Been on school holidays this week and have attempted to learn 'Twitter'. As a 40+ childless woman I don't have a teenager in my household who can expose me to the latest technologies. (I know that twitter is not the latest technology- and facebook is so middle-aged!) But I thought I'd give it a go. So far I have managed to work out how to: follow, tweet, reply, favourite and retweet. It's been an education. However, it means that I have read a lot of things which I wouldn't have normally come across. I can spend hours on the net reading; mainly things to with school and childlessness. But I've managed to read things to do with child development, leadership, women's projects, research all sorts!! One article caught my eye yesterday, something which is very dear to my heart, Confidence; more specifically 'The Confidence Gap'- the difference in confidence between men and women.
It seems that I'm acting just like a woman when I doubt my abilities. Research shows that competence and confidence are equally as important! And all those things I learnt at school haven't helped at all!!Apparently feeling like an imposter is quite a typical emotion for women to feel. Other women also believe that things are just easy for everyone else, unlike me!
According to this paper, Women don't consider themselves ready for promotions and underestimate their abilities. Sound familiar? Too much so!
A growing body of evidence shows just how devastating this lack of confidence can be. Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels. Now that's the BAD NEWS. The GOOD NEWS is that confidence can be acquired and developed therefore the confidence gap can be closed! YEE-HA!!
Perfectionism is a woman's confidence killer. Study after study confirms that it is largely a female issue, one that extends through women’s entire lives. We don’t answer questions until we are totally sure of the answer, we don't apply for the job until we are 100% sure we can do everything on the job description and we fixate on our performances home, school, where ever!
So where does this all start? Childhood I'm guessing- thinking back to my previous blog post about my interviews and how I always seem to miss out to the man; and how little girls are described as bossy not having good leadership skills. Nurtured. But what about nature?
I recently attended a training course on 'How to raise the achievement of boys in school' by a very interesting bloke called Trevor Hawes. In primary school (and secondary for that matter) there is a massive gap between the boys and girls achievements. Girls are out-striping the boys and as a primary school teacher, my role is to close the gap. But having read about, and thinking about, the underachievement of women isn't it what we are doing to girls that needs addressing? On average, the the boys seem to be doing pretty well in the big wide world, in spite of their school experience unlike the girls.
It’s easier for young girls than for young boys to behave: As is well established, they start elementary school with a developmental edge in some key areas. They have longer attention spans, more-advanced verbal and fine-motor skills, and greater social adeptness. They generally don’t charge through the halls like wild animals, or get into fights during recess. Soon they learn that they are most valuable, and most in favour, when they do things the right way: neatly and quietly. “Girls seem to be more easily socialised,” Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success says. “They get a lot of praise for being perfect.” In turn, they begin to crave the approval they get for being good. There’s certainly no harm intended by overworked, overstressed teachers (or parents). Who doesn’t want a kid who works hard and doesn’t cause a lot of trouble?
Dweck, states: “If life were one long grade school, women would be the undisputed rulers of the world.”
As part of the course I learnt about how the male and female brains function differently. Male and female brains do display differences in structure and chemistry, differences that may encourage unique patterns of thinking and behaviour, and that could thereby affect confidence. This is a busy area of enquiry, with a steady stream of new—if frequently contradictory, and controversial—findings. Some of the research raises the intriguing possibility that brain structure could figure into variations between the way men and women respond to challenging or threatening circumstances.
There is also something to do with hormones- I definitely can relate to that one! Sometimes my confidence is high where as others, it's so low it's positively invisible and that I can relay to the place in my cycle.
Many psychologists now believe that risk taking, failure, and perseverance are essential to confidence-building.
Boys tend to absorb more scolding and punishment, and in the process, they learn to take failure in stride. “When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct,” Dweck writes in Mindset. Dweck explains that girls and boys get different patterns of feedback. “Boys’ mistakes are attributed to a lack of effort,” she says, while “girls come to see mistakes as a reflection of their deeper qualities.” Boys also benefit from the lessons they learn—or, more to the point, the lessons they teach one another—during playtime and after school. From kindergarten on, they roughhouse, tease one another, point out one another’s limitations, and call one another morons and slobs. In the process, Dweck contends, such evaluations “lose a lot of their power.” Girls don't play like this, girls aren't encouraged to act like this. Teachers, parents, wrongly in my opinion, want an easy life, and therefore are grateful for the girls who are keen to please and don't 'mess around' and praise them for being so!!
The boys' rough and tumble, teasing, playground behaviour therefore makes them more resilient. This can be attributed to the sports they play too. Through sport they can relish the wins and flick off the losses consequently giving them the experience of life's ups and downs.
I never played team sports at school. Typically, I didn't consider myself good enough, despite being asked to play for a hockey match. I hated PE mostly because I found that I really struggled to do what was asked of me. My teachers weren't really interested in developing my skills; they were more bothered about the girls who had excellent hand eye co-ordination and showed potential. I gave up as I could see that I was never going to be that good. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, girls are still six times as likely as boys to drop off sports teams, with the steepest decline in participation coming during adolescence. This is probably because girls suffer a larger decrease in self-esteem during that time than do boys.There’s even a direct link between playing sports in high school and earning a bigger salary as an adult. Learning to own victory and survive defeat in sports is apparently good training for owning triumphs and surviving setbacks at work. Girls lose confidence, so they quit competing in sports, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it. Women suffer consequences for their lack of confidence—but when they do behave assertively, they may suffer a whole other set of consequences, ones that men don’t typically experience. If a woman speaks up first at meetings, she risks being disliked or even—let’s be blunt—being labelled a bitch.
So what's a woman to do?
Confidence is not, as we once believed, just feeling good about yourself. The clearest, and most useful, definition of confidence could be the one supplied by Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject. “Confidence,” he states, “is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.” Of course, other factors also contribute to action. “If the action involves something scary, then what we call courage might also be needed,” Petty explains. “Or if it’s difficult, a strong will to persist might also be needed. Anger, intelligence, creativity can play a role.” But confidence, he says is essential, because it applies in more situations than these other traits do. It is the factor that turns thoughts into judgements about what we are capable of, and that then transforms those judgements into action.
The simplicity is compelling, and the notion that confidence and action are interrelated suggests a virtuous circle.
"Confidence is a belief in one’s ability to succeed, a belief that stimulates action."
In turn, taking action bolsters one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed. So confidence accumulates—through hard work, through success, and even through failure.
