Don't you dare change the emphasis on hard work, cooperation, discipline, etc. girls (young women) demonstrate. Instead, instill a lot more of the above in the boys (young men). No mre "boys will be boys" nonsense.
Sorry, but most of the idiots and miscreants out there are male, and they overdo sports, gambling, video-gaming and other not-so-great pastimes.
Give females more time and chances and we'll have a better country. We don't want a nation of Trumps, do we?
Spoken by a guy who spent 47 years in teaching from junior high to grad courses. As to achievement, the differences between the top 25 percent of males and females is negligible. But beyond that cohort, male achievement falls off the table.
So demand more of males (especially discipline) and do remember Title IX has brought incredible changes for women, especially since around 1980. Give it time and more support on the child-rearing end, and women will do even better in the marketplace of American life.
You can bet on it!
90
Young girls should spend more time learning to play golf.
16
One word: testosterone. Testosterone is the confidence hormone. (Yes, and the do stupid stuff hormone.)
31
Men are naturally more aggressive., The end.
13
Maybe it’s because they have babies?
13
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that sexism has something to do with it.
41
As a woman I think the author is on to something. I actually was not one of those little balls of perfection but I knew and was in class with many of those kids. I could never quite figure out why they did so much for a few points more than me when in the end we were all getting As. My parents knew I figured out the difference between perfection and good enough and I cannot tell you how important good enough is at work. Also the confidence you gain when you realize what you can accomplish even when you’re not giving 100% is something. I’m 40 years old and been promoted 4 times in 10 years all while having 3 kids. I work when I need to and sometimes that extra effort at night but I don’t put in face time or cooler time. I’m efficient and have high EQ. Maybe because I grew up with older brothers, maybe because I played sports growing up. Maybe because I had a great Dad. I dont know probably a whole lot of that and some good luck and some great bosses ( male mostly) but a few key women mentors but it’s worked. A company that is forward thinking has not hurt.
I would never push my kids to do the extra credit or study non stop. It does not serve in the professional setting. You need to learn to listen, exude calmness even in times of high stress. Learn to socialize to have a laugh and work with different types of people - work on a team and win and lose graciously. With a little smarts, a willingness to work, a person whether male or female can a long way with that.
39
Gosh, does this mean boys and girls are different....now there's a revolutionary thought!
20
Sister, in the real world women aren't allowed to make mistakes! A man walks into a workplace and everyone just assumes he's competent till he proves otherwise. A woman walks into a workplace and everyone assumes she's an idiot until she shows them she's a rock star and even then they're just wondering how long she'll last before she has a baby or sleeps with the boss for her next promotion!
Men are allowed to learn on the job- women need to walk in and be perfect or it's years before they're trusted. The environment to take risks and be bold and try things that you aren't expert at isn't there for women. Men dream big and fall flat on their face and they're encouraged to get up and try again. A woman has simply made a fool of herself and she never should have been given the job anyway!
Women know that we have to be perfect because being a cocky fool is an endearing quality in man- in a woman it's not.
87
I find it interesting the the NY Times headline editor focuses on gender "winners" and "losers" in school and in business. The article itself seems to focus more on school and business success, which is different. Maybe it's a New York thing.
2
males have millions of years at the top of the food chain...all species...including humans. It is the natural hierarchy of life......try watching "Planet Earth" and see who has the "confidence"......sorry to break the news.
9
Biology; ever seen an athlete object estrogen to make them more aggressive and likely to take risk? Or do they take testosterone? Why? Evolution. This is chemistry.
If women evolved to take risks they would die pregnant and leave infants without food.
If men did not evolve to take risks and try new things, their wives and children would starve.
When you earn an advanced degree and get published in the NYT, I would think you would understand basic chemistry and biology. Thank God men are men and women are women. Else we would not be here.
#sciencerules
#evolution
#youarewelcome
16
As a competent woman you are surrounded by fearful, incompetent men who hate your guts because you're better than they are.
Indeed, there are bacteria in my large intestine which could run organisations better than the majority of 'executives' I had to prop up over a 40 years in the workforce.
But men have the power.
They use it to maintain systems which let them indulge their fantasies of superiority, while underpaying women up to 40% less than they'd pay a man for the same work.
Women don't 'hold back'.
They're intimidated into silence, forced to shut up, and in the worst places, drop their knickers & open their legs, to put a roof over their heads & food on the table.
32
The biggest mistake the writer makes is seeming to say that it’s the A students run the world. They don’t. Straight A students don’t have the personalities or the common sense. That is why were seeing medical students having to be taught bedside manner and naval officers running ships in the each other. High grades don’t prove that you have reasoning power. Give me a B to C student with reasoning powers anytime over an A student. The B&C students run the world and make all the money. The straight A students are generally the nerds who have spent their life in a narcissistic pursuit of their goals only. That leads to a self centered arrogant adult.
15
Save us all from over-confident and underprepared men, like Trump.
Maybe the problem isn't girls.
36
It appears to be a flawed op-ed piece. Men... (read white men from upper middle class)...do well because American work place believes that they should lead.
Nonetheless, things are changing...fast. Look around you. Many of these “leaders “ are taking credit for the hard working value-added contributions of the women & minorities. It’s just a matter of time before capitalism will cut the middleman.
There are no shortcuts in life. The op-Ed is discouraging hard work...shameful!
12
Let's see, girls in school are being diligent and responsible about completing assignments and studying for tests. Boys are being arrogant and overconfident despite doing the minimum work. And you think the problem lies with the girls??? The value system and power dynamic you have identified (and seem to be promoting as a solution for gender equality), has saddled us with an arrogant, ignorant, overconfident, narcissist as President. Heaven forbid we set this as a role model for any of our children!
38
Oh please. Stop with the girls and women need to adopt sloppier work habits and wing it more in school so they’ll succeed in the work place.
In the upper rungs of management (I have observed), male colleagues often choose and then kiss the rings of selected “alpha” males — and stay loyal even when their leaders display blatant incompetence or worse. Meanwhile, one of the few females in the room may call out obvious problems and offer thoughtful solutions, only to be shunned and ignored as an enemy agitator. “Confidence” often means dominance and intimidation in the real world, easily and often deployed to shut women up.
Of course, as the politics turn and the bad leaders are gone, it often happens they eventually decide the woman was right, but by then she’s either long gone or it doesn’t accrue to her benefit.
37
It's interesting you don't ask nor really concern yourself with why the boys do worse in school.
24
Earth to Lisa: Women 'lose out' to men in the workplace because -- in far too many cases -- they choose to get pregnant and unlike men their focus of importance shifts. No amount of "paid family leave" will change that.
When men 'have children' - by which is meant their wives have children -- the child rearing partner responsibilities shifts to the wives, who are too often the ones who society expects to "be a good mother" and tend to every childhood need/emergency from the sniffles to problems at school. And how often do we hear of Dad quitting his job because Mom has taken a new job across the country and insists hubby and family follow her?
Does pregnancy & motherhood choice explain all reasons women 'lose out' to men in the workplace? Of course not -- good old fashion misogyny still plays a big part. But if Mom is not in the game, she can't score any points. Birth control is the #1 defense against missing that big promotion or important information in the workplace because Mom's attention is elsewhere.
11
Silly false dichotomy. Failing in school ruined my confidence. My sisters did amazingly well. In the real world, we're now successful in our own ways. We're all very smart. There's no simple explanation, but school did them many more favors, and it nearly ruined my life.
11
"When investigating what deters professional advancement for women, the journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found that a shortage of competence is less likely to be an obstacle than a shortage of confidence."
