Happy 2025, Comes Now readers! I hope that you had an enjoyable holiday season and feel ready to welcome what the new year brings. If you were in the path of the winter storm like me, I hope that you were hunkered down at home yesterday with a warm hot chocolate, enjoying the snow.

Over the break I enjoyed reading Connie Chung’s Connie: A Memoir. It’s a brave book packed with rollicking tales of her experiences in network television—back when most of us got our information from watching the evening news. It wonderfully tells all without seeming like she’s doing so to settle scores or sell books.

Most importantly to a newsletter written for women lawyers, Chung doesn’t hold back in describing what it was like to be a trailblazer in a male-dominated environment. While she in no way dwells on it, she vividly describes the sexism and racism she experienced throughout every phase of her career.

I don’t just want to talk about the stories of sexism she experienced, however. I want to discuss how Chung tells those stories. Because she does it plainly and frankly without wasting ink beating herself up for not handling what she experienced better. She owns up to the techniques she used to survive without apology, even though younger generations of women might consider those techniques to be “selling out.”

So in this week’s issue I want to talk a little about how Connie Chung tells her story—and what that can tell us about coming to terms with our own.

Stories of Sexism

Chung was one of the “affirmative action babes” (her word) hired into television networks after Lynn Povich and other aspiring women writers at Newsweek filed a class action lawsuit under the newly-passed Civil Rights Act challenging their diminished status. As such, Chung’s memoir includes many examples of the sexism she experienced throughout her career. She makes no bones about the fact that the news industry of that time had its share of men who suffered from big-shot-itis, “characterized by a swelling of the head, an inability to stop talking, self-aggrandizing behavior, narcissistic tendencies, unrelenting hubris, delusions of grandeur and fantasies of sexual prowess.”

For example, a network executive told her that she’d never be an anchor on a nationwide news program because Americans wouldn’t want to hear a woman’s voice during a newscast. She talks about how she found it hard to understand the open hostility she often experienced from many men in the workplace until she realized that much of it came from what she came to call the “he either wants to f*ck you or f*ck you over syndrome.”

She was regularly assigned topics deemed by white male network executives to be the province of women. At the beginning of her career she was asked to do a piece on mini skirts. NBC later told her to do pieces about sex and AIDS and one about weight loss. At CBS she was asked to cover the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan conflict and the OJ Simpson trial. In many cases, Chung was forced to do these stories after her male co-anchors refused to do so because covering them would ruin their careers. (Here’s looking at you, Dan Rather.) And when she agreed to do those stories under protest, she was predictably criticized as less serious and mocked for lacking “gravitas.” Conversely, if she complained about these assignments, executive producers didn’t want to work with her and called her a b*tch.

She also experienced the double-bind experience of being—or even trying to be—a working mom. At one point she’s tricked by a network executive into taking time off to focus on efforts to conceive via IVF and ends up being ruthlessly attacked by the media for doing so.

And, as often happens to women in male-dominated workplaces, her experiences with her female colleagues weren’t all positive either. After being chased out of CBS Chung goes to work at ABC, where Barbara Walters and Dianne Sawyer are also both employed. While she starts off hoping that all three women will support each other, she soon finds herself in the middle of a fierce battle between the egos of Walters and Sawyer.

Wanting to be a Guy

Chung survived these incidents by putting her head down and focusing on the quality of her work. The first sentence of the first chapter of Connie is “I didn’t start out wanting to be a guy,” but she says she decided to be a white guy to survive in male-dominated newsrooms. (Admittedly, she says that wanting to be a guy had an additional layer for her because she was born into a Chinese family where the three sons born to her parents died.)

When Chung says she wanted to be a guy, or that she had “male envy,” she means that she could take jokes (even sexist and racist ones), dish out insults, and swear like a sailor. She ignored sexual banter from her male colleagues in the name of getting the job done. The persona she adopted was so significant to her that she devotes a full chapter—entitled Good Girl/Bad Girl—to elucidating how she was both a “bad girl,” firing off inappropriate remarks and insults to men she didn’t know well, and a “good girl,” treating men she came to know with respect.

Chung she also talks about the pain of doing everything she could to be a guy, yet never being accepted as one of them.

Closing Thoughts

Even though Connie Chung is more than 20 years older than I am, I related to many of her experiences in the workplace and recognized some of my own coping mechanisms in those she adopted. Though I never said that I wished I were a man or that I was trying to be a man, I did things I needed to do to survive. At the time I never thought of them as coping mechanisms: I thought I was just being myself.

In past issues of Comes Now I’ve talked about how we are often able to see sexism better once we’re removed from the environments where we experienced it, and I’ve talked about reckoning with our own complicity—or at least with failing to see things that we often don’t see. But what I loved most about Chung’s memoir was her ability to describe things about her younger self without judging her too harshly.

Today if any woman admitted that she was trying to be a guy to survive in a male-dominated workplace she’d be universally condemned. But Connie shows that you can tell a story—even one tinged with shame and regret—without directing those feelings at the person you once were. You can say that you survived, and even thrived, and allow that to be enough.

That’s what makes Chung’s story so different from Bonnie Hammer’s book from last year. Chung doesn’t ever say that because she survived by becoming a man that women entering male dominated workplaces should do the same. She doesn’t say that we should all face sexism by putting our heads down and doing the work. Yet she speaks kindly of the Connie Chung who did those very things. In fact, at the end of book she says she suspects she still has male envy: “Don’t get me wrong. I love being a woman, but today I am still staring at a dinosaur society in politics, corporate America, and too many other professions that are still dominated by men.” p.306

Perhaps it all comes down how Chung says she felt writing this book:

Because Chung had such a good editor she was steered away from writing her story from the perspective of someone who’d figured it all out. For that reason, her memoir comes across not only as honest and true, but as a model for how we can think and write about our own professional experiences.

Bravo, Connie. Bravo!

Share Comes Now!

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please share it with others and encourage them to subscribe. I draft it on Beehiiv (Comes Now (beehiiv.com)) and distribute it on Tuesday evening, but also post the issue as a LinkedIn newsletter on Wednesday mornings.

I also now post Comes Now issues on Instagram! (I just post a link to new issues; I don’t add additional content—yet.) You can find those postings at Comes.Now

Have a topic you’d like me to address? Want to tell me where I got something right or wrong? Send me an email at [email protected].