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Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here's why, and what to do about it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/
-- submitted from IRC
The elusive nature of confidence has intrigued us ever since we started work on our 2009 book, Womenomics, which looked at the many positive changes unfolding for women. To our surprise, as we talked with women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn't quite identify, a force clearly holding them back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn't really deserve the big promotion she'd just got? What did it mean when the engineer who'd been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn't sure she was really the best choice to run her firm's new big project? In two decades of covering American politics as journalists, we realized, we have between us interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people you would assume brim with confidence. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt—that is, when they include women at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Sunday November 15 2015, @04:45PM
Like the AC said. The problem here is that they're trying to fix things that are no longer broken while ignoring things that remain broken. Women in the sciences isn't a result of brokenness, it's a result of women choosing to take other courses of study or going into other fields. A lot of my profs in college were women, I'm not sure it was 50-50, but it was a lot closer than people suggest. In classes, it was usually 60-40 in favor of women, but once you leave college, things get worse.
So, you get a ton of attention to that and virtually no attention being paid to the lack of women in undesirable jobs like garbage collection and mining. And virtually no attention paid to the over representation of women in teaching.
At this point, it's women keeping themselves down more often than not. Men aren't typically the ones spreading lies about sexual assault rates, that's generally women. I can't blame women for not wanting to spend a lot of time in male dominated professions when everybody saying that rape and sexual harassment are likely results.