Journalists? This is science?
10
Hospitals are large corporate critters with women holding managerial power, sometimes top to bottom.
Anyone want to go there?
8
Please STOP blaming women for male-led discrimination, power and privilege. Stop internalizing and transmitting misogyny. It's disgusting.
19
Then why have my last 4 bosses been women? And why, during the past 20 years, have my male colleagues and I been repeatedly passed over by our female bosses to promote other women?
#InconvenientTruth
4
Work smarter, not harder. I saw that phrase on a banner hanging in an IBM plant in the later 1980s. How true it is for the ambitious.
Avoid meetings. Most will just waste your time. You don't need to read this survey, that article, or to know those sets of facts. Skim over them, cherry picking the good stuff. Other people can get mired in the total absorption of information, you don't.
Anything that restricts your upward motion, letting chatty co-workers talk your ear off or reading every single email for fear of missing something, is to be avoided. Stay streamlined.
Above all, don't blame others for failure. Get knocked down? Well too bad. Get up, dust yourself off, and learn from your mistake. Your grounding was a pit stop, a brief refresher. Now charge back in, Tigress. Who is better than you?
No one.
12
If “Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” while “overqualified and overprepared . . . women still hold back," we don't need women wth more confidence, we need men with less.
15
For fun, watch the movie "Office Space."
Lisa Damour's insight has been expressed for some time without the lens of gender, in the contexts of the military and of large telecom operations.
There are four kinds of people under your command / in your department. People are either smart or stupid, and they are either hard working or lazy.
Those who are stupid and lazy, keep them around, give them simple tasks. Someday there will be layoffs/a large battle, and you can shed them without too much loss.
Those who are stupid and hard-working, get rid of them right away. They will get you mired in all kinds of projects which will hinder your progress.
Those who are smart and hard-working, keep them where they are. These are your work-horses, they get everything done.
Those who are smart and lazy, promote them. They will figure out the key goals which must be met, accomplish those, and ignore all distractions.
So, if Lisa Damour is right, employers of those women who are smart and hard-working are following this advice.
The skill of identifying the goals which are critical, and identifying the least-cost path to those goals, is not taught in school, and is often actively discouraged. It is however, recognized in the workplace, often to the dismay and detriment of those who are smart and hard-working.
125
don't we just love the idea of gender-defined competition, in every walk of life? let's have them all wear uniforms, brandish team colors, promote team mascots, develop cheers, have rallies . . . gosh, what fun . . .
15
Another article that puts the blame on the girl's deficiency versus the biased world in which she competes.
64
Maybe girl success in the classroom is due to bias - it’s geared towards girls.
28
We are talking about strategic -tactical thinking. This does seem to be an area at which men's brains are hardwired to outperform women. Military and statecraft are obviously the arena in which these qualities are paramount. The relative dirthe of women political and military leaders makes it difficult to measure their aptitude for this type of thinking. However when measuring the performance of women military and political leaders, the vast majority were more charismatic than strategic.
Examples:
Salome-Alexandra (Shlomzion) Queen of Judea was both charismatic and a skilled political strategist.
Boudica- Her total lack of tactical and strategic skills guaranteed the defeat of her uprising
Joan of Arc - Pure charisma and inspirational leadership, but very limited strategic skills
Mary - A disaster. Her moniker bloody Mary says it all. her strategic incompetence ensured England would develop a hatred for Catholicism that would endure for 400 years
Elizabeth 1 - Another rare case of charisma and strategic acumen
Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Khaled Zia and Sheikh Hasina (the sub-continent's begums) have all risen via charisma, and failed due to strategic incompetence
Golda Meir - Her strategic incompetence nearly brought about the destruction of Israel
Thatcher - a rare case of a woman rising to the top of the greasy pole by virtue of strategic acumen, not charisma.
7
I had tended to see these outcome differences as largely a result of our sexist society. However, the DISCREPANCY, between school and work outcomes does put that explanation somewhat in question. Schools and colleges are parts of societies, so we would expect them also to be sexist. Schools and colleges are also places of employment. Education, to my knowledge, is not known as less sexist than other sectors of the economy. So, we could reasonably expect a place where female employees are discriminated against to also discriminate against female students. Yet, female students outperform males. That is interesting and potentially illuminating.
There are some possible explanations. For instance, schools are sexist (there is evidence for this) and so girls compensate through "overwork", and outperform boys despite sexism. Or, schools simply value conscientious, effort, and conformity more than corporations (at least at high levels) and these are also norms associated with (imposed on) females. So, these norms serve girls in school, but not women in work. That is, the unequal expectations of females and males which predominate in our society disadvantage women where it matters more (work), while benefiting them in school. The "styles" Damour refers to are clearly gendered and bottom-line, efficiency-obsessed corporate cultures are not receptive to the highly conscientious styles adopted by a larger number of females, who are then rewarded in schools for adopting such a style.
9
I think there are different general expectations for women and men at work. Women must exhibit “effortless perfection,” whereas men practice “learned incompetence,” which gets them out of doing the extra (organizational aka housework) duties that women take on, mistakenly thinking it will help them get promoted.
26
Well. School teachers are largely women (female in charge). Bosses are largely men (male in charge). Instead of focusing on what women are doing wrong you should be focusing on what men are doing wrong. It comes down to mysoginism and sexism, plain and simple.
20
I work as an executive in the construction industry and I think this article is missing what is actually going on in the workplace. Consistently less qualified or competent do lean in or are tapped on the shoulder and asked to lead. When a similarly qualified or confident women leans in, she is deemed as unqualified or not ready for the role. Men wait for women to be over qualified before allowing them to lean in and take a more advanced role. This leads to frustration by women who see their less qualified peers get promoted while they sit and wait for their turn.
46
Last I checked, the Great Recession was not caused by Hermione-like women who spent extra time doing extra credit in school, but rather mostly by men who were over-confident in real estate and investment business fields and the mostly white, mostly male politicians who enabled them.
Perhaps the real message here is that the wrong values are being promoted in our workforce.
85
High school sports play a role as well. Schools promote football and other male teams as the dominant spectacle and females are reduced to cheering on the males from the sidelines.
37
Here is an attempt to understand and address the author's main concern.
Imagine there are four individuals: Teacher A, Boss B, Jane and John. At school, Jane and John do the same job in a class, and it is easy for Teacher A to know who does better. As an impartial judge, it is morally wrong and cognitively hard to rank Jane and John wrongly.
At a workplace, Jane and John can hardly do the exact same thing. Even if the same, what matters most is to get the job done, and the better job may not mean much. Unlike Teacher A, Boss B is not much of an impartial judge. He or she is an active player. Boss B wants to do well in competing with other teams and to get promoted. As a result, Boss B is very interested in befriending or promoting those who can make B's job easier or make B laugh, or help B's career. So in the promotion decision, Boss B's self-interest, emotional or material, may matter more than the respective merit of Jane and John. Men may be better at office politics; some are yes men; and the me-too movement may unexpectedly hurt women's chances (please do not squabble over this minor point).
The reality may not be as bleak, or may be even worse. The purpose of my reflection is to reveal the selfish sub-consciousness or calculation, and to make people realize the importance of meritocracy. Without it or the fair allocation of human resources, a group or a country will not do well in the long run. Unfortunately, identity politics may develop into a cancer in America.
19
The majority of school is dominated by females. Female teachers and mainly female students. Therefore school is run in a way that is advantageous for girls. Most top corporations are dominated by males. Therefore corporations are structured in a way that is advantageous for males. That’s the only logical argument.
