I was seduced by an article on the cover of The Atlantic titled “The Confidence Gap. Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here’s why, and what to do about it.” I bought the magazine and repented sooner than I hoped to.
Whenever one says that North American women suffer from severe issues with their confidence, somebody immediately objects that there are structural inequalities and we should talk about them instead. As if these problems were not intimately linked and discussing one would suck all the energy away from the other.
The article in The Atlantic, however, doesn’t even begin to address the issue intelligently. First, it offers a bunch of inane evolutionary psych platitudes that go on for pages and that I skipped because my brain refuses to process this much stupidity. Then, the article informs us that the reason why women don’t hold a many responsible positions and positions of power as men doesn’t only reside in naturally flawed female brains:
For some clues about the role that nurture plays in the confidence gap, let’s look to a few formative places: the elementary-school classroom, the playground, and the sports field.
Note the pointed absence of what is the formative place par excellence: the family. There is no discussion at all of family scenarios and upbringing, as if children were delivered by storks straight into the classroom. After the article informs the readers that girls who don’t play sports in school have no chance of becoming confident women, it trots out the tired old piece of idiocy that has been used to sabotage women for ages:
If a woman walks into her boss’s office with unsolicited opinions, speaks up first at meetings, or gives business advice above her pay grade, she risks being disliked or even—let’s be blunt—being 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.
As a woman who not only sucked beyond belief in gym class and who is the mouthiest, most obnoxiously opinionated and narcissistic colleague anybody can imagine, I can’t hear this load of sad, tired, caked on BS any longer.
What would be fascinating to discuss in this respect is why confidence comes so easily to the generation of American women who are now in their 50s and 60s but proves so elusive to those in their 40s and younger. There must be a reason for this enormous generational difference, and nobody is analyzing it.
So I’m thinking let’s discuss it here. How are you doing in terms of confidence? Have you noticed the generational difference I’m talking about?
One rule for the discussion: no passive voice is allowed. Even though I just used it.
Clarissa's Blog 
Damned if I know. I’ll just throw out a few random observations.
“If a woman ..(blah blah blather yadda yadda yadda) it’s her very character.”
Big effing deal. The same thing happens to a man who does those things, except he’ll be called a jerk or asshole or bastard instead of bitch and he might pretend to not notice it more or might in fact not notice it (or maybe notices and doesn’t care). Articles like this seem to assume that women can’t (or shouldn’t) be able to deal with ever being unpopular (and some degree of unpopularity is a toll booth on the highway of success).
Also, are you aware of the generations theory of howe and strauss? The women in their 50’s and 60’s would be baby boomers (maybe a and those in their 40s and youngers would be generation x’ers and millenials (both of which have a lot less confidence than the boomers).
The boomers were born and grew up in the American high and great compression (roughy 1944-63) while those of generation x were the first children that people took pills to not have (a less than auspicious debut) and then grew up in a turbulent time of great social change (counterculture, divorce, the womens movement etc) while the millenials were smothered by helicopter parents (also not likely to engender a great deal of confidence).
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“would be baby boomers (maybe a ”
ignore the “(maybe a” I was going to write “(maybe a few from the silent generation)” but then thought better of it as they would be more in their 70’s now.
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Interesting. But for me your comment raises a couple of questions:
Didn’t most (white, middle class) baby boomer women spend their early (and so formative) years in a society that offered them a very narrow sphere of existence? Not sure how growing up the daughter of a frustrated housewife would foster greater confidence.
Regarding the pill– might a woman’s greater control over her fertility not suggest that it’s more likely she truly wanted the children she did have? Isn’t it possible that children who were wanted would, all things being equal (which of course they are not), grow up to be more confident?
I don’t doubt there are generational factors at play here. But also consider this: is it possible that women in their 50s and 60s are more confident in large part owing to their age? They have had more time to understand themselves, others, the world they live in. That world has changed so much over their lifespan — perhaps most pertinently to the question of their confidence: they have seen the possibilities for women expand dramatically.
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“Didn’t most (white, middle class) baby boomer women spend their early (and so formative) years in a society that offered them a very narrow sphere of existence?”
