Working Girl (1988)

and the Idea That Had Someone Else's Name on It

A secretary's idea is dismissed by her boss, then quietly written up under the boss's name. The thief is a woman, which is the point. What it taught a generation about credit, about dressing to be believed, and how one woman got her idea back by knowing where it came from.

Working Girl (1988). Directed by Mike Nichols, written by Kevin Wade. Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill, Sigourney Weaver as Katharine Parker, Harrison Ford as Jack Trainer, with Joan Cusack as Cyn and Alec Baldwin as Mick.

“There’s a light bulb over my head. I know Trask and you know media.”

Katharine wrote it to Jack. The light bulb was Tess’s.

This page belongs to On Screen. It picks up a lesson the series has met twice already: in Mannequin, where the windows are hers and the praise is his, and in My Fair Lady, where the work is hers and the credit is his. This time the person who takes the credit is a woman. That matters, because it shows the pattern was never about men. It is about who is standing higher, and whose name gets believed.

Like every entry on the On Screen page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Katharine is a comic antagonist in a screwball comedy, played for laughs, and this page reads her only as the shape of a move. Jack is not a villain: when it counts, he stands up for Tess. And Tess is one of the most determined heroines in the series, which is why this film does something the others don’t. It lets her get her work back.

The Story

Tess McGill is a secretary from Staten Island who wants a career in business. She has earned a business degree at night school and takes speech classes on her lunch hour. At her stockbroker firm, the men she works for treat her as decoration while making use of her instincts. For her birthday, her boyfriend Mick gives her lingerie. “Y’know, Mick, just once I could go for like a sweater or some earrings... something that I could actually wear outside of this apartment?”

After one humiliation too many, she answers back and is fired. She lands a job as assistant to Katharine Parker, an associate partner at a mergers and acquisitions firm. Katharine seems like the boss she has been waiting for: a woman who encourages her to share ideas. Tess shares one, a plan for Trask Industries to buy a radio network. Katharine tells her it won’t work.

Then Katharine breaks her leg skiing and asks Tess to house-sit. At the apartment, Tess finds Katharine’s notes, and in them her own idea, written up to go to Jack Trainer under Katharine’s name. The same day she comes home early and finds Mick with another woman, and leaves him.

With Katharine in the hospital, Tess decides to take the idea to Trask herself. Her friend Cyn helps her with a makeover, from Katharine’s wardrobe, so that she looks the part. She sets up a meeting with Jack Trainer, a mergers man at another firm, and together they work up the deal and pitch it to Trask. They fall for each other. Tess learns that Jack had been seeing Katharine, and had meant to end it.

Katharine comes home the day of the final meeting. She tells Tess she had meant to take the Trask idea to Jack, and to give Tess credit for it eventually. Then she finds Tess’s notebook, understands what has happened, and walks into the meeting. She tells the room Tess is her secretary, and accuses her of stealing the Trask idea. Tess cannot defend herself. She apologizes, over and over, and leaves.

The next day, cleaning out her desk, she runs into Jack, Katharine, Trask and his board. Jack sticks up for her. In an elevator, Tess tells Trask exactly what inspired the plan. Trask asks Katharine the same question. She can’t answer, and he fires her.

Tess starts an entry-level job at Trask Industries and moves in with Jack. On her first day, the woman she takes for her new supervisor, Alice, tells her she is actually her secretary. Tess tells her she doesn’t expect her to fetch coffee, “unless you’re getting some for yourself.” Then she picks up the phone in her own office and calls Cyn. “Hey, Cyn. Guess where I am.”

Working Girl was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress. Carly Simon’s theme, “Let the River Run,” won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

What It Gets Right

A lot, and it deserves to be said first.

Tess is the engine of this film. She pays for her own education, trains her own voice and walks out on a boyfriend who wants to order her like a meal: “I am not steak! You can’t just order me!” Her makeover is hers, done with her best friend, not paid for or bet on by a man. The idea at the center of the plot is hers, and the film never lets us doubt it.

It also names the rules out loud. “I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up, okay?” For a 1988 comedy about a secretary, that is a clear-eyed sentence.

And the ending does something rare in this series. The man does not arrive to take her away. She gets her own office, she refuses to treat the woman outside it the way she was treated, and the last call she makes is to her friend.