19
Girls do better than boys in school particularly in the lower grades because female teachers favor girls.
Girls are better behaved.
Students are graded on factors other than their knowledge of the material like neatness or participation in class or being less disruptive in class.
Boys can be an intellectual threat to a female teacher who does not know her subject.
One of the worst crimes you can commit in school [not throwing a cherry bomb in the toilet] is doing an arithmetic problem by a correct procedure that is not in the teacher's manual that the insecure teacher relies on.
{I committed this latter crime numerous times.}
In the later grades these non academic factors become much less important. You either know how to solve a certain equation or you don't. Smiling at the teacher does not solve the equation.
This expletive propogated by schools of education that you can understand the material but just can't obtain the correct answer is no longer accepted.
The converse may not always be valid but if you can't do the problem then YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE MATERIAL.
The same essay has been given to different teachers and has received grades from A to D.
Female teachers will tend to rate female students' essays higher because they like the girls' opinions.
The answer to a math problem is right or wrong.
I only address why girls do better than boys in school.
I make no statement about the corporate world.
17
@david Did you know girls can be an intellectual threat to a female teacher that doesn’t know their subject? My guess is that has never occurred to you.
11
Being a Hermione-type woman, a genial male colleague once recommended I watch the movie "Office Space." It removes the gender issue and brings it down to the confidence vs. competence issue.
I think it may also have been the inspiration for the TV show "The Office" but I'll have to check that . . .
4
Unwritten rules exist in the workplace. In school it’s only grades/results. Likeability, friendship and mentors are huge in the workplace, i.e., emotional intelligence. How many companies still have the dated golf outings or those that are informal and hard circles for women to break into? How many rounds of golf did Obama and Trump play with women? Not counting family, my guess is next to none. I can’t tell you how many conferences I’ve been to with next to no women presenters.
27
I'm reading a very interesting book, Chimpanzee Politics, that illustrates how deep this whole problem is. Our social structures have their basis in biology. It's not that we cannot make the world a better place, but it's going to be a tough slog.
10
Girls do better at school because it’s a matter of life or death. The tribal females were conscientious even overly conscientious because the result of eating a brightly colored plant
In our beginnings could/would result in death. Women are/were the protectors of offspring. They could not value physical aggression within their tribal ranks because there were children present. Always present. Continuously present and their needs had to be considered first. Rather than admonishing extra effort it could be valuable to encourage our boys to be considerate and alert to the needs of their society – boys/men have been encouraged to be aggressive and in the best shape they can muster because confronting a saber toothed tiger demands that. Now it may be the time to modify these survival traits – to adjust to differences and encourage equality. There is so much to learn from each other.
Debbie Jones. Playwright/NYC public school teacher-retired
7
School isn't the problem. The workplace is.
24
This article suggests that men are better at blustering their way to successful careers and women, being more conscientious, do not bluster but prepare and that preparation is detrimental to their advancement. This is, on its face, ridiculous.
Perhaps the author should have been better prepared and studied the subject more thoroughly, putting in the extra hours to make sure she knew the issue inside and out, rather than approach the subject with an overblown sense of confidence.
22
Seems to avoid the issue of why girls perform better than boys at school. If we were talking about why some races do better at school than others, would a simple explanation like “hard work and discipline” be accepted?
10
Successful schooling teaches you how to learn, the facts and certainly the details will be forgotten, what remains is the love of learning and hopefully the thirst for new development.
There is nothing wrong with getting good grades and gold plating your school work, those are not so relevant to the issue at hand.
It may be useful to find out why girls need to do this more than boys.
There are huge number of possible reasons, perhaps girls need more outside praise?
I think that the main reason (for later success by boys) is that boys tend to have large group of lose associations of friends which change without too much fuss. Girls seem to have smaller but tighter circle of BFF's, which they tend to stay in for long periods of time.
The boy's model is much more similar to the work environment, they are more ready for shallow networking, which is (dare I say it) the paradigm of work-world.
8
Our society is structurally biased to favor the success of white men. Those of us who are not white men, and have found a measure of success, have done so by working harder. Telling an ambitious girl to work less hard may relieve stress and anxiety, but it won’t let her get ahead.
266
@Claire I agree wholeheartedly. This article reminded me of the importance of mentors in the work place, particularly for women and people of color. We need to make sure that hard work is noticed and not taken for granted as it often is.
34
Did you guys ever stop to consider that maybe choice has something to do with this as well? When we grow up, many of us make choices not to put work ahead of home and children and we do not make the decision lightly, but gladly. Chalking this all up to sexism and racism is blind and limited to a very small percent, any more, of what drives differences in office success.
37
Schools is structurally biased to favor girls.
17
...Unless women are at the top end of the hierarchical structure. In this situation, all the teachers under their helm are expected to be over-achievers! I see this in my position as an elementary teacher where women are boss. If you look at the K-12 teaching profession, already over-worked teachers are expected to work on weekends, before and after school, as volunteers on after school committees, and then turn in detailed lesson plans that have little to do what teachers end up doing during the ever-changing complexity and challenges that come with teaching children. Thank you for this column. Now I see the light!
2
I disagree with the comments here that say this article ignores sexism. It is examining one aspect of sexism, manifested in different behaviors between girls and boys in school. Sexism isn’t some outside force like the weather, it is a societal product of individuals’ actions and beliefs and is perpetuated when other people internalize these actions and beliefs. This article points to the school environment as an amplifier of these attitudes that propagates sexism down generations. This article says that by avoiding double standards in school whereby girls have to be perfect while guys can skate by we prevent these same girls and boys from internalizing sexism. This will play out down the line in their behaviors in the workplace, with more girls willing to speak out confidently. The point is to change the way we look at education as a system to ultimately empower girls to lean in, not put the onus on them alone to do so, as some comments suggest. This article is a great example of how breaking down and understanding sexism in different contexts can give us a blueprint to stop the feedback loop and re-educate ourselves as a whole, including authority figures like teachers, girls, and boys, so that double standards produced by sexism don’t perpetuate from childhood to the workplace.
3
Just a couple thoughts from a retired high school teacher with over 30 years experience in the classroom:
1) Girls are better at "doing school" than boys. By that I mean they take better notes, get assignments handed in on time, do extra-credit assignments when they're offered, and are more likely to put extra effort into major assignments.
2) The smartest student in the class is often one who doesn't get an "A" in the class. Many boys don't find school relevant or interesting (despite the best efforts of teachers), and intelligent ones will do the minimum amount of work that they can get away with based upon expectations that are put on them by parents, teachers, etc.
From my personal experience, the confidence factor doesn't so much come from sex, but from culture. White students tend to be more confident than the Asian students who get better grades than them. African-American females tend to have more confidence than African-American males. I could go on...
22
K-12 grades reward compliance over competence. The math student that doesn't bother with homework but gets 100 on the final (and a 5/5 on the AP exam) gets a B. The student that dutifully turns in all homework on time but gets an 88 on the gets an A. The adult world doesn't work that way.
13
This is one of the most logically flawed op-eds I've had the displeasure of reading in a long time.
The author observes that on average women work harder academically and earn better grades than men while holding fewer top positions in the workforce. With an impoverished understanding of the concepts of correlation and causation, she goes on to conclude that women's lack of advancement in the labor force must be due to their academic conscientiousness, and thus that we should counsel them to work less hard in school.
Women's work ethic gives them a leg up in the labor market despite institutionalized discrimination. Men do not succeed in the labor force because they discover their inner confidence while breezing through school with minimal effort - they succeed (in part) because the biased labor market has always preferred men to equally competent and equally confident women.
