The Confidence Code (13 page)

Della’s style is an exception. Most of us learned the good girl lesson all too well. But it doesn’t prepare us very well for the real world. Carol Dweck, author of the best seller
Mindset
and a Stanford psychology professor, puts it this way: “If life were one long grade school, women would be the undisputed rulers of the world.”

Owning the Classroom, Skipping the Playground

The meritocratic academic classroom, where we excel, doesn’t teach us to play very confidently in the assertive, competitive world of the workplace. With all their focus on getting high academic scores, too many girls are ignoring the really valuable lessons that wait outside of school. “Girls still don’t play enough competitive sports, where we train them to know what it’s like to compete and win,” says Susannah Wellford Shakow, cofounder of Running Start, the group that prepares women to run for political office.

We all know that playing sports is good for kids, but we were surprised to learn just how widespread the benefits are. Studies evaluating the impact of the 1972 Title IX legislation, which made it illegal for U.S. public schools to spend more on boys’ athletics than on girls’, have found that girls who play team sports are more likely to graduate from college, find a job, and be employed in male-dominated industries. There’s even a direct link between playing sports in high school and earning a higher salary in later life. Learning to own victory and defeat in sports is a useful lesson for owning triumphs and setbacks at work.

The number of girls playing sports has increased dramatically since Title IX passed. In college, women’s participation in athletics rose sixfold from 1972 to 2011. In high school, girls’ participation in sports jumped a staggering 1,000 percent over the same period. But the numbers are still uneven. Fewer girls than boys participate in athletics, and many who do quit early. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is alarmed that girls are still six times as likely as boys to drop off their sports team.

Academics confirm what we know from our own experience as teenagers: girls suffer a larger drop in self-esteem during adolescence than boys, and it takes them longer to get over those demoralizing years. The drop in confidence makes them more likely to quit team sports because their self-confidence isn’t robust enough to handle losing. What a vicious circle: They lose confidence so they quit competing, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it.

Men, meanwhile, seem to more naturally embrace competition, whether it’s for the boss’s attention, their peers’ adoration, or the sweepstakes for the corner office. Out on the football field, boys learn to relish wins and flick off losses. In the classroom, boys tend to raise their hands before they’ve even heard the question, let alone formulated a reply. Essentially, they turn everything into a competition. All of this behavior may irritate the teacher, but it’s hard not to envy that degree of confidence.

With all their roughhousing and teasing, boys also toughen each other in ways that are actually useful for building resilience. Where many women seek out praise and run from criticism, men usually seem unfazed, able to discount other people’s views much earlier in life. From kindergarten on, boys tease each other, call each other slobs, and point out each other’s limitations. Psychologists believe that playground mentality encourages them later, as men, to let other people’s tough remarks slide off their backs. It’s a handy skill to have when they head out into the cold world.

Girls leave school crammed full of interesting historical facts and elegant Spanish subjunctives, so proud of their ability to study hard and get the best grades. But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change and they don’t understand it. They slam into a world of work that doesn’t reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners. The requirements for success are different, and their confidence takes a beating.

Professional success demands political savvy, a certain amount of scheming and jockeying, a flair for self-promotion and not letting a
no
stop you. Women often aren’t very comfortable with that. Perhaps, deep down, we don’t really approve of these tactics. Whatever the reason, we haven’t been very good at mastering these skills, and that holds us back.

Valerie Jarrett regularly spots this operational tension in the women she works with. One of the top women in the White House, she’s a senior adviser to President Obama, and also an unofficial adviser to dozens of female White House employees. She’s an especially effective messenger because she freely admits she’s worked hard to banish her self-doubt. We dropped in late one afternoon, and, along with some female colleagues, gathered around a conference table in her West Wing office. In a cream silk blouse, splashed with an edgy design of purple and yellow (she’s known as a sharp dresser), Jarrett managed to convey crisp authority and matriarchal warmth at the same time. We noticed, over the course of the hour-long conversation, that Jarrett listens and solicits other opinions as much as she speaks, even in a session in which
she’s
being interviewed. One thing she’s learned over the years, she told us, especially watching her friend Tina Tchen, the First Lady’s chief of staff, is that you don’t always have to dominate a conversation to have an impact.

But there are times when speaking up is required, and women have got to master that distinction. “We’re taught to be more self-deprecating,” she told us. “I think it all begins on the playground, and then society reinforces it. We believe that we should wait until we are absolutely sure that we are ready for something before we ask for it.” It took her a decade in the workplace to learn to ask for something boldly, without waiting. She was in her early thirties, working in the Chicago mayor’s office and doing a stellar job handling huge real-estate transactions. A client told her she was doing the work her supervisor should be doing. “She told me, ‘You need to be the boss. You need a promotion.’” Jarrett didn’t believe it. “I thought she was crazy, but she kept nudging me,” she said wryly, “for months and months and months.” Eventually, she listened, and decided to take a chance and just ask her boss. She remembers the meeting as though it happened yesterday. “I was so nervous, but I told him all of the reasons why I deserved it, and he, very quickly, just said, ‘OK.’” It was as though the scales dropped from her eyes. Emboldened, she asked for a front office, too. He waffled, and a few days later she simply moved in to an empty one. It was a breakthrough confidence moment for her.

Years later she asked her former boss, now a good friend, why he never just offered her a promotion. He told her he’d been busy, and hadn’t thought about it. “We all assume,” Jarrett told us, “that there’s a reason why. We think, ‘I’m not deserving, if I were, he’d recognize my talent. It’s not up to me to point it out.’” It’s a way of thinking she sees routinely, even in the White House, and it’s one she tries to vanquish because she knows the career damage it can do.

