Hello! My name is Karen. If you had asked me 10 years ago if I would be apologizing for my name, I would have said,“…What?”

When my parents, mostly my mother, named me Karen, it was after my grandmother Karoline. It was a very popular name at the time, and in fact there were three Karens in my Kindergarten class. I could write my entire name very well before I even got to first grade.

If somehow you haven’t heard, according to Urban Dictionary, Karen is now a pejorative term for a woman seeming to be entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal. The term also refers to memes depicting white women who use their privilege to demand their own way. 

There was even a Super Bowl commercial apologizing to a woman named Karen. 

I know a lot of Karens. One is a CEO, and another is a caretaker. I took a walk with one friend Karen this week, she’s a HR executive, and yet another Karen in my life is a nurse. There are two Karens in my extended family, and the other Karen lovingly refers to herself when she’s with my nuclear family as “the other Karen.” What we do have in common is that we were all born within the same decade. Quite honestly, I don’t know many people of color who are named Karen, but I did go to camp with one and that Karen was a ton of fun with a huge sense of humor.  

So, Karen has become a stereotype. Of course, I wish another name had been selected for the role, like Marsha, Jan, Nancy, Patty, Mary, or why not Brenda? Those names were all popular at the time too. 

What we can learn from this is that stereotypes are a fixed, over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people. By stereotyping, we infer that a person has a whole range of characteristics and abilities that we assume all members of that group have. 

One advantage of a stereotype is that it enables us to respond rapidly to situations since we may have had a similar experience before.

One disadvantage is that it makes us ignore differences between individuals; therefore, we generalize and think things about people that might not be true.

The use of stereotypes is a major way in which we simplify our social world since it reduces the amount of processing (i.e. thinking) we have to do when we meet a new person.

Feel free to call me Karen. It’s my name. And please take the time to get to know me. I will do the same for you. Let’s start with scheduling a complimentary call.

And then introduce me to your organization. Derogatory comments about what one eats, their name, their beliefs can be disempowering and upsetting when spoken from colleagues. If your organization occasionally suffers from a lack of empathy and kindness, it’s impacting the bottom line.  Give me a call and let’s work together to improve the culture.