Telling women to exert less effort in school will not magically produce the self-confidence that will vault them forward to CEO positions - it will just deprive them of an advantage that they currently hold over men! Professional success comes from hard work, subject knowledge, and attention to detail. Rather than telling women to abandon these things, we should be convincing them to derive assertiveness and self-assurance from the laudable work habits they develop in school. We should teach women to be confident by taking pride in their best qualities, not by imitating men's worst qualities.
44
I agree. Anyone who takes their child to this woman for counseling should stop. Immediately.
I am so tired of articles about how women just need to be more x or less y, and suddenly the effects of centuries of systematic oppression will disappear. Sure, more confidence is probably a good thing, but that’s not magically going to fix how literally every person that interacts with you treats you every day. They’ve already decided you can’t be a CEO.
How about it doesn’t matter how confident women are when no one likes a confident woman? How about we should value hard work, intelligence, and competence, over fake bravado?
Do you know why women and people of color constantly feel the need to prove themselves by overachieving? It’s not some internalized personality trait, it’s because we are not believed. We are not believed when we say someone has assaulted us. We are obviously not good at math or science. We are told we’re not capable of making decisions about our bodies. We’re not allowed to not be interested in a man that’s interested in us. Who wouldn’t have a bit of anxiety and look for ways to have some control?
If you look at school performance vs. work performance, one thing the author is right about is that it has nothing to do with actual skills or abilities. Men do better in the workplace because there’s no objective test to get hired or promoted. It’s all based on convincing someone that you’re good enough. Men always have a leg up in that test.
38
Ms. Damour,
I question the links you provide that girls outperform boys, study harder, and get better grades. Not my son, nor his friends, nor the students at the public school he attends support your bias. In all cases the boys outperform the girls. You mentioned how you read Harry Potter to your daughter at age eight, I can clearly recall a young boy reading Harry Potter, by himself, at the same age. Once a school required my son take an IQ test, administered by a psychologist affiliated with the University of Washington. His superb scores did nothing to dampen their core believe something was wrong with him because he was acting like a boy and was clearly lacking in self discipline. A week ago a friend, a retired university professor, was observing my son and his friends, as the boys were being boys. He remarked they were working on stuff that he was working on when he was finishing his PhD. Schools are not a confidence factory for boys, if anything the stamp down on boys for being boys. Schools are cheer factories for girls,not boys, and I am glad girls have found a voice. When the yoke of school oppression is lifted from our boys they excel. The recent biased and unscientific pronouncement from the APA that boys, being boys, is harmful to boys is further evidence someone has a finger on the scale. I would like to offer up my finger.
8
@NorthXNW
I would like to hastily add to my own hastily written post that combined the boys have interned at MIT, aced the SAT's, played at the Kennedy Center, and today, Saturday, are hard at work in a cold garage building a robot. Fear these boys not as they are all decent, caring, and thoughtful young men, how I am even related to one is beyond me. While I am pessimistic about the present, I am optimistic for the future. One final comment: My own son contributed recently to an art piece that dollars to donuts will soon be on display at a competition in New York City but wanted no acknowledgement for his part. His reasoning was he was satisfied enough to help, the girl, with what was essentially a middle eight.
1
Perhaps, girls and women are more successful in female dominated environments like schools, and boys and men are more successful in male dominated environments like most corporations. Why each is dominated as they are is certainly tied up with sexism, but I think few would argue that the majority of boys and men are any more well served by non male friendly school environments than girls and women are by non female friendly work places.
9
Women know they have to work twice as hard to achieve equal results in moving ahead. If they learn to do this in school, it is preparing them for what they face in the workplace. It is not that they need to do this to give themselves confidence, but that all the other societal issues that hold them back are real. Unless they show super competence and diligence, they can be ignored when promotions come around.. And they may well be anyway as societal norms are powerful. But in the right situation, it can level the playing field.
12
Could you please provide proof. That comment is rather offensive and suggests that all boys simply breeze through life.
3
This article overlooks that school isn't just about grades. The emphasis should be on "learning the subject", rather than "learning how to skate by with a good grade as easily as possible". As an educational goal, this should be encouraged for all students. I'm a woman, and my own strength through my post-graduate years and then in the workforce, was my preparedness. This strength helped me in the early years of my career, and yet the following really happened to me in the last year of my professional life.
I was a high level manager for a digital company that anyone online knows and has probably used extensively. On any scale of measurement, my teams and I excelled. My boss, however, consistently told me that I was too prepared and too logical. My performance reviews included reflections such as "you come so prepared to meetings that you make people who aren't as prepared feel uncomfortable." "You rely too much on strong logic and understanding the issues well; you need to learn to make decisions based on your gut." "Stop relying on self-confidence that comes from being prepared." "When you already understand all the issues, others feel that their point of view isn't worth as much as yours".
Even though I could not be fired on any merits, and though my teams supported me, my (male) boss found a way to push me out of the organization. And out I have stayed. I never returned to work, finding fulfillment in other ways that turned out to be a lot more meaningful.
9
Based on my own experience I would say boys are more interested in sports, games and general goofing around through high school but stop all that (mostly) and become serious (more serious anyway) in college. Apparently I learned enough in grade school and high school to get a PhD in spite of my less than 100% academic effort earlier.
The lesson I guess is that maybe other things are more important in early school years than grinding away at the books. The early edge girls had in the early years largely seems to have faded away during college and academic achievement was more equal or even slanted already toward men. By the time graduate school arrived I would say men definitely had the edge.
2
Here's my two cents--from working for decades--on this particular aspect of why women succeed less well in the workplace.
When I started working, the project completion rule of thumb was "If you get it 80% right, that's good enough. Now move on." Then it went to "70% right-30% wrong", then "60%-40%". By the time I retired people were saying that in this fast changing world "40% right is enough." The reality is that the product or service won't be around long enough for anyone to remember how short lived the product was or how shoddy the service was.
So when schools teach excellence, and the more mature teenage females excel, they subsequently enter the work world with a skill that is NOT rewarded!
Two solutions. Either align school's missions to the low quality expectations of corporate/business success or change the national culture to expect better from the products and services consumers buy. Guess which one will be adopted first.
Still, in market sectors where quality is still valued, e.g., healthcare, scientific research, women's successful participation has increased. Maybe this is what the magnet school concept is really all about--teaching and grading for different levels of quality excellence for different future job expectations?
3
what do we learn in school? if you show up, do the required work, pass in the required assignments, and get the right answers on the test, you are guaranteed to be rewarded with a top grade, and all those top grades are cumulative. also, you must sit still and be quiet. this is not how the world works outside of academia, where just doing what's expected is no guarantee of success or even survival. the basic difference is the boys have a hard time sitting still and being quiet in school, and are a lot more aggressive. this may not lead to academic success, but it is much more appropriate, or at least useful, in the real world where success is not guaranteed by complicity, and is more likely to come about by a combination of chance, opportunistic behavior, and aggression. girls are taught to sit by the fire and nurse the young. boys are taught to go out hunting and kill something.
6
Many men succeed where women fail because boys have been trained to work collaboratively (think sports teams), while girls tend to work as individuals, intent upon the defeat of their individual rivals. Men are pack-players; women, lone wolves. Men understand that in order for them to "win", their team must win.
4
I disagree think about all the complex social structures in hs that mainly girls must worry about. They have to form “alliances” of some sort.
Rather than addressing boys versus girls, I would rather address what is important to learn. Too much effort expended on learning every fact often distracts from learning the overall thrust of a topic to be learned. I think that it is more important to come away with an over-riding concept of a subject rather than memorizing every little fact. The facts are often forgotten while the concept is retained. Besides, the facts can always be googled.
