The Confidence Code (14 page)

And being part of a double minority can become alarmingly complex. Tanya Coke, a great friend of Claire’s since childhood, is an accomplished civil rights lawyer and an African-American woman. She thinks about what she conveys every time she walks into a room that holds strangers. “It’s not that I have any apprehension about competing, or that I have a crisis of confidence about my abilities,” she said. “I have a consciousness about what people see when I walk into a room. I know they may wonder, until they know me, ‘Is this a competent person?’ I know I’ll be battling assumptions, even if they are unconscious and implicit.”

In some ways,
knowing
about negative stereotypes has become a motivator. “I think it makes me all the more intentional about presenting myself forcefully,” Coke told us. “I know the challenges I face.”

Valerie Jarrett told us much the same thing. “I’ve never felt it a disadvantage to be a woman, or an African-American woman,” she said, pausing, considering her answer. “On the other hand, my parents definitely taught me everything would work out—if I worked twice as hard as everyone.” She then bursts out in a hearty laugh. “They told me later they didn’t really think that advice would work, but figured they should say it, because it was the best they had.”

And for all women, and men as well, the legal framework is archaic. The United States is one of
only three
of the 190 countries in the entire world with no national policy providing a paid maternity leave. New mothers are guaranteed twelve weeks off, but with no salary. That puts us in the same category as women in Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. American exceptionalism sounds nice in theory, but it’s often a cold, hard myth for working women.

The latest Global Gender Gap Report compiled by the World Economic Forum ranks the United States not at the top or even in the top ten nations in the world, based on a broad array of measures of equality for women. The United States is twenty-third, just behind Burundi. And in terms of women’s political empowerment, by their measure, the United States is a miserable sixtieth. We are first in terms of educational attainment, but sixty-seventh in terms of gender pay equality, placing us just after Yemen. That is a sobering gap.

We aren’t laying any of this out as an excuse for not trying new challenges, because the fact is we have to deal with the world as it is even as we try to change it. Still, ignoring centuries of tradition would be shortsighted, to say the least. Understanding the challenge, or the stereotype threat that we face, as Tanya Coke pointed out, can motivate us to battle it.

Confidence and Mirrors

We can’t discuss women’s confidence and ignore the image in the mirror. We have an extremely tough and limiting relationship with what we see in there. As Marie Wilson points out, we don’t know how to use the mirror as a tool for hope or empowerment, since those future senators never make an appearance. At every age, physical appearance plays a disproportionate role in building a woman’s self-confidence. We are much quicker to criticize our appearance than men are to criticize theirs. The data is devastating. One international study shows 90 percent of all women want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance. Eighty-one percent of ten-year-old girls are afraid of being fat. And only 2 percent of us actually think we are beautiful.

We don’t know which comes first, attractiveness or confidence. Do attractive people feel more confident? Or do confident people perhaps feel they are more attractive than they really are? What we do know is that there is evidence that women are indeed judged more harshly at work and in life on our physical appearance than men are judged.

Take obesity: The professional penalties for men and women are very different. Christy Glass at Utah State University has studied obesity in men and women, looking particularly at its relationship to education levels. She found that overweight girls were much less likely than other girls to join clubs, get picked for sports teams, and be included in social groups. Teachers even have lower academic expectations for heavyset girls. But the same is not true for overweight boys: they are still included in sports teams, they still date, and are still present in all the important social groups. Obese boys go on to college just as much as other boys do, but obese girls are less likely to go to college than other girls. It sets up heavy girls for a long-term struggle. “Women who don’t meet the beauty standard—the social beauty standards—lack critical social resources,” says Glass. “They’re denied the network ties and people expect less of them.” Overweight men can even benefit from the Tony Soprano effect. They can be seen as powerful, savvy, competitive, and intelligent. Yet if a woman is overweight, her size is seen as a negative reflection not just of her physical attractiveness but also of her intellectual capability. She is deemed less organized, less competent, and lacking in self-control.