But there was much greater overall cultural confidence and the probable peak of 20th century social trust, those would have knock on effects when women (technically more from the silent generation than the boomers themselves) started entering the work force in large numbers.
“might a woman’s greater control over her fertility not suggest that it’s more likely she truly wanted the children she did have?”
In theory maybe, but when you actually listen to generation x’ers they certainly don’t describe feelings of being wanted as children (not to mention that their childhood coincided with a rash of movies with children/babies as evil monsters – Rosemary’s baby, the Exorcist, It’s Alive, The Omen etc)
“is it possible that women in their 50s and 60s are more confident in large part owing to their age?”
Possible to some extent (one of the good parts about getting older is ceasing to care much about other people’s disapproval) but the women in my family were pretty formidable when they were younger. The TV shows and movies (that are all most people go by) aren’t necessarily accurate representations of what was really going on.
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Anna: I’m seeing situations where very successful, brilliant and mouthy 45 and 35-year-olds immediately shrink, shut up and plaster on pathetic, servile smiles the second a pair of pants appears within eyesight. I can’t make myself believe that 10 years later, greater self-knowledge will cure something this severe.
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I’m a white middle class baby boomer. My mother worked before I was born, and resumed working when I was about ten. She earned more than my dad when she was working. I think there’s this idea that women didn’t work in the fifties, but this is just a myth. Most of my mother’s friends worked. One of her women friends was the mayor.
I don’t know why younger women have less confidence. When I was growing up, kids were allowed to fail, and it was not a big deal. You either acknowledged that you weren’t particularly good at that particular endeavour, or you tried again til you got it right. Now it seems failure is a big deal. However, it is the same for both sexes.
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“Now it seems failure is a big deal.”
– I see this with my students all the time, and my sister says the same of her employees. These are all people under 30 and they often take comments like “You still need to practice past subjunctive a lot because you made 11 mistakes with it in the quiz” or “Can you retype this document because there are typos” as a condemnation of their entire way of being.
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Cliff: yes, that sounds like a plausible theory. I’m quite recent to this culture, so it’s hard for me to say what’s causing this. Maybe smothering parents are the answer.
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I can’t comment on the article, as I haven’t read it and I am not American. However, the snippet you copied I think actually talks about how people perceive confident women, rather than women not being confident. So if you say that you are “the mouthiest, most obnoxiously opinionated and narcissistic colleague anybody can imagine”, I would be curious on how people perceive you? Are you seen as difficult, such as the article claims? I am also very assertive and have a “long tongue” (meaning I tell people exactly what I think about them) and the more I continue in the academic career, that does come with a certain level of unpopularity and more and more of it, the higher in the hierarchy I get.
I would be curious as to what is your experience with this.
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If people see me as difficult, they are not telling me that because they are probably scared. 🙂
Some people will always like us and some will always dislike us, no matter what we do. It’s normal and not something I believe it makes sense to dwell on.
The situation where the personnel committee looks at my dossier and says, “Her dossier is amazing but let’s not give her tenure because she’s such a bitch” is not possible, and other than that, who cares what people think of me? I often think that people are “stupid sheep and obnoxious goats” but they don’t seem to be doing any worse as a result. 🙂
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http://thefederalist.com/2014/04/18/why-are-feminists-so-insecure-6-reflections-on-the-confidence-gap/
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The comments are interesting, especially the one that points out that getting ahead in the corporate world is not like climbing a wall or ladder, it’s like a pyramid, the higher you get the less space. While men are more likely to push their way to the top it’s only a small percentage and nobody notices (or cares about) the much higher rate of men who get stuck on the way or find a secure niche long before the top (or wo fall all the way back down to the base).
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When I got to the part about whether women should “fight their nature” I gave up. I get very embarrassed for people who believe in “female / male nature.” What next? An earnest belief in the tooth fairy?
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The essentialist universalist talk was kind of tiresome.
I prefer to talk (loosely) of percentages. As one of my favorite ever lecturers said (paraphrasing) “(when you look at people as individuals) everybody does everything, but when you compare groups the percentages differ” and I basically don’t think that’s a problem. It would be very odd if all those in every area of endeavor exactly matched the sex and ethnic makeup of the general population.