It is the rote memorization of the individual facts that keeps the student studying until 2:00 AM and creates anxiety, but it is the conceptualization which enables problem solving. Perhaps, this is what makes a liberal arts background so valuable.
4
Yes, school is big part of the problem. This is what children learn their entire school life; stay in your seat, sit still, be quiet, do your work. As girls will typically play in a small space, this is much easier behavior for girls to accomplish. Boys tend to play in the entire space available to them which results in more activity, and more challenges to classroom management.
As we reinforce this behavior, stay still, be quiet, etc. we are not only teaching our young girls and women that this is how they should be behave, but guess who else is learning that? Our boys and young men! Is this sexism? I'm not so sure, it's simply what we are teaching our children.
Having spent over 20 years working in the tech industry and often the only woman in the room, I was amazed at how physical meetings were. Men would stand, walk around, take dominant positions, talk more loudly, etc. A woman in this environment sitting still, being quiet, etc. would be completely overlooked and the interpretation is she's too passive, therefore how can she lead? During a girl's formative years, she is taught to suppress any assertive behavior, because it's "bad" and therein lies the problem.
13
The article underplays the sexism (and, as another reader pointed out, the racism) still involved in hiring and promoting. That confidence based on nothing is an attribute that men overrate (in white men), while underrating actual ability (if it's in a woman). And those same societal forces reward girls for hard work in school (I must be a good girl and please those around me!) and discourage them from speaking out and taking risks (Women are strident, men are forceful.) Similar factors play out in a racial context.
So yes, confidence building skills for our girls are very important, and that is a great takeaway from the article. Countering societal influences that say girls are not good in math and science, or (as my niece once shocked my by saying, only about 10 years ago) "social studies is for boys," has been a recognized struggle for years. But I also notice that this article took what may be perceived as a positives generally about girls and women (better, earlier executive functioning skills, listening skills, focus, ability to multitask) and turned them into negatives, which is historically no different from what has always happened to women!
5
I believe you are painting a picture based on stereotypes: the plodding, hyperconscientious girl and the boy who is already doing the least amount of work possible and claiming the credit. Yes, as a professor I knew both stereotypes reflected in this piece. I definitely had hyperconscientious students, male and female. I also had men and women who did the least amount of work necessary to get the grades they wanted. What I found most disturbing however were colleagues who assumed that when women worked hard they were unimaginative plodders and when men worked hard they were brilliant. There's more than a bit of those stereotypes in this piece.
As for the workplace, the assumption is still that women are there for the short run and men for the long run. Men come into the workplace feeling it is their natural habitat and find that assumption confirmed in all too many careers. Women still need to fight for their place.
There is also another assumption here, one that is much more subtle. Like so many pieces in the NYT, the base assumption is that the children and parents being written about are white, upper middle class and hoping for the brass ring on the college merry go round. The reality is that for too many children today, the dream of college has turned into a nightmare of how they and their families will pay for it. No matter how hard they work, they believe that college is out of reach for them and there is no point to putting in any real level of effort.
14
“A colleague of mine likes to remind teenagers that in classes where any score above 90 counts as an A, the difference between a 91 and a 99 is a life.”
True, but try to tell that the King-maker Ivy League schools or top tier public universities.
6
Classic. Love that phrase.
The simplest, and most likely correct answer to why women don’t advance in equal measure to men in the workplace is that men are the ones doing the hiring. As for men having more confidence and getting by on minimal effort, that has been shown to be because males, particularly white males, are given more credit, and praised more, for that minimal effort. That is why it is said that women, and people of color, have to work twice as hard to achieve the same gains.
17
From my first minimum wage job on a farm at age 14 to my current post-doctoral profession, the only difference between men and women has been weekly hours. In nearly 35 years in the workforce in agricultural, consumer service, government research, military, and medical positions, I have only the single observation that men consistently put in more hours each week than women. Ability may be similar, but men advance with accumulated time on the clock -- especially when doing the "extra" hours that impress "higher-ups" on nights, weekends, and holidays in professional positions. Whether by choice or because of obvious childcare and family obligations, women co-workers and bosses of mine simply could not match male workers at the same position. The men thereby pulled ahead in their respective careers, often deservedly since they often put in 25%-50% more hours in the course of a year and completed many more jobs important to the boss.
7
It disappoints me, but does not entirely surprise me, that an article essentially blaming women for being treated unfairly in the American workforce has been written by a psychologist purporting to be serving as a guide for girls. With guides like this, I suspect that the problem of never achieving true parity for women will persist. We need to change our society to be sure, and maybe those who pretend to lead the way as well.
14
A lot of these comments are troubling. Yes, a lot of the problem involves sexism, some men are afraid of smart women, and other known facts/issues. However, this article is focused on one aspect of the problem and doesn’t attempt to explain or solve the whole situation. There are many facets to this issue. I think this does a good job of explaining how families can start to train their daughters a little differently that could help them in the long run. Will it solve the problem? No, but it’s a step in the right direction.
4
This may be part of the problem but it's not the whole problem. What I've learned after decades in the workforce is that men succeed in the workplace because they operate by the rules of sports, not school. And many men automatically define women as the competition or the opposing team. In fact, women's competence makes them more of a threat, so their male colleagues' interactions with them take on an even more competitive tone. I have seen men form alliances with each other in the workplace, similar to a sports team, that actively work to "beat" their colleagues by withholding information, excluding from meetings and after hours networking, actively undermining with behind-the-scenes criticism, often unfair and sometimes untrue. The ethos seems to be, "if the ref didn't see it and call it, no foul."
Women need to be taught to compete at work like athletes, not like students.
8
Or, employees need to create an atmosphere of cooperation rather than competition. Which would be good for both women and the bottom line.
12
@LF: I agree! And it's the managers who need to create -- and reward -- workplace cooperation. If individual employees are routinely rewarded for undermining their colleagues, which they are, this will never change.
6
I'm a male teacher working in the female dominated workplace. This helps to explain why we teachers are basically assumed to be incompetent in our jobs and therefore must always be in compliance with district approved and paid for curriculum. We can't possibly have the know-how and resources to do a worthy job. In this workplace culture, it doesn't matter if you or a man or woman, you cannot possibly be fully competent in what you're doing.
4
those who can, do. those who can't, teach. everyone knows teachers are basicslly just school marms and babysitters; that's why they deserve to be underpaid. it's not a "real" profession, only something to fall back on if a lucrative marriage doesn't work out. right? and it doesn't hurt that teachers are at least somewhat educated and therefore more likely to be union members or at least Democrats, so the best plan is to denigrate them,starve them, then drown them in the bathtub before election day.
1
Excellent article and bang on. The two items I might add are (1) the time taken to make work product "perfect" is often not chargeable to a client and takes time away from networking, and (2) if a woman spends too much time in the back room getting the paperwork perfect, her immediate boss is credited with her work and has a motivation to keep her in her position to continue doing so, and since no one else understands her contribution, she never moves up.
7
I think both sexes would benefit from an educational system which was more collaborative, and more geared to questioning and problem solving. These higher level skills are more valuable and would lead more naturally to a successful personal and work life.