Women’s looks are complicated on all fronts. When Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, did a spread in
Vogue
in 2013, critics suggested that she shouldn’t be taking time out from her day job to play dress up for a fashion magazine. It seems unfair; however a woman looks, she can’t seem to catch a break.

We aren’t helping ourselves, either. Our own obsession with our physical appearance drains our confidence. Barbara Tannenbaum is a public speaking coach and beloved professor at Brown University whose course “Persuasive Communication” is so popular it’s always standing room only. Video is an important tool in her class. But, with most women, she’s found, she can use it only in carefully controlled settings. Tannenbaum regularly videos the class’s public speaking exercises so that the students can look back and critique the content of their own performances—did they project enough, make eye contact, engage with the audience, those kinds of things. But initially women can’t see any of that, she says, because they are so focused on how they look. “I look too fat, ugly, my hair’s a mess . . . it’s a huge issue,” Tannenbaum says. “I literally have to sit with them, reviewing the video and stopping the self-criticism. You know how little babies need mittens to stop scratching themselves sometimes? I have to be their mittens.” And the men in her class? we ask. They may occasionally say they don’t like their sweater or that their hair needs a cut, but it’ll be a fleeting comment and it doesn’t stop them from seeing the important things.

Self-Inflicted Confidence Wounds

Our genetics, our schooling, our upbringing, our society, our looks—these are all factors that affect our confidence. It would be easy to simply shrug our shoulders and blame all those obstacles when we stop short and don’t reach for the goals we want. Easy, but misguided. Because we are getting in our own way, too. There are things we do to ourselves, as adults, that kill our confidence. Things that were perhaps inculcated but that we are quite capable of changing.

Look at some of the unhelpful traits women tend to bring into the workforce. We can be exquisitely thin-skinned about our relationships with others and what people think about us. Unlike our male colleagues, women often would rather be liked than respected, which makes it harder for us to shoulder those tough workplace negotiations. The psychic risk of making someone irritated with us is just too great. Claire admits that being liked is essential to her, and it’s a need she finds almost impossible to overcome. “I’m not even sure why I need for people to think I’m a nice person or when that started. But any suggestion that bosses or colleagues or even friends might be mad or disappointed starts hours of worry. Lately, as a result of our research, I have come to see that worrying about those things is the opposite of confident.”

(At the same time, as Sheryl Sandberg lays out in
Lean In
, studies show that being likeable is also critical for success for both genders, and more so for women, who are actually
expected
to bring likeability to the table. It’s a double, in fact a triple bind, if ever there was one. A focus on being liked can kill confidence, and yet, being liked does matter. On top of that, working to be liked may keep us from employing more aggressive strategies that would get us ahead.)

What, exactly, is the cost of our need to be liked? Try $5,000, to start. Finally, you’ve graduated from college, you even have your master’s degree, and that prestigious multinational corporation offers you a job. The salary isn’t great. But, hey, you’re young, just starting out. After all, you have no experience and aren’t you lucky to have a job offer at all? You wouldn’t want to make anyone mad by asking for more money. You may laugh, but you know it rings true. That is the soundtrack of too many young women who are just starting out. But it’s not how the guy who’ll be sitting in the adjacent cubicle thought about it. Which is why he’s apt to be making $5,000 more than you.

A study of recent graduates by Rutgers University confirmed the studies we mentioned in chapter 1. It found that’s the average pay gap between young men and young women in the first five years after college, and it increases over the years because women don’t ask for more money.

If we can be so fragile about the prospect of even mildly annoying someone, it’s not surprising we have such a horror of being criticized. Not surprising, but really limiting. If you aren’t prepared to be criticized, chances are you’ll shy away from suggesting bold ideas, or sticking your neck out in any way. Think of that ad associate Rebecca, fighting back tears in her cubicle just because her boss was critical of a piece of work.

