Nose Pressed Against That Glass Ceiling

A while back, Trusted Advisor's Charlie Green had one of his typically thought-provoking posts. This one (Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife?), discussed an article from Forbes by Berkeley B-school lecturer Maura O'Neill about women in business entitled "Luck or Hard Work."

O'Neill's read is that the usual suspect for women hitting the glass ceiling - the patter of little feet - is “rarely the real reason, and never the only reason…The more nuanced explanation is that many women think getting to the top job pivots more on luck and connections than on hard work.”

A survey O'Neill's piece cited (here taken from Charlie's post):

...asked people whether they attributed success in life to luck and connections or to hard work. We found a significant gender perceptions gap that gets wider the higher you look in the professional hierarchy. Twelve percent more working men than women think it is hard work, rather than luck, that determines success. When you look at men and women who hold supervisory roles, 30% more men than women believe it’s hard work that determines success. [Note again: this and the following quote were taken directly from O'Neill's article by Charlie, so I'm quoting from Forbes here. I don't know what the Chicago School of Blog Usage is on quotes within quotes.]

From this, Ms. O'Neill concludes:

…the old boy network trumps 60-hour workweeks. And when women believe this, their inability to land the top job becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy…I worry that if women don’t think that the workplace is a level playing field where effort generates promotions, they will not feel compelled to invest their best efforts. As a result, corporate America will lose out on a vast reservoir of talent.

Charlie finds that "Ms. O’Neill’s logic is tortured...—and manages to perpetuate a misconception about getting ahead." Charlie goes on at length about O'Neill's conflating "luck" and "connections", and how "connections" (read: relationships) ARE important.

But as far as I'm concerned, where Charlie truly starts to hit the nail on its head is when he writes:

It's men who are more likely to believe hard work explains success. Yet men lie.

In a world of haves and have-nots, the haves are more likely to attribute success to their own hard work, rather than having been born a) rich, b) white, c) male, d) in a good neighborhood, e) having successful parents, etc. Those who have connections are more likely to deny their importance.

No, this is not going to turn into a rant on all-men-are-liars. They aren't - not anymore than all women are shrews.

But there is a way in which men and women express themselves - and talk and think about themselves - that contributes to women hitting that glass ceiling.

Many years ago, when negotiating a promotion and raise - and getting nowhere - I came upon a book called How Men Think. (No jokes, please.) The author is Adrienne Mendell.

It turns out that how men think, see, and talk about themselves is a lot more positive than how women think, see, and talk about themselves. And - here's the kicker - purely objectively, how women think about themselves is far closer to the reality of any given situation than her opposite number's view of the world. Men are lying, alright, but it's to themselves.

According to the book, a woman thinks about her strengths and weaknesses and has little or no problem expressing them openly. A man - if he even acknowledges any weaknesses to himself - is far less likely to be open about it. The author mentioned a study in which school kids were asked how they thought they did on a test. The girls tended to downplay the results they expected, but their feelings were more or less in line with their actual performance. Not the boys: from the kid who aced it to the one who flunked, they all said they thought they did great!

Mendell attributed this phenomenon to men growing up wanting to get picked for the team - and not wanting to get picked last. So they're never going to say, "I suck at throwing but I don't strike out all the time." No, they're going to say, "Pick me, pick me, pick me." Maybe this will change as more women grow up playing team sports; maybe not. Time will tell.

There's no end to the examples from my own career I could throw in to illustate this.

Until I read How Men Think, I can truly say that I'd sit through post mortems, supposedly honest discussions, wondering why I was the only person (I was often the only woman) who would actually say "here's what I did right, here's where I screwed up." I'd come out of these meetings scratching my head and wondering why not one guy was willing to admit they'd done anything that could be improved on. These were not bad, dishonest, weak guys. They were just being guys.

Anyway, the scales fell from my eyes, I went into negotiating for my raise and promotion with a tick-list of all my accomplishments and everything that I excelled at. No mention at all of any of those "needs improvement" areas. Forget-about-it. And yes, I got the promotion and a big fat raise.

No, women haven't gotten to the top of the heap in near any proportion to where they are on the bottom. And that's for a whole lot of reasons. (Frankly, one big fat one of which is that a lot of us just don't want it as much as the men do.)

But I can't help but think that women's more accurate self-assessment of their abilities may keep some of them from daring to go a rung or two up the ladder. It just may keep their noses pressed against some glass ceiling or the other, wondering why they're looking up. 

Admit it, girlfriends, there's been at least one time when you said to yourself, "What makes that jerk think he can do that job?" or 'Hey, no fair, he's no better than I am.'  And sometimes we were secretly gratified when 'that jerk' failed.  But let's also face it: sometimes 'that jerk' did just fine.

Women would no doubt fail and succeed in the same proportion as men.

Maybe those of us who suffer from the plague of too accurate a personal self-assessment need to stop letting the boss-man hear, "I throw like a girl, but I'm a good batter," and instead start telling him, "Pick me, pick me, pick me. I'm a star."