Four Ways to Prepare Girls to Compete in the Workplace

I recently met with a coaching client who I had not seen for a year or more. I was surprised to find that she was still struggling with the same question we had last discussed—what she wants to do next in her career. She is in her late thirties and has multiple professional degrees and considerable work experience. When I asked her what actions she had taken to find her next role or position since we last met, she responded that she had found a position on the internet that interested her but had not applied because she did not feel qualified for it. She also reported that some opportunities for research grants had come her way, but she did not feel qualified or prepared to accept them. I looked at her for a moment in silence trying to mentally organize an appropriate response, and she said, “I know. Men wouldn’t worry about these things. They would just assume they were qualified.” I exhaled and agreed with her.

In fact, research shows that women typically feel they are not qualified or ready for positions and promotions that men with less experience don’t hesitate to apply for. While some describe this as a confidence problem for women, I have never felt comfortable with that explanation. For this reason, I was interested in a report by Lisa Damour in the New York Times in which she explores a potential rationale:

From elementary school through college, girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades. . . . And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies.

What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class—their hyperconscientiousness about schoolwork—also hold them back in the work force?

The author, a psychologist who works with teenagers, shares that parents routinely notice that their sons do only the minimum amount of schoolwork necessary to get by while their daughters “don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and rewritten their notes with color-coded precision.” Damour suggests that perhaps the experience boys have of succeeding in school with minimal effort is crucial to developing confidence that serves them in the workplace. Perhaps the experience girls have of overpreparing and being hyperconscientious in school is getting in their way later in life. Maybe they need to know that they can succeed without overpreparing and being perfect.

What can parents and teachers do to help girls prepare for the future? The author offers several suggestions:

  1. Help girls learn to do a little bit less and focus on economy of effort.
  2. Help girls take pride in how much they already know. One way to measure knowledge before studying is to take sample tests to see where their knowledge gaps may be so they know how much work they really need to do—or don’t need to do.
  3. When a girl with a high A average turns in extra work for extra credit, encourage her to consider that the extra credit isn’t needed.
  4. Affirm for girls that feeling some anxiety about school is normal and healthy, but too much stress is unsustainable and unhealthy. The difference between earning a 91 and 99 might mean some time to relax and have fun. She will still get an A.

Damour acknowledges that women are being kept out of top jobs for plenty of reasons besides their lack of confidence, such as gender bias, sexual harassment, and double binds. But perhaps we can help girls arrive in the workplace without the additional pressure they put on themselves to be perfect.

Photo by pan xiaozhen on Unsplash.

When You Are the Only Woman: New Research

Not long ago a new client, Isabelle, came to me to discuss feeling confused and lost about how to be a woman leader. She had most recently worked for a Global Health NGO as the only woman on the senior management team and had taken a strong stand for promoting a woman in the organization to fill a senior-level vacancy. All her male peers wanted to hire a man from the outside. Isabelle argued that the woman was at least as qualified and that the organization needed more diversity in its leadership ranks. Finding no support among her male colleagues, she went over their heads to her boss’s boss and got his support for promoting the woman. Her own boss, who had disagreed with her, wrote a negative performance review for Isabelle’s permanent HR file, stating that she was biased and discriminated against men. He also wrote that she was too aggressive and not a team player. Isabelle felt that she had won the battle but lost the war. A short time later, she left the organization. When she came to me, she was filled with self-doubt about her leadership abilities and was unsure if she ever wanted to work in a male-dominated organization again. Many women find themselves in Isabelle’s position as the only woman on a team. Rebecca Greenfield of the Boston Globe reports on a new study from LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. on a group of women called “Onlys,” defined as those who are often or always the only female in the room at work. In a survey of more than sixty-four thousand employees in 279 US companies, the research found that one in five women put themselves in the Only category. The number rises to 40 percent for women in senior or technical roles. Survey participants reported facing more challenges in organizations as Onlys than other women:

  • Half of the Onlys say they need to provide more evidence of their competence than others do.
  • Onlys are twice as likely to be mistaken for someone more junior.
  • They are almost twice as likely to be subjected to demeaning comments.
  • They are twice as likely to report being sexually harassed at some point in their careers.
The situation is worse for Onlys who are women of color, half of whom report that they are often the only person of their race in work settings and are subject to more scrutiny and exclusion than white women. The LeanIn-McKinsey survey results also disproved a myth often offered to explain why there are so few women in senior-level positions in organizations: women do not want to be senior leaders. The LeanIn-McKinsey survey found:
  • Almost half of the Onlys say they want the top job in their organizations.
  • Of the Onlys surveyed, 80 percent say they want promotions.
While ambition is not lacking for Onlys, the article also states that “being an Only ‘takes a physical and emotional toll.’” Like Isabelle, Onlys are less likely to stay in their organizations. Greenfield explains that the benefits of diversity for organizations do not kick in with tokenism, which is diluted diversity. Other studies have shown that the barriers and double binds that women face in organizations do not change unless women constitute a majority of leadership. Some research on barriers and double binds include the following:
  • Women are given more negative performance reviews with more negative personality criticisms.
  • Women get interrupted more and then are criticized for not talking enough in meetings.
  • Women must walk a tightrope between being effective versus likeable and too feminine versus not feminine enough.
It is important that we understand the stress and distress for women who are Onlys in organizations. Onlys can easily become exhausted both physically and emotionally and begin to doubt themselves—and they often leave organizations. Even when there are some supportive male colleagues and mentors in their lives, women who are Onlys seldom have the support of other women who are also Onlys—because they are isolated from other women by definition. It is critical that women become aware of the Only phenomenon and join together with other women who share their experience by seeking out professional networking groups or forming their own. A support group of women can become a place for grounding and strategizing—and staying focused on your goals. If you are an Only, what has worked for you?   Photo courtesy of U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine (CC BY-ND 2.0)  ]]>