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These things are so dependent on cultural and generational aspects that it makes no sense to discuss them outside of these contexts. According to current American stereotypes, I’m a man. And according to my culture’s stereotypes, most American men I know are women. Obviously, none of these stereotypes have value when applied to a different culture or even age group.
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Besides, this whole article is inspired by the whiny-moany worldview I hate. Asking for promotion is risk-taking? Gosh, what a huge risk! You might hear the word “no”, and that will be the end of the world, of course.
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It does seem that men far too often get credit for women’s achievements and ideas. Consider, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as an example. There are many others.
“…is not allowed.” is not passive voice. Allowed is a participle used as a predicate adjective.
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““…is not allowed.” is not passive voice. Allowed is a participle used as a predicate adjective”
Yeah, it’s passive, just with the agent (expressed with the preposition ‘by’) deleted.
All passives use particples as predicates so that’s not a useful criterion (or in normalhumanspeak, criteria). The criteria (in English) is putting (or ‘raising’) the object into the subject slot and (optionally) turning the subject into a ‘by’ phrase.
So,
I allow passive voice. (active)
Passive voice is not allowed (by me).
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Cliff is right, obviously.
“No passive voice is allowed” is an example of the passive voice construction. Your test here is whether the subject of the sentence — here, “passive voice” is the one holding the agency of the verb. That is, does the “passive voice” allow? Nope. Here, it is Clarissa (understood) who is not allowing.
Rewritten as active voice, this would be “Clarissa does not allow passive voice,” or, as Cliff also correctly stated, “I do not allow passive voice.”
(Another test is whether you can add “by vampires” after the verb. If you can, it’s passive voice. “No passive voice is allowed by vampires.” That one, sadly, does not always work.)
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Sorry, Cliff. “Criteria” is a plural. I cringe whenever I read or hear it used as a singular. It is worse than “We had went,” for example. “Normalhumanspeak” does not have to be profoundly offensive to the listener. I often forget the point a speaker is trying to make when such distracting abuse of language occurs.
I have no quarrel with the passive voice; it is used all the time in mathematics. For example: “A set is called connected if and only if it cannot be expressed as the union of two disjoint subsets of itself, each of which is relatively open and nonempty.
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I might say ‘we had went’… no I wouldn’t, I’d say “We’d done gone (already)…” but the point is language changes. Would it bother you if people said you’re ‘nice’ since the original meaning was ‘foolish’?
Lord knows I don’t like every innovation in language but individuals can’t stop them, no matter how much it may bug them.
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I just realized that there are two versions of the passive voice, one where the direct object becomes the subject and one where the indirect object becomes the subject. “Each child will be given ten dollars to spend,” is an example. I do not recall ever having observed this before.
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Those women are just very passive, as are many Australian women and quite a few white Zimbabwean women, but in different ways. At the same time, when one has been ideologically, which is to say psychologically hobbled, one becomes alarmed at what it means to assert oneself. Ideology creates a balance, not just in terms of one’s own psychology but in relation to societal expectations. So to go against one’d ideological conditioning can feel like losing the balance and walking into dangerous situations.
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and in a way, USA women are more regressive than any others I’ve encountered, because even when liberal USA women want to point out how naturally smart they are, they make the error of pointing to children, such as this current celebrity. So then people think women are like smart children.
http://functionalhumanbeing.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/bleeding-eyeballs-and-bleeding-hearts.html
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It’s too funny, look at the Russian propaganda:
http://yoshke.livejournal.com/868352.html#comments
Explanation of the joke:
http://ffffound.com/image/a1d056f5ce848c0db0db2890b08dfc69a1de4a73
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Another, even more funnny, pic:
http://ortivika.livejournal.com/1895578.html
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School is the only reason I have any confidence, and I didn’t even play sports. My family failed completely at any sort of confidence teaching (I was physically and emotionally bullied by an older sibling from the time I was young and severely punished if I fought back or complained). Yay for school, where if I worked hard, I was rewarded with As and gold stars, and knew what to expect!
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