded that constant emoting produces a kind of “emotional numbness,” a reduced awareness of one’s own feelings.

As for the effect on the “audience” – i.e., those of us who are subjected to a steady display of “exaggerated smiles” and “exaggerated enthusiasm” – we get a little numb too. It doesn’t take long to learn that a smile doesn’t mean friendship, that wide-open eyes and exclamations of “awesome!” don’t indicate the slightest interest. The entire emotional currency of human interaction is being fatally devalued, and when that happens, there can be no trust. And when there is no trust, there can be no business, no economy, no society worth living in.

But maybe I’m just an old sourpuss. Maybe the cheerleaders should take over the entire corporation. CEOs, for example, define much of their work as “motivational,” which suggests it could be done just as well, if not better, by a peppy airhead in a micro-skirt. Nor should chemists be exempt from replacement by qualified cheerleaders. Give me a “C”! Give me an “O”! Give me an “H”! – and what have you got? If the ratios of the atoms are right, you’ve got sugar – or whatever that thick sticky syrup is that’s gumming up corporate America.

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Barbara Ehrenreich comments on working in America

December 01, 2005

Invasion of the Cheerleaders

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