Self-image and professional competence

[MagicalHamSandwich]

This question is inspired by one of my LinkedIn contacts. I used to have some dealings with this man on one of the projects I worked on and he is - I'm sorry but I can't put this in nicer words - utterly useless in his job. When I worked with him he consulted for us and basically delivered poorly thought out minimal solutions that barely worked and didn't meet any of the minimum requirements.

Apparently he's since changed employers and obtained a position that I would never ever dream of even applying for - because I'm hopelessly underqualified for it! Reading through his LinkedIn CV, though, I can certainly see why it wouldn't come across that way. Apparently the man is an expert at anything he's ever touched - including the aforementioned delivery project which he lists as a professional success.

The thing is: I see this time and time again and it's a heavily gendered phenomenon. My male colleagues (with one notable exception, whom I ironically regard as one of the smartest people I know!) seem so secure in their own skills and knowledge. They seem to regard promotion, better positions and professional achievement in general as something they're entitled to and will occasionally threaten to (or will actually) resign if these things are denied to them.

In contrast, most of the very few women I work with appear to have the attitude that we ought to be grateful to the nice gentlemen who so generously offer us a job with some perks (exaggerating here, hope you get my drift) and that we don't actually know all that much and do all that well.

Now, I realize that objectively speaking this is bullshit! I see the work my male and female colleagues do and the women tend, on average, to be better. (No, this is not because women are generally better - I rather suspect that only women who are above average survive in a male dominated field like ours). I myself have maintained a top tier performance rating for three years running and have just been fast track promoted on account of my supposedly outstanding work. I still don't have half the confidence that some of even my junior male colleagues of middling work performance display.

This doesn't seem to matter so much in the short term - when people change jobs, though, it has an enormous impact - see moronic LinkedIn contact above. I've certainly been 'overtaken' by several male colleagues on account that they got hired away into jobs that I would simply never dream of applying for!

I've just become a mentor to part of the firm's graduate intake - among them several young women - and this is something I'd really like to address with them. Unfortunately, the only senior person I've ever really had the chance to discuss such matters with is the aforementioned male exception to the confidence-rule. We're both of the fake it till you make it persuasion, but I'm thinking there has got to be a more effective way of addressing this issue.

Any thoughts? And especially: any tips on how I can best support my female graduate mentees to avoid this trap?

DO IT VESTAL!

JFDI or your license will be shredded for hamster bedding!

Helpful?

Thank you, OneMore. Tomorrow, I shall write an job application for a job I don't meet one of the qualifications for! And just claim that I can learn the stuff! :)

You need to find the YouTube video of facebook's "unconscious bias" training. It's brilliant. Basically it says we all (both sexes) need women to be likeable more than we need neb to be. So am when a woman is strong in a situation it conflicts with this. It's a great vid. Let me see if I can find it.

I haven't watched it through but I think this is it managingbias.fb.com

I think the best thing you can do for your graduates is make them aware of the phenomenon.

I have always done it with my DD, told her how men apply for jobs even when they only have 50% of the required essential criteria, but woman don't, and thats why they progress slower on the whole. Whats the worst that can happen? you get interview experience and a no. your life doesn't end.

Also encouraged her to ask for a raise if she feels she is more than fulfilling her role and to take in evidence on why she thinks she deserves it. She graduated 3 years ago and in that time, she has pushed her wages up from 14k to 28k and had 3 promotions.

It definitely helped me to identify that I was restricting myself when applying for roles - I applied for one role where I met only a third of the "essential" criteria, knowing that statistic about how many men expect to match before applying. I was later told that I was streets ahead of any other applicant. I suspect that this is particularly acute in male dominated professions like IT, because hiring managers are unlikely to notice that people aren't applying for their roles.

It's one of the many "secret rules" about recruitment that once you know about them, you can work with, but unless you're lucky enough to have a savvy mentor, you'll probably never find out about.

Good luck Vestal! Many men expect to get jobs they can "grow into", rather than paying dues by "acting up", working at the level above for years to "prove" themselves before getting the role at the point where they feel they're just about to grow out of it...

But men are often recruited/promoted for their potential, where women are for their achievements, so there are double standards which work against women there.

I'm always being told that I need to be more confident at work. It pisses me off. I kind of feel like they're telling me to be more like a man.

Why should I be more confident?! I'm fairly new to this field. Why should I profess to be an expert when I know I have much to learn still? I prefer to be realistic and humble and I feel that putting on an air of confidence would make me false and maybe even arrogant. I hate the idea of "fake it til you make it".

Sounds harsh, I know, but I sometimes wish I could just bring everyone else's confidence down a notch, rather than having to artificially bring my own confidence up.

I do work for an American corporation (in the UK though) so it's all about tooting your own horn and very competitive. Hate it.

However, I do sometimes wonder if I suffer from impostor syndrome.

Agreed. It's certainly not a case of "all women have to do is apply, but they just don't" (in other words just blame it on lack of confidence aka woman's fault).

I think there are at least two things going on:

1. Direct discrimination, whether overt or implicit - different expectations of women, different interpretations of the same performance/behaviour, all the way up to outright harassment.
2. Not being in the club: I guess the comparison here is how, given two otherwise equally accomplished 18 year olds, the one attending a sink school who is the first in their family to consider university is going to find it harder work to access a good university because they have none of the unwritten knowledge or training or attitude that a more privileged teen will have from parents, family friends, schools etc. Things that make a huge difference - like expected entry grades are a lie (they'll often accept lower, but advertising higher helps in league tables), or that when you walk into your Oxbridge interview and the interviewer says "I'm surprised to see someone with your GCSE grades applying " this is apparently code for "argue your case" not "you might as well go home now".