Women Are Calmer under Pressure: New Research

New research by Alex Krumer of the University of St. Gallen, as reported in the Harvard Business Review, finds that women respond better to pressure in competitive sports than men do. Krumer and his colleagues analyzed more than 8,200 games from high-stakes Grand Slam tennis matches. They chose to include only the first matches of Grand Slams to control for the fatigue factor. They also chose Grand Slam tennis matches because performance was easy to measure, the monetary incentives and ranking points were the largest out of all the tournaments, and men and women received the same prize money. Krumer and his colleagues found that the men’s performance in unbroken serves deteriorated more than the women’s when the game was at a critical juncture, such as a 4-4 tie. Krumer said, “Among women, we saw barely any difference between pre- and post-tie performance.” While the researchers acknowledge that applying this information to the labor market is difficult, they also speculate that biological differences between men and women identified by other researchers are consistent with their results. These are just two examples:

  • The literature on cortisol, the stress hormone, shows that levels of it increase more rapidly in men than in women, which can hurt performance.
  • Testosterone, a proven performance enhancer, increases after a victory and decreases after a defeat in men but not in women. Spikes in testosterone can lead to overconfidence and higher risk taking.
In previous articles, I reported on studies that show similarities and differences in factors affecting decision making between women and men. The differences in risk-taking behavior show that overconfidence is a major obstacle in making smart decisions. The tennis researchers note that while they cannot demonstrate a direct relationship between performance in Grand Slam tennis matches and competence in the business world, other research shows significant differences, probably at least partially biologically based, in how women and men handle pressure. The researchers suggest that we consider the variety of roles in which we want leaders who can stay calm under pressure, such as CEOs and political leaders with control of nuclear weapons. Krumer suggests that “if you’re talking about mental toughness, maybe in certain circumstances it’s women who have the edge,” yet we have a dearth of women in CEO (4 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives) and political leadership roles. Clearly, that needs to change. What steps are you taking to make a difference?   Image courtesy of businessforward (CC BY 2.0)]]>

How To Be Helpful without Burning Out at Work

recent article in the New York Times, Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg talk about how selflessness and helping behavior are expected from women in the workplace, both as supervisors and as colleagues. Scholar Joyce Fletcher explains that many women place a high value on helping others and being a team player. Others also expect us to be helpful, nurturing, and generous with our time and talents. Yet Grant and Sandberg cite several studies showing that when women help others by being informal mentors, volunteering to organize office parties or charity events, and offering to support colleagues, they benefit less from it than men do. And “if a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers. But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is ‘busy’; a woman is ‘selfish.’” These different expectations set up another double bind for women—we are expected to do extra helpful things that men are not expected to do, which may cause us to miss career opportunities. And if we don’t help, we are disliked and receive lower performance ratings. Grant and Sandberg also report that an analysis of 183 studies, spanning 15 countries and dozens of industries, shows that women are significantly more likely to feel emotionally exhausted. They note that “in their quest to care for others, women often sacrifice themselves. For every 1,000 people at work, 80 more women than men burn out.” Here are three ways women and men can prevent burnout for women:

  1. Track and reward helping behavior. Most organizations track and reward individual accomplishments but do not require or reward communal helping behavior. Expecting both women and men to be helpful to the team by assigning communal tasks rather than relying on volunteers and rewarding or valuing helping behavior from both women and men will help to correct the imbalance that often exists.
  2. Prioritize our own needs as women. Remember Tammy? She forgot to make her own needs as important as the needs of her staff. She will actually be more helpful to them if she takes care of herself and does not burn out. In his recent book, Give and Take, Grant explains that to achieve high performance with low burnout, people need to prioritize their own needs along with the needs of others.
  3. Men can speak up more to support women and share the load. In a previous article, I shared research showing that men tend to dominate meetings and interrupt women. Instead, men can speak up to draw attention to women’s contributions and can do their share of the team support work and mentoring.
Let’s be clear. Organizations and teams need helping behavior to be successful, but that work needs to be equitably shared by both women and men to be done effectively. Please share ways you have found to help at work without burning out.]]>