Consider the following tale of two employees working in New York. A female friend of ours was supervising the two twenty-something junior staffers, one female (whom we will call Rebecca) and one male (whom we will call Robert). Even though Robert had been in his job for only a few months, he was already stopping by our friend’s office to offer off-the-cuff pitches for new ad campaigns, to comment on business strategy, and to share his unsolicited opinions about recent articles he’d read in the
Economist
. Our friend often found herself shooting down his ideas, correcting his misperceptions, and sending him off for further research. “No problem,” seemed to be his attitude. Sometimes he’d retort with a counter-argument; other times, he’d grin and shrug his shoulders as he headed back to his desk.

A few days later, he’d be back in to pitch more ideas and to update her on what he was doing even if it was only to say, “I’m still working on that.” Our friend was struck by how easily and energetically Robert engaged her, and how markedly different his behavior was from Rebecca’s, with whom she’d already been working for several years. Rebecca still made appointments in advance to speak with her and always prepared a list of issues and questions for their discussions. When asked to provide feedback, she did, but she was mostly quiet in meetings with outside clients, focusing instead on taking careful notes. She never simply blurted out her ideas; she always wrote them up with comprehensive analyses of the pros and cons. Rebecca was prepared and hardworking, and yet . . . even though our friend was frequently annoyed at Robert’s assertiveness, she couldn’t help but be impressed by him. She admired his willingness to be wrong and his ability to absorb negative feedback without letting it discourage him. Rebecca, however, took negative feedback hard, sometimes responding with tears, and a trip to her own office to collect herself before the conversation could continue.

Our friend had come to rely on and value Rebecca, but when she speculated as to which of the two had what it takes to go far, she knew it was Robert’s star that would rise. It was only a matter of time before one of his many ideas would strike the right note, and he’d be off and running—probably, our friend was beginning to fear, while Rebecca was left behind, enjoying the respect of her colleagues but not a higher salary, more responsibilities, or a more important title.

Faced with these corporate realities, sometimes we women give up altogether, deciding we don’t fit in this world and can’t be bothered to put up with it when the toll on our psyches and our families is so high. Too often, even when we stay, doing so drains our energy. Every morning we have to drag on our office armor, trying to win a game we don’t really understand or like.

Same Game, Different Standards

Here’s an unsavory question: If Rebecca did behave just like Robert, exhibiting his kind of self-assuredness, what would her boss think then? All the evidence suggests that Rebecca wouldn’t fare so well, whether her boss was male
or
female.

For women, this is the big conundrum of confidence. A host of troubling studies now show that we pay a heavy social and even professional penalty when we act as aggressively as men do. If we walk into our boss’s office with unsolicited opinions, speak up first at meetings, and give business advice above our pay grade, we are either disliked, or—let’s not beat around the bush—labeled “a bitch.” The more a woman succeeds, the worse the vitriol seems to get. It’s not just her competence that’s called into question; it’s her very character. Look at the 2008 election campaign, in which two women ran for high office. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were neatly placed on a continuum that ran from smart and cold to stupid and pretty. No one would ever say those things about a man. All too often, the very fear of this kind of abuse is enough to make women pull too far back and become overly deferential.

Back at the Yale School of Management, Victoria Brescoll has tested the thesis that the more senior a woman is, the more she makes a conscious effort to play down her volubility. It’s the reverse of how most men would handle their power. She conducted two experiments on a group of men and women.

First, she asked 206 participants, both men and women, to imagine themselves as either the most senior figure or the most junior figure in a meeting. Then she asked them how much they’d talk at that meeting as their imagined character. The men in the group who’d imagined themselves as a powerful figure reported that they would talk more than the men who’d picked a junior position. But the women who’d selected high-powered roles said they would talk the same amount as the lower-ranking women. Asked why, they said they didn’t want to be disliked, or seem out of line or too controlling. Were the women inventing these fears, or were they realistic?

In Brescoll’s next experiment, both male and female participants rated a hypothetical woman CEO who talked more than other people. The result: Both sexes viewed this made-up woman as significantly less competent and less suited to leadership than a male CEO who talked for the same amount of time. When the fictitious female CEO was described as talking less than others, her perceived competency shot up.

Not only do we dislike women who talk a lot, we actively expect men to take the floor and dominate conversations; we punish them if they don’t. And remember, Brescoll’s female participants were just as prejudiced against women as the men.

It’s Lonely at the Top

Even women at the pinnacle, women who are tough and normally don’t like to complain about discrimination, say they still feel unspoken waves of prejudice in their everyday lives. Linda Hudson, who spent the last four years as president and CEO of BAE Systems, the U.S. arm of the global defense contracting giant, has been a leader in the industry for decades. Still, she is a pioneer, and she told us, “I still think the environment is such that even in the position I am now, everyone’s first impression is that I’m not qualified to do the job.” “Really?” we asked, taken aback. “Yes,” she insisted, explaining the essential corporate difference for men and women. “When a man walks into a room, they’re assumed to be competent until they prove otherwise.” For women, she says, it’s the other way around.

Hudson had just described the reality of “stereotype threat.” It’s a dry, officious-sounding term, but the experience can be an emotional, confidence-killing loneliness. The term was coined in the mid-1990s by psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, who were trying to figure out why African Americans were often still performing less well in college than white students. Since then, hundreds of studies have shown that women, too, underperform in areas like science and math because they are competing in fields in which, stereotypically, females don’t do well. Remember that Harvard study from chapter 1, in which women, if asked to name their gender, did worse on the math exam? That’s an example of the power of stereotype threat, but the problem is actually much broader. It’s essentially a corrosive circle: When we are part of a minority in an institution, and that minority has a well-known stereotype about performance already associated with it, we feel pressure to conform to that type.