5
This rings true for me. I did extremely well academically, always, even through graduate school. Over the past year or two, I’ve been polishing my resume and applying for jobs. One male coworker whose advice has been critical reviewed my resume and said I sounded incredibly junior and tactical, when in fact I’m a senior manager. He said I had to toot my own horn, and really play up my accomplishments more. Even my fiancé, whose advice I would ask in replying to recruiters, would say just tell them you’re good at everything they’re looking for, get your foot in the door, then learn anything you need to once you’re in. It was tough taking their advice but it’s made such a difference - I’ve had numerous hiring managers say they love my resume, and I’ve gotten further on multiple interviews than I otherwise might have. I’m not sure what changes - how you can be so confident academically and then have a crisis of confidence professionally. I just always felt like I had to be scrupulously honest in all of these interactions and applying the confidence suggested by my male friends seemed like hyperbole.
10
I see this both as a teacher and as a co-worker. Anyone in our profession knows that it's the overachieving female students who do the extra-credit (that is, until the last week of school). The author is exactly right that we must be more proactive about helping our female students understand that 'good enough is enough" much of the time.
And in my own career I see daily evidence of women working much harder at the same job as their male peers, only to be rewarded with more 'boots on the ground' work rather than promotion or recognition of less tangible sorts. The lack of success in the work force is precisely because the sort of behavior that's rewarded in school--hyper diligence, respect for the rules, and the fear that anything less than perfect renders us unworthy for a seat at the table, is precisely what holds women back and helps promote men in the workplace.
7
This author demonstrates a profound lack of experience in being in "the office". Whether in public or private sector, confident women are not welcome. Period. Confidence is viewed as unseemly in women. And threatening. Especially when paired with competence.
16
The problem is that women have to take and often take their prime work years off to have a child. The situation is that they enter a patriarchal form of business set up by men without biological clocks and therefore are disadvantaged when they take time off.
3
I went to an all boys school and in my graduating class (class of 1980), one of the students at the bottom ended up the president of the company and one of the students at the top of the class works in the same company, basically under the under-achiever in school. How that happened? It comes down to sales skills. You have to be able to sell yourself. Some people are good at selling themselves (Nancy Pelosi) and some are not so good (Hillary Clinton). Sales in an art, like music. You can get some training and become pretty good at it, but you will never beat someone with a natural talent for it.
12
I have mixed feelings about this article because it's assuming girls have some control over how they are perceived in the workplace, how they are hired, paid, promoted. There's very little girls, women, can do when the people in charge, mostly men, don't see and hear them at all - and don't value them. The lack of confidence reflects an external reality, I think the focus should be there, not on the interior landscape that ignores the context. Women still simply don't count as fellow professionals in the minds and hearts of men. I think we need to structurally fix that, working with girls' psychology is just tinkering.
15
The world is full of overconfident, undercompetent men. The highest paid man at my company makes almost $250k/year. I have had to show him how to use the accounting software central to his job duties 5 separate times now. The highest paid woman at my company makes a little over $70k/year. She does not only her job, but also makes up the slack of the overpaid men.
Next year, I will leave my job as a software engineer, and almost entirely male career field, to become a teacher, an almost entirely female field. Neither my confidence nor my competence will decrease. I will have to earn a Masters to become a teacher, and I will take a roughly 40% pay cut to do so. Women’s work is not valued the same way men’s work is, even though it is mostly women doing the actual work.
27
It is obvious that running the software well vs. just getting it done, I.e., the minimum, is not that important for execs at the firm. In a company, unless you are the CEO, you do not get to pick what is important for its senior managers. Know what is important, match those skills to your skills and make your career decisions accordingly. The list is not right or wrong. It just is what it is.
1
My niece followed this advice growing up in Ohio. It has not worked out well for her. The research Damour quotes will be evaluated in 20 years when I suspect data will not confirm success for those who followed it.
Perhaps learning how to cope with stress, pick academic paths, and build cohorts for business success is a better approach. I remember in the EU perfectionism was termed "struggle" as a positive proof of living life to its fullest, not a dreary yoke, and failures along the way a proof of new self learning. If the "boys" are going to let you down, you might as well give your all for your own self value. Then be cleaver. How many people wish later in life that they had taken more risks, been bolder, asked more questions about other paths.
1
The game is rigged, from kindergarten throught graduate school, always has been. This article oversimplifies much bigger problems. The same techniques that helped to end the Vietnam War and obtain civil rights most likely will be the only thing that works on this problem.
There is a war on to maintain the status quo against women, and brown skinned people, those in power want to keep it at all costs.One only has to listen to the message of the right, White Nationalists, and Extreme Fundamentalists who are out and proud of their position on the place of women and the entitlement of white men. They are loud and unafraid to express those opinions and they get support from the powerful men in the highest offices in the country.
Boycotting, peaceful resistance, public awareness and organizing works
6
One of my most startling early teaching experiences was going around my physics lab after the first month and asking my students what their plans were. Boys with C's and D's on labs and assignments were going to be doctors, lawyers and scientists. Girls with A's, doing outstanding work, were going to be dental assistants, technicians of various kinds, or didn't have a particular ambition. I hope my incredulity didn't show on my face.
11
This is a common reality even today BUT those young women, by choosing a more female-friendly role, will not have to fight for a seat at the table or look back with disappointment at the opportunities that never came but were given to less qualified men. Are they making a wise choice given current realities? Maybe!
We women do need to learn to play the game more effectively but until men in power recognize the inherent biases and spend their own personal capital to change things (there are some powerful examples of this starting to happen) this situation will keep repeating. It starts very early - its insidious - and we do not yet fully understand all the forces that cause this gender differential. I hope the next 30 years will see more real progress!
1
@tony zito: I hope it did!
Not only as a former student, but also as an educator and Assistant Principal, I find this article very interesting. First, when I was a student (JHS and HS), my brother was the meticulous onw striving to take advanced classes and as many AP classes as he could. He'd sit down at the dining room table when we got home from school and do all his work. I played sports after school, came home and shot more hops on the driveway and then did homework to the Brady Bunch or the Adam's Family. He secured a spot at a highly competitive Engineering school and I managed my way into some half way decent colleges with an 85 average. It wasn't until college that I actually became that "girl" that is described in this article.
I watch boys and girls alike strive for success especially if they are in honor's class. I watch boys and girls alike also be dismissive of their studies.
Success in the work place - ah, but the challenges for women. First, teaching was not my first career choice. Far from it as a matter of fact. But to raise up the ranks and move into administration, you have to have determination and commitment. A lot of factors, as mentioned in the article, get in the way and I think one of the hugest one's is motherhood. Women who want families will forever be challenged to attain high ranking positions. The CEO of a company cannot just take a couple of years off to raise their newborn. Many, many factors ... it's not just about the climate of schools.
6
I am extremely confident, in school and at work. It is worth noting how threatening that is to insecure men and women. That is what held me back, not my work ethic or lack of confidence or skill.
11
I see the problem not as what little girls do in school, but rather in the way they are treated once they reach the workplace. Scoring high grades in school takes hard work and a willingness to defer gratification. Rewards include development of good work habits, acquisition of knowledge, and admission to top colleges, where a girl can study with the most talented academics in her field.
When a woman reaches the workplace, she is judged by other standards. It does not matter if she is smart, capable, hard-working and talented. The standards for advancement are no longer objective or connected to how smart she can be or how well she does her work. Now she must also deal with prejudice – sexism, envy, hostility, stereotypes- in other words, the boys’ club.
Women deal with these issues by working harder; when hard work does not bring rewards, they lose self-confidence. They believe they are less capable than their male colleagues. They believe the often hostile attitudes which they encounter are related to their performance. Not true!
The woman thinks “I was an A student. I scored in the 99 percentile on my LSATs; I attended Ivy League colleges and professional schools. Why am I not doing well?”
The answer is: you are not doing well because you have run into a wall of illegal, immoral, unethical discrimination - not because you worked too hard in high school.
