The “Bro-ocracy” My Daughter Is Graduating Into (And the Book I’m Putting in Her Hands)

My oldest is graduating from college in a few weeks.

I should be floating. Instead, I’m pacing my kitchen at 6 a.m. with coffee in one hand and her résumé in the other, asking the question every mom of a graduating senior is asking right now: what is actually out there for her?

The short answer, from where I’m sitting: not much. And what is out there is a lot less friendly to young women than any of us were told it would be.

For about a year now, she’s been working for me at Orlando Mom Collective & Mom Commerce Media— which has been a gift, but also a quiet tell about what the market is offering her peers. Her group chat is full of smart, capable, qualified young women who applied to fifty jobs and got three callbacks. They are doing everything right and watching the door close anyway.

I kept trying to put language to what I was seeing. And then a press release dropped one word right onto my desk.

Bro-ocracy.

That word comes from Dr. Lois Frankel, the executive coach behind Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. She’s out with a new 2026 edition, and she is not pulling punches. “The U.S. has moved backward when it comes to the rights of and respect for women,” she says. “We currently live in what I call a bro-ocracy. This isn’t the workplace women were promised, but it’s the one they’re navigating today.”

Read that last line again. Not the workplace women were promised, but the one they’re navigating. I wanted to frame it and hang it in my daughter’s bedroom, right next to her diploma.

What a “bro-ocracy” actually looks like

Frankel’s argument is that power and decision-making in American workplaces still sit, overwhelmingly, with wealthy white men — and that the rules of success are unspoken, uneven, and unforgiving. The overt stuff is rarer than it used to be. But mansplaining, gaslighting, “she’s so abrasive,” getting talked over in the meeting and then watching a guy repeat your idea ninety seconds later and get credit for it? All alive and well.

She tells a story in the release about a recent grad working in network television — a young African American woman — who told her, “I thought my mother fought to change all that.”

That line physically hurt to read. Because I am that mother. We all are. We raised these girls on you can do anything, and now we’re handing them the keys to a car that doesn’t start.

What the book actually does

The 2026 edition of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office walks through 100 career-limiting mistakes women unconsciously make — and how to stop making them. The five that stopped me cold:

• Buying into gaslighting
• Avoiding office politics
• Failing to create a memorable brand
• Undervaluing your worth
• Letting fear eclipse your choice

Every one of those is a conversation I want to have with my daughter before her first Monday in an office she doesn’t own. The book also takes on the stuff actually shaping work right now — the Me Too movement, gender fluidity, remote work, the dismantling of DEI programs, the erosion of reproductive rights. None of that was in the career-advice books our generation was handed.

Frankel’s line is blunt, and I love it: “Nice is necessary, but not sufficient.”

What we do as moms

Here’s where I land, after a lot of pacing.

I cannot fix the bro-ocracy for my daughter. None of us can — not this year, probably not in her first decade of work. What I can do — what a lot of us in this Central Florida community can do — is refuse to send our daughters in unarmed.

For me, that looks like:

• Telling her the truth about what she’s walking into, even when it makes us both sad. Especially then.
• Coaching her to negotiate the first offer, not the fifth. The starting number compounds for forty years.
• Giving her permission to be disliked at work. “Well-behaved” is how you get a corner cubicle, not a corner office.
• Being honest that her network is going to matter at least as much as her GPA. (Hi, that’s most of us reading this.)
• Putting actual tools in her hands. This book is one of them.

And for those of us who are the workplace now — the managers, the business owners, the hiring decision-makers across Orlando — the call is louder. Hire her. Mentor her. Pay her. Promote her. Don’t make her prove it twice.

The part I keep coming back to

My daughter is going to walk across that stage in a few weeks, and I am going to cry, and I am going to be proud, and I am also going to be furious on her behalf. All three can be true at once. That’s motherhood. That’s also, apparently, 2026.

She didn’t inherit the workplace I thought I was leaving her. So we adjust. We tell her the truth, we put the playbook in her hands, and we give her full permission to stop being nice about it.

Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make that Sabotage Their Careers (Revised 3rd Edition), by Dr. Lois Frankel. Published March 3, 2026 by Balance, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Available on Amazon.