The combination of both mean that sometimes even when you know the rules and are fucking awesome you still get knocked back. But knowing them at least means you can try to make a few more opportunities for yourself - and if they don't work out, you know it's not you.

Sorry, that was in response to EBearhug. I do agree there's too much emphasis on the appearance of confidence, Purple. I've had criticism on those lines - which bugged me because actually, I was very fucking confident thank you very much, but what I was trying to express was not a straight yes or no, but a "maybe, in this circumstance, with this degree of certainty", which to my mind was just being truthful that nobody fucking knew. But honest doubt expressed by a woman apparently reads as weakness to some.

I don't agree that confidence is a male trait. I do think workplaces tend to be set up in a way that drains women's confidence & boosts men's.

I work in software. On the one hand, I know I'm good at my job. I've made substantial improvements to our products and my work gets deployed to thousands of customers. I have stats and positive feedback to prove this! On the other hand, I can't shake the nagging feeling that everyone else is better than me and they'll realise it soon. So as a consequence I work way too hard and stress myself out even more! My boss doesn't seem to want to promote me and I don't want to push the topic in case I come off as looking too greedy. And I also just decided not to apply for a job I wanted because I'm not fully qualified. I think I'm a walking clichè of women in tech!

Firstly, OP, I think it's fantastic that you're thinking about this issue and ways that you can help your graduate trainees to deal with it. As others have said, even just discussing the problem and making sure that they're fully aware of it has to be a really good start.

Practially speaking, for the specific trainees concerned (rather than dealing with the systemic problem), I suspect that the more that you can put them on the spot in situations where they have to deal with clients, stand up and put their point across, deal with confrontation etc, the better.

I really think that one reason that Oxbridge grads tend to do well is the supervision system - you've spent 3 years having to defend your work in front of a small group who are (hopefully in a constructive spirit) pulling it apart in front of you.

I work in software. On the one hand, I know I'm good at my job. I've made substantial improvements to our products and my work gets deployed to thousands of customers. I have stats and positive feedback to prove this! On the other hand, I can't shake the nagging feeling that everyone else is better than me and they'll realise it soon. So as a consequence I work way too hard and stress myself out even more! My boss doesn't seem to want to promote me and I don't want to push the topic in case I come off as looking too greedy. And I also just decided not to apply for a job I wanted because I'm not fully qualified. I think I'm a walking clichè of women in tech!

I (unix sys admin) have asked for promotion. Apparently it only happens for people who walk on water. What I actually want is not an impossible goal, but a discussion about "you will need to improve X and Y, but this bit is good, so keep it up," and to get things in my dev plan that would help me improve X and Y.

I don't give a damn if they think I'm greedy. I am the best in the team, and one of the best in the department, and I deserve some recognition of that.

When I worked it was in a female dominant position so I didn't note this personally.

I did note my exh had an over inflated idea of his worth, in skills and compensation negociations. I can see how poorly he is performing now as he runs his own public businesses, there is nowhere to hide.

Another example was last week. I attended a political meeting and the Male former leader suggested I apply on the all female as a councillor. He and the other two Men in the meeting persisted that I should apply. I repeatedly suggested I wasn't up to the job, they left with the words "Do think about it". Me not being up to the job wasn't a barrier apparently . I can't string a sentence together sometimes.

I repeatedly suggested I wasn't up to the job, they left with the words "Do think about it". Me not being up to the job wasn't a barrier apparently

Well, I think you should accept their objective evaluation of your talents. Unless there are life constraints on you, which they wouldn't know about?

I once turned down a real life-changing offer because I felt I wasn't ready for it. They'd head-hunted me, fgs, they knew what I was ready for! After that I stopped underselling myself.

I'm not sure it's about lying or being over-confident. Men who get the promotions are often more likely to view their gifts in a positive light. Perhaps women are more likely to have developed a habit of self-criticism, as we spend such a lot of effort on not pissing off the patriarchy with our appearance, words & behaviours.

I'm sure the referenced texts have covered this; I haven't read any of them.

Wrt mentoring younger women - and younger men, for that matter, if perhaps less urgently - assertiveness training's invaluable ime. We all think we know about assertiveness but, a lot of the time, we don't.

Good luck with the promotion, EBear :) If you think you can do it, you're right!

I feel exactly like you treefrog

This feels like the right thread to add this to. Remember the bit in Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender about testing implicit and subconscious gender biases using timed word association tests? Well, you can have a go at taking them here on the Harvard University website.

I found them really interesting - particularly because despite knowing exactly what they were doing and how they worked, I'd still have found it really difficult to "game" them. I came up as having moderately strong associations between male and career/ female and family (despite being a working single parent, feminist, and having managed to get promoted in my job since having a child...) In a sense this didn't surprise me - part of Cordelia Fine's point is that even if you manage to erase conscious gender biases, you're still carrying round an immense amount of subconscious baggage.

I was perhaps slightly more surprised to find I came up as neutral on the male and science/female and liberal arts test (though this I think is to do with slightly peculiar details of my personal experience of attitudes to biology in my girls' school/ experience of a philosophy department at university - I have very deeply ingrained experiences of biology as a women's branch of science/ philosophy as male dick-swinging, which I think skewed my performance - pre-emptive apologies to Buffy for this latter attitude, but I was trained in the Anglo-American "analytical" tradition which is very dick-wavey in my experience).

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here they are - try 'em out and see how you do.

I did a few of these tests a while ago and came out as neutral in nearly every one that I did. I have done the gender -science and career, skin tone, race, sexuality and weight tests. When I have time I'll try some more. The only one I came up as not neutral on was I think the gender-family one where I came more on the side that I'd expect the man to look after family. I think he belonged to the group that did this so that is why I got that result. I can't remember the exact details now.