We need to stop blaming victims and point the finger of blame where the blame belongs.
25
@RCT: yes! This is not a problem with female psychology -- it's a problem with male psychology and/or manage psychology! Just as racism isn't a psychological problem originating within people of color, although they suffer from its impact -- it is a psychological problem within the perpetrators. Let's focus on perpetrators, not their targets.
6
I think there’s a simpler answer. Education is a largely female enterprise while business is dominated by men. One is constructive, the other disruptive. The vaunted female “need for perfection” is a symptom of our oppression, the Stockholm symptom of looking up to those who put us down.
7
While I agree that it's important to get people of either gender with perfectionist tendencies to get a grip, I am also surprised that we still put the cart before the horse and miss the elephant in the room:
What if, just maybe, positive outcomes are not, primarily, the result of confidence, but rather confidence (and lack thereof) is an accurate (self-)reflection of ability and predictor of outcomes?
If one person can achieve the same results as another person, but with a fraction of the effort, that first person is probably more capable, they have more headroom.
So if the going gets tougher, the first person will probably have better outcomes, because they can just add effort. The second person cannot add more effort, they are already maxed out.
While it's possible that person 2 was expending more effort than they needed (i.e. they could have expended the same effort as person 1), that would also be bad as it means they are not capable of making good cost/benefit calculations. Which are hugely important in business!
5
Anytime an article suggests they have an answer to a very complex question its usually full of errors, guesses, and broad suggestions; this article is no different.
Confidence is absolutely a key issue in men and women – on average women are less confident them men to a greater degree. Confidence in part, is gained by the surrounding people, culture, religion, biology (sex), etc.
School helps get you to the field and prepares you for the game. Studying sample quizzes as a plausible solution is ridiculous, in part because smart girls and boys do that already. The solution is to start with you and I. If your kids are less confident, its most likely you! As a parent you must routinely work with them, help them see and identify their strengths and weaknesses.
When a boy was dubbed a man years ago, they would go hunting for the first time and get to shoot a gun. So, take your daughters and have many meaningful experiences in the real world. Show them that failure is part of success, and to scrape your knee is to learn a valuable lesson about getting up and moving forward.
Don’t issue your responsibilities solely on school, government, religion, sexism, etc. While they do play a role, it’s the leading role that’s most shapes your child’s experiences and prepares them for life, your role as a parent!
8
Women are designed, made and intended for different functions than men.
Can they be bent and folded, tooled and whittled to fit in the same mold as men?
Yes.
SHOULD they be?
No.
If this were a problem of Programming you would need to change the Source Code.
But we haven't figured out how to do that.
Yet.
This is the primary obsession and insanity of the modern world. It generates more angst and discontent than anything else.
An analogy;
If you haul enough water and topsoil into the Mojave Desert you could grow wheat there.
But why bother?
It grows so nicely in Kansas.
7
I taught middle school language arts and was bothered by the slackers, usually boys, who were happy with a C or even less. I had parents tell me that middle school grades do not really "count." I started grading them A, B or zero. Students could redo papers until they got an A or B. They started asking other students to read their drafts and give feedback. Then students asked if they could redo a B until it was a A. Sometimes everyone in class earned an A on an assignment and I gave out snacks. "A" papers are easier to grade since there are few errors.
5
Men are pigs. "You throw like a girl". " Don't bitch at me." "Act like a man". But, here's the problem--women let them get away with it! Is this a hormonal thing? Societal, I really don't know. Why do men act like asses, and why do women not jump down their throats? Maybe I'm low on testosterone, or just can't fit into the type A profile. When a woman told me no-geez, I took it for no. But--A woman needs to be able to look a man in the eye and say NO!. I had two boys, but by god, if I'd had a girl, I would have demanded that she take up for herself. That she know, unequivocally, that she was the equal of any man. All that said, men are pigs.
3
Recently, a male doctor made the news because he stated women doctors made less because they did not wok as hard. That same doctor used a patient as a weapon to humiliate and punish a highly competent woman doctor of color. I was there and I called him out on it at morning report. He had transferred an unstable patient out of an ICU onto the floor in the middle of the night just to increase the workload of a woman who intimidated him . This was a prime example of confident man attacking and sabotaging a woman in the workplace.
The director of our program promised to investigate and punish this type of behavior. When I threatened to report then the inappropriate transfers from ICU stopped. The women in this case did not resort to tit for tat.
The women don't need to act as unethical as the men. We need strong leadership to stop the bad behavior.
13
who knows what the motive was, and if it really had much to do with gender? aggressive men will pull any stunts, tell any lie, undercut and backstab any colleague or subordinate, steal any idea, or fake any results to push themselves ahead. winning is the goal, the method is whatever works. do women work this way? sure, just not as often, and rather than being "in your face" about it, they are more likely to be passive aggressive.
What I shall call machismo may be a factor in why many women (and some men) are not at the top of the formal world we operate in. In the medical world, I see mostly pushy, bullying personalities in leadership, often lacking in knowledge and ability. Sadly, males are socialized in our culture to behave aggressively, and are rewarded for this type of unfortunate behavior. Ours is not a society where thoughtful, considerate people are listened to very often.
16
@Dr. T: I agree. I commented above that the right analogy is not "school", but sports. Many men in the workplace treat females colleagues as their opponents on a different team. The better those women are, the harder those men work to undercut them. And if the ref doesn't call it, well ... Sadly, most managers don't understand that the self-promoting, pushy colleague may LOOK effective, but studies suggest that he lowers overall productivity while advancing his own career and compensation: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46608818.
5
We should not forget women have made huge progress in leadership. Hilary was the presidential candidate last time, and the presidency was almost hers if she had worked harder in the last month or even week of the campaign. This year, so many women have declared their candidacy already. Who says women lack confidence?
Senator Warren was the first to declare her intention at the end of the last year. At the beginning of her video, she said that if you work hard and play by the rule, bla bla bla. It turned out that she had gamed the system for more than 30 years. The land was taken from native Americans, and now their identity was the target. Somehow the question to a senator arises: "Have you no sense of decency?" Girls should have confidence in themselves, but all of us, men, women, children, should have sense of decency. Otherwise there would be no future for this great country.
3
Good lord, I was so upset that no one understood this piece, that I catastrophically failed to recognize that you're coming precariously close to reinventing Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor's strategic optimism versus defensive pessimism distinction. (You've virtually made the distinction verbatim here).
Read Julie Norem's stuff, Lisa. For reasons unbeknownst to me, research in this area has sort of petered out, and your piece suggests to me that there is still both good reason and space to explore these constructs further.
I'm getting old and senile.
1
I really dont like hearing about the hyperinflated wage gap. If women were underpaid for their equal work, businessmen all over the world would only higher women because it's cheaper. But you don't see that for a reason, and it's not because of sexism.
4
funny, I was at a lecture by an engineer a couple years ago who recommended this approach. it was a laugh line in his talk, and the laughter seemed to be in agreement. the audience was only about 5 percent female, and while I had heard these sentiments spoken in small groups by male managers, I had never heard them in such a large venue. I was a bit shocked, especially because this particular engineer works with his engineer daughter. I was shocked not that he would suggest taking advantage of women in general, but by the lack of respect for his own daughter that his comments highlighted. extremely unsettling and disappointing.
3
"The best is the enemy of the good" may be the message for success in the workplace.
And it's a message boys seem to innately understand, that girls do not.
5
I think the reasons why men have dominated society worldwide since the dawn of humanity have to be examined in depth in order to understand the deep-rooted inequalities between the sexes in today's workplace.
