SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 15 2015, @07:04PM
In terms of confidence, the worst invention that humanity bestowed upon itself in the 20th century is the Masters of Business Administration. It is essentially a curriculum in confidence, in debate, in twisting words around in a logic-defying way, in shutting down undesired conversations. The children of these MBAs learned their parents' horrible ways, and society placed the MBA and management on a pedestal. Instead of properly vetting qualifications for promotion choices, we have the Peter Principle. Any and all doubt in the status quo is smeared as "unprofessional", even if it is doubt grounded in research of concrete facts or analysis of the situation. Being correct no longer matters; only the preservation of the illusion that one is correct.
Some workplaces institute a hostile culture of accepting nothing less than complete sycophantic fanaticism. You either play along with the overwrought marketing plan of Human Resources, or you get effectively ostracized via the Siberian Treatment, or other corporate mechanisms of societal shame.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Monday November 16 2015, @02:26AM
Instead of properly vetting qualifications for promotion choices, we have the Peter Principle.
We wish we had the Peter Principal. I know it is more of a meme than a definition, but in the days of the Peter Principal people got promoted to the point they were no longer useful, but at least they once did something and had an understanding of what the people they are managing are trying to do. Now, we get managers that have no clue about anything but what they were taught in business school, and instead of the end result being revenue increases due to production increases, we have profit increases due to cost decreases. The problem is, you can only cut costs so much, eventually production suffers and the company goes into a death spiral. The MBAs then engineer a sell off of the company and think they are heroes because they made a killing on the stocks, while the majority of the employees are just out of a job.