What It Teaches

1. Her work under someone else’s name

The core move of the film is one many women will know from a meeting room. Tess offers an idea. Her boss tells her it won’t work. Then the idea reappears, polished and addressed to someone important, with the boss’s name on it.

This is Mannequin‘s fourth lesson and My Fair Lady‘s third, and Working Girl adds the part those films left out: the person taking the credit can be anyone with a higher desk. The Decoder Series reads patterns, not genders. What makes the move work is not who does it, but that the person above you is the one who gets believed.

Notice the order, too. First the idea is dismissed, then it is taken. The Glossary calls the first part invalidation. Being told your thinking is no good is what makes it so hard to say, later, that the good thinking was yours.

2. I was going to give you credit, eventually

When Katharine comes home, she tells Tess she had always meant to take the idea to Jack, and to credit Tess for it in time. It is a promise about a future that costs nothing now.

The Decoder calls this Card 42, Future Faking: the promise keeps you invested without anything having to change. Its Power Move is the right answer to “I was going to credit you”: “Judge by patterns, not promises.” The notes Tess found didn’t have her name on them. That was the pattern. The promise was the explanation.

3. The one who took it accuses you of taking it

The hardest scene in the film is the meeting. Katharine walks in and tells the room that Tess is her secretary, and a thief. Tess, who has done the work, cannot find the words. She apologizes again and again, and leaves.

The Glossary calls this move DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. It is worth being fair: Tess had passed herself off as an executive, and the film knows it. But the idea was hers, and in the moment it mattered, she apologized for the theft that was done to her. Many women have done exactly that, in a meeting or a kitchen, because the person accusing them sounded so sure.

4. To be believed, dress like the person who took it

Tess’s first job had her wearing what the men found decorative. Her boyfriend buys her clothes for the bedroom. Her ticket into the room where decisions are made is her boss’s wardrobe. Jack’s first compliment is about her clothes, and her own line at that party is “I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Nothing is wrong with it. But the film is honest about the price of entry: her idea was the same idea it had always been, and it only got a hearing once she looked like Katharine. That is Sabrina‘s lesson in an office. Being overlooked is treated as a problem with how she looks, and the fix is a change of surface.

5. She got it back by knowing where it came from (a partial turn)

Here the film turns. Tess does not win by getting louder or by being rescued. She wins because she can tell the story of where the idea came from, and the person who took it can’t. The one question Katharine cannot answer is the question that proves who did the work.

The Glossary calls this reality testing: checking your version against the record. Tess’s record was in her head, and it held. The turn is not complete. It still takes the man at the top of the company to decide whom to believe, and Jack’s word helps. And she starts again at entry level, while the woman who took her idea had been an associate partner. But the credit comes back to her through her own account of her own work, and in this series, that is new.

6. She doesn’t pass it down

The last scene is small and it matters. Tess’s new secretary calls her Ms. McGill. Tess tells her to call her Tess, and that she doesn’t expect coffee “unless you’re getting some for yourself.” The pattern stops at her desk.

Then she calls Cyn. Pretty Woman‘s first ending, in the script, put Vivian on a bus with her friend; the film sent a man up a fire escape instead. Working Girl gives its heroine the office and the man, but it ends on the phone call to the friend who helped her get dressed.

Whose Work, Side by Side

	Mannequin (1987)	My Fair Lady (1964)	Working Girl (1988)
The work	The windows	Passing as a lady at the ball	The Trask deal
Who takes the credit	Jonathan, because she can’t appear	Higgins and Pickering	Katharine, her boss
Does she get it back?	No	No: she walks out	Yes
How	She never speaks in public	She leaves the room	She tells where the idea came from

Three films in which a woman’s work goes under someone else’s name. Only one of them gives her the words to take it back.

If You Grew Up on This

You may love this film. The ferry, the skyline, the song over the opening, Tess in her borrowed suit: it is funny and hopeful, and it gave a lot of us a picture of a woman who wanted more and went after it. Nothing on this page asks you to stop. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Has an idea of yours ever been dismissed, then come back with someone else’s name on it?
Has anyone promised to credit you “eventually”? Did the pattern match the promise?
Have you ever apologized for something that was done to you, because the other person sounded so sure?
What did you change about how you looked, or sounded, before anyone would listen?
Could you tell the story of where your best idea came from, if someone asked?

Tess knew exactly where her idea came from, and when someone finally asked, she said so. You can keep that record too.

You’re the audience now. You know whose light bulb it was.