Read Online The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It by Valerie Young - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Valerie Young
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describe their largely male work environment to be so “competitive and unfriendly” that it requires “a concerted effort to be assertive in order to be heard.” 11
Naturally, everyone wants to feel heard. It’s likely, though, that for you feeling heard matters even more. If you’ve ever sat in a classroom or meeting and felt your contributions were ignored, you won’t be surprised to learn that when female students feel their questions are dismissed by professors, their self-confidence declines; conversely, feeling heard boosts women’s confidence. 12
You don’t have to convince United States Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that feeling heard matters. Speaking of her experience as a female attorney in the sixties and seventies, Ginsburg told
USA Today
, “I don’t know how many meetings I attended … where I would say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert to it, respond to it.” Three decades later Ginsburg admits that there are times when the lack of diversity on the high court can still be wearying. “It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something … it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” said Ginsburg. 13
When you feel like an impostor, you’re prone to undervalue yourself.Widen the lens a bit and the question becomes, how could you not? As more women enter a field, the pay scale drops and so does the job’s status. And when you live in a society where money and status are revered, having less of both only reinforces the perception that the work you do is not as highly valued—at least not when a woman does it.
Miami Herald
humor columnist Dave Barry raised this point when he suggested, “The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.” Joking that “the trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything.” 14
It’s easy to smile at the truth in Barry’s joke. But it’s no laughing matter when your job is the one routinely made smaller. Just ask former Clinton White House staffer Dee Dee Myers. In her book
Why Women Should Rule the World
, Myers offers a revealing look at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways women are rendered less important. She tells of the intense pressure then president-elect Bill Clinton was under to make good on his promise to create a government that “looked like America.” Unfortunately, his initial appointments looked like more of the same. That’s when insiders hatched a plan to appoint Myers to be the first female White House press secretary—
kind of
. Myers got the news from transition-team members George Stephanopoulos and Ricki Seidman. I’ll let Myers take it from here:
“[They told me] I would have the title of White House press secretary. But the job would be a little different. George would be director of communications; he would handle the daily briefings, as he had during the transition, and I would be the backup briefer. He would take the press secretary’s office in the West Wing; I’d have a smaller office in the same suite.He’d carry the highest rank of assistant to the president (as all previous press secretaries had); I’d be a deputy assistant—a lower rank that came with a smaller salary (natch).” Of the offer, Myers says, “Suddenly, I found myself staring down the barrel of a predicament that I knew was all too common among women: responsibility without corresponding authority.”
Once in the White House, Myers had the lesson reinforced. It turned out that despite having
Naturally, everyone wants to feel heard. It’s likely, though, that for you feeling heard matters even more. If you’ve ever sat in a classroom or meeting and felt your contributions were ignored, you won’t be surprised to learn that when female students feel their questions are dismissed by professors, their self-confidence declines; conversely, feeling heard boosts women’s confidence. 12
You don’t have to convince United States Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that feeling heard matters. Speaking of her experience as a female attorney in the sixties and seventies, Ginsburg told
USA Today
, “I don’t know how many meetings I attended … where I would say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert to it, respond to it.” Three decades later Ginsburg admits that there are times when the lack of diversity on the high court can still be wearying. “It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something … it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” said Ginsburg. 13
When you feel like an impostor, you’re prone to undervalue yourself.Widen the lens a bit and the question becomes, how could you not? As more women enter a field, the pay scale drops and so does the job’s status. And when you live in a society where money and status are revered, having less of both only reinforces the perception that the work you do is not as highly valued—at least not when a woman does it.
Miami Herald
humor columnist Dave Barry raised this point when he suggested, “The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up.” Joking that “the trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything.” 14
It’s easy to smile at the truth in Barry’s joke. But it’s no laughing matter when your job is the one routinely made smaller. Just ask former Clinton White House staffer Dee Dee Myers. In her book
Why Women Should Rule the World
, Myers offers a revealing look at the subtle and not-so-subtle ways women are rendered less important. She tells of the intense pressure then president-elect Bill Clinton was under to make good on his promise to create a government that “looked like America.” Unfortunately, his initial appointments looked like more of the same. That’s when insiders hatched a plan to appoint Myers to be the first female White House press secretary—
kind of
. Myers got the news from transition-team members George Stephanopoulos and Ricki Seidman. I’ll let Myers take it from here:
“[They told me] I would have the title of White House press secretary. But the job would be a little different. George would be director of communications; he would handle the daily briefings, as he had during the transition, and I would be the backup briefer. He would take the press secretary’s office in the West Wing; I’d have a smaller office in the same suite.He’d carry the highest rank of assistant to the president (as all previous press secretaries had); I’d be a deputy assistant—a lower rank that came with a smaller salary (natch).” Of the offer, Myers says, “Suddenly, I found myself staring down the barrel of a predicament that I knew was all too common among women: responsibility without corresponding authority.”
Once in the White House, Myers had the lesson reinforced. It turned out that despite having
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