How letting women fail can help them succeed.
In life, and especially at work, women often are afraid to break the rules. They are also afraid to fail
in ways that can differ from men. Often, this holds them back in their
careers. It isn’t an irrational position. Instead, it’s more likely a
reaction to social pressures that tell them they will be more harshly
judged than their male peers on their perceived missteps.
Over at the Harvard Business Review
blog this week, Tara Sophia Mohr writes that she is skeptical of the
“confidence gap” as a reason that women aren’t getting as far up on the
career ladder as their male peers. She did a survey of professionals and
asked them: if they looked at a job, but decided not to apply, why not?
It usually wasn’t because they didn’t think they could do the job well,
she says.
Instead, she found that most often, men and women don’t
apply for jobs because they feel that they don’t meet all the
requirements in the job description. In other words, “what held them
back from applying was not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a
mistaken perception about the hiring process.”
Here’s the full division of answers:
It’s interesting how little variation between men and women
there seems to be. Where there are differences, they are that 1) women
are afraid to fail and 2) women believe they must follow the guidelines
as written. These two issues seem to be rooted in traditional notions of
femininity: women are expected to be gentle and deferential.
This is important because it’s not just about how women
think of themselves, but about how people perceive those women. It isn’t
an accident that women internalize these expectations. We expect women
to act that way. Then, generally, reactions to women in the workplace
fall in line with those expectations.
This is where personality comes in. In the same situation, a
man may be considered confident, whereas a woman would be called
abrasive. And that affects who gets the job or who gets promoted. In
another informal study out this week, Kieran Snyder
looked at the performance reviews of high-achieving men and women. She
found that even in positive reviews, women are more likely to receive
critical feedback.
Snyder writes that, “negative personality criticism—watch
your tone! step back! stop being so judgmental!—shows up twice in the 83
critical reviews received by men. It shows up in 71 of the 94 critical
reviews received by women.” The two polls, taken together, paint a
picture of women being more risk averse than men — for very practical
reasons.
Mohr’s post points to the fact that women need to break the
rules more often. But with Snyder, it’s unclear that women who break
the rules are rewarded in the same way as their male counterparts, so
that can’t be the only answer. We probably make small judgements daily
that contribute to the continuation of this way of thinking. It can only
stop if we make ourselves stop.
Women shouldn’t be afraid to fail. But we as a society (men
and women), need to stop judging women so harshly for their flaws. For
them to be equally good, it has to be okay that they are equally bad
sometimes.
reuters.