We aren’t immune to this weakness, either. Katty realized just how badly she handled criticism when she started getting a lot of it, online, very publicly. It’s almost a job requirement for journalists to tweet now, and when Katty set up her Twitter account she was appalled by the responses from people who followed her. “On Twitter people either seem to love me or hate me, and when they hate me they really, really hate me. I get nonstop abuse from people who say I’m an idiot who knows nothing about American politics and should just go back to Britain. One person even said he hoped I’d die.” Initially, it was really upsetting, and was almost enough to make her give up. “But, somehow, I got used to it. Perhaps because there was just so much of it, I developed a thicker skin. Now, I find it almost funny. The tweet that said ‘I don’t give a rat’s anus what an uptight pinko Brit chick thinks,’ is a particular favorite! One thing about social media is that you quickly learn that you can’t please everybody all the time.”

Another unhelpful habit most of us have is overthinking. Women spend far too much time undermining themselves with tortured cycles of useless self-recrimination. It is the opposite of taking action, that cornerstone of confidence. There is a formal word for it: ruminating. We do a lot more ruminating than men, and we have to get out of our heads if we want to build confidence.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale, spent decades elaborating on the dangers of excessive rumination. Her studies illustrate that women have an instinct to dwell on problems rather than solutions: to spin and spin on why they did a certain thing, how well or (more often) how poorly they did it, and what everyone else was thinking about it. Our intensive capacity for brooding, she maintained, can put us at risk of anxiety and depression. “Over the past four decades, women have experienced unprecedented growth in independence and opportunities,” Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in her book
Women Who Think Too Much
. “We have many reasons to be happy and confident. Yet when there is any pause in our daily activities many of us are flooded with worries, thoughts and emotions that swirl out of control, sucking our emotions and energy down, down, down. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Before she died in 2013, Nolen-Hoeksema tied rumination to the fact that women are naturally or sociologically more inclined than men to put greater weight on our emotional connections. Of course, our attention to relationships is also one of our greatest strengths. It is what makes women so satisfying as friends. But we are undermining that positive attribute when we spin our emotional wheels too fast. Managers say this tendency for women to overthink is a real hurdle. From her perch running BAE Systems, it frustrated Linda Hudson to no end. Over the years, she’s managed thousands of young men and women and has found the same phenomenon Mike Thibault, the Mystics’ coach, sees: “Men tend to let things go, slide off their backs. Women tend to be more self-reflective: ‘What did I do wrong?’ as opposed to thinking it’s just a bad set of circumstances and so let’s move on.”

This is not just a career issue. Unfortunately our propensity to ruminate is not selective. We do it just as much in our personal lives as in our professional lives. How often have you mentally picked away at relationships with friends or a partner, undermining something that was actually perfectly solid? Or spent too many hours second-guessing a decision as simple as whether to get a new haircut?

It was another diagnosis we found all too familiar. While we were writing this very chapter, Katty got into a spiral of self-recrimination. Something had gone slightly wrong at work, there was a new boss, and she was sure she’d disappointed him by saying no to a weekend shift. She came home and spent not just hours, but days, agonizing over it. “I lay awake more than one night thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I made the wrong call. That was so stupid of me.’ I knew it was minor and would blow over—I didn’t even know if he’d noticed, and anyway I could think of fairly good reasons for making the call on that story that I did, but I couldn’t stop the tape. It drove me mad.”

Have you ever noticed that women tend to be really good at taking the blame for things gone bad, and crediting fate, or other people, or anything but themselves, for successes? Perhaps you’ve also noticed that men do the opposite. The stories we tell ourselves about the roots of our success and our failure are the foundation of self-assurance.

Dave Dunning, the Cornell University psychologist, gave us an example that perfectly illustrates how the instinct to overpersonalize setbacks undermines women’s confidence. At some point in Cornell’s math PhD program, he said, the course inevitably gets tough. It is a math PhD program, after all. What Dunning notices is that the men in the course recognize the hurdle for what it is, and they respond to their lower grades by saying, “Wow, this is a tough course.” That’s what’s known as external attribution, and it’s usually a healthy sign of resilience. The women in the course tend to respond differently. When the course gets hard for them, their reaction is, “You see, I knew I wasn’t good enough.” That’s internal attribution, and with failure, it can be debilitating. The story becomes one about their intelligence, not about the course itself, or even how hard they worked, says Dunning.