Around the time I finished my first BA and was looking to enter Work Land on a full-time basis, I happened upon an article about why men tend to succeed more than women at the office. One of the problems mentioned is that women are socialized, when girls, to worry about being Polite and Humble. We're taught that tooting one's own horn is "showing off" and showing off is distasteful. Men, on the other hand, are more vocal about their achievements--they inform their superiors about the work they're doing, and about their desire for advancement.
Around this time I started work at a small bookstore where I was trained by a very nice woman who'd worked in the store a long time. When the current manager left, another woman was promoted to her job--and not the Very Nice Woman. VNW was angry and quit. But I remember the outgoing manager expressed surprise because VNW had never expressed any interest in being promoted.
Tooting the Horn is a piece of advice I've passed on to many of the women working in various supervisor and manager positions in my present store. Don't wait for people to recognize how wonderful you are, because they won't. They're busy with their own goals, and much of the time our successes are achieved alone--there's no one standing there as you create a new system for organizing product, or as you build a great display, or when you're handling a crisis at 9 PM on a random Wednesday night running the store on your own.
The New York Times has just published a new article on this topic, which I highly recommend. It covers the above issue, and many others.
"In my own case, I realized that I needed to develop a thick skin, feel comfortable promoting myself, learn how to negotiate, stop being a perfectionist and create a professional network — abilities that men are just more likely to have already. ... 'By and large women believe that the workplace is a meritocracy, and it isn’t.'"
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