What can the UN learn from the movie Mean Girls? A lot.

Why you should watch Mean Girls, especially if you work inside of a big, rich bureaucracy…

What is Mean Girls about?

Well, it’s about mean girls.

But it’s also power constructs, socioeconomic status, inequality, relational aggression, suppressed ambition, gender expression, meritocracies, implicit and explicit power structures, corruption, and sexual tension.

You know- work stuff.

A quick summary — spoiler alerts are implied.

The cult classic film Mean Girls, inspired by a real-world anthropological deep dive into the middle-to-secondary school girl culture of the American upper middle class, takes its audience on a journey through the rise and fall of 16-year-old Cady Heron.

Cady begins the film as a sweet, angelic, American Anakin Skywalker-type, transplanted from her scholarly parents’ homeschooling in the bush of an unnamed African backwater (where her elite status was assumed) to an Illinois upper-crust high school (where this assumption no longer applies.)