There is no doubt that women in the workplace have a harder go of it than men, however the underlying causes of this are ancient. To rectify today's imbalance between the sexes these causes must be examined thoroughly and fully understood if we as a society are to make any progress towards proper equality.
1
This article reminds me of my friends' faux outrage when I was recognized as the best student in 11th grade Spanish. "You were always sleeping!" said one classmate. I was definitely not a high school over achiever.
3
It is not that complicated. Men know their career is everything to them, so they are willing to "lean in". Women are more lifestyle inclined and are concerned that if they lean in too far it will eclipse other more important things in their life. Basically women want to straddle the middle for their own reasons. Your trying to fit a square peg into a round whole. Yes men and women are different.
6
Seems to me that both approaches to learning are misguided; over working for grades, or slacking off to the lowest effort needed for grades. I think young men and women should be encouraged to love learning for the joy of self enrichment and simple curiosity. The emphasis on study solely as a means to become a more successful "cog in the machine" is a broad indictment of our society, IMHO.
7
The premise for this commentary, that girls simply “work harder” in school than boys, is quite disturbing. Imagine for a moment of instead of girls and boys we were talking about white people and black people. Then the premise would be clearly racist, wouldn’t it? So why is it not alarming that the author makes a similar claim for such a vast difference in gender? Boys are lazier than girls, is that it? I wonder if there might not be other factors at work, related to the school environment and curriculum that are discouraging boys from concentrating on school work. For instance, less and less recreational time; less unstructured time; emphasis on socialization; demand that boys remain still; not enough active-learning in the lesson plans, and on and on. Maybe, in other words, we should also be concerned about why boys are underperforming in relation to girls in our schools—and the gap appears to be widening. Vast, cultural-general arguments to explain that gap should be proposed only with extreme caution. Since we are talking about a gender difference that is fairly consistent across a vast country, there’s probably more going on to create these differences than the kind of observation-based and anecdotal speculation this article indulges.
8
I chose not to have children. I watched others who worked but also have children. It's much, much harder that way.
I would say that we need to compare women who work who are childless with men who may have children but do not act as primary caregivers. What are those statistics?
I also think that sports for boys can teach skills that some girls don't get to learn. Being tackled in football and having to get up and continue playing may be bad for young brains, but all schools have football teams anyway. What does that kind of experience teach? What if the boys had to participate in home economics or something similar (if they still have such course) -- would they still be the same?
If it really is true that 95% of the top CEOs are male, that has to be cultural. We thought that the Baby Boomers had turned things around and that they were getting better. I guess not.
8
Yea this isn't why women aren't occupying top jobs. Recently uber found that its male drivers make more than its female drivers per hour spent driving. Sexism can't explain that, and nether can lack of confidence. It comes down to choices about working conditions and hours spent at work. Men are much more likely to accept dangerous and difficult working conditions, and work much longer hours. They are also more likely to relocate for job opportunists, and to chose work over family commitments. If you want to be CEO of a fortune 500 company, a great many social sacrifices have to be made. Women tend to value their social lives (family children and friends) more than men do. This isn't a value judgment, it is just a fact.
In addition there is also the greater male variability theory. This theory explains why you see men dis-proportionally occupying extremely high status jobs, but also see men making up the vast majority of inmates.
11
This is an AMERICAN culture gender-bias problem more so than Ms Damour understands.
I work with companies operating in many countries and people living in these countries and from many other cultures. Jobs and pay in communist and post-communist countries are family and merit-based. Those from most European countries and their former colonies are mostly merit based.
In the U.S., females who do not plan to wed young and be taken care of by their husbands learn early on must strive to perform perfectly academically to complete degrees which will enable them to effectively compete with men in the workforce for high-wage, powerful, meaningful jobs. That's the bar to get the interview, especially if you want to live in a high cost-of-living location.
Further, often teachers claim bell-curve requirements, then limit the quantity of "A's" to be awarded. The cultural belief that men "need it to go to college, get a job, go on to grad school more so than a female who will eventually leave the workforce to be nurturer to husband and family" enhances the bias to give males "A's" rather than females.
Also in U.S., men's income is believed to be a necessity, while women's is a nicety.
As teachers and supervisors naively assume their decision to down-grade a top-performing female will only disadvantage her once, rather than recognizing the same female may be down-graded similarly again, it is believed to be harm-free.
Women, shoot for the stars, you might reach the moon.
4
As per me, what Lisa mentioned is true to certain extent.I don't want to bring in gender bias.. but as far as I'm concerned..on the whole, students who try to master their academics by studying all hours eventually could get good grades at schools but when coming to career it requires diverse skills (intellectual & interpersonal skills) to prove themselves, and to be a a step ahead of their competitors.
As a result the students who were quick witted and shrewd at school will be able to do better in their life, than the one who worked all hours long to secure good grades.Because practical world is outright different from school where we have to make most of decisions and do things in no time than hours of hard work. Maybe its worth to teach today's children how to make a wise decision in fraction of seconds and come up with smart solutions and last but not least interpersonal skills.
3
@Srsahas
Students should be instructed in sword fighting.
1
I am a white male who got OK grades in high school, went on to "grind out" A's in college, and now I teach at the college level. Now that I'm on the other side of the desk it has been genuinely surprising to me how women's academic performance is consistently better than that of their male counterparts!
One thing that strikes me is that the guys in class are probably oblivious to this disparity. I certainly had no sense of it when I was going through the system, and I wonder how much unearned confidence comes from simply not knowing what other people are actually doing.
After each test I like to plot out a graph of the results, so that students can visualize where they fall amongst their peers. It's tempting to break it down by gender, just to make the point.
7
I've found great success working for women over the past 25 years -- 7 strong, smart leaders who treated me fairly. And did we all over perform? Maybe. But our companies only benefited, and so did we. I hope that eventually results will speak louder in business than bluster and swagger.
Two short stints working for men included one who not-so-subtly encouraged me to quit because I was 7 months pregnant; and another who told me my Ivy League degree was equivalent to an AA for compensation purposes.
I learned to flee those situations. Perhaps one competitive advantage women leaders have is attracting and retaining other highly competent women in their workforce.
6
@Katy
"I hope that eventually results will speak louder in business than bluster and swagger."
It would seem that "bluster and swagger" yield the desired results.
2
Education is your ticket into the arena, you’ve got to have it but it doesn’t predict success. Male or female whatever ethnic background. You’ve got to know how to play the game. It has to do with supporting your co-workers, delivering to your boss, having the boss’s and your co workers back. Moving in the right circles. Even playing the right sports, supporting public service etc etc.
4
Maybe the problem is Business run by men is designed to play to men's strengths. As mire women assume leadership roles I suspect business values will be more balanced. At present the system was designed by men for men,
7
@GUANNA
" At present the system was designed by men for men,"
Hallelujah!
1
I love all these comments about Hillary. Has it occurred to her defenders that she got where she is by acting as "masculine" as they come. From eviscerating her political enemies to enabling sexual assault (by going after her husband's sexual assault victims), she clearly knew how to gain power. The irony is people supported her because she was a "woman".
2
It doesn't take academic excellence to succeed at the office. It takes some combination of street smarts, willingness to face danger, and getting back up after you fail. Teach that to girls too. Some of them do it instinctively, and some boys never learn it.
5
Such a strange thesis. Not sure the context or research this author used in this unusual induction. There is a consensus on the facts that sexism exists. I recommend reading findings deeply and widely.
1
My point is that girls and women have every reason not to "lean in" to gutsy decisions when the response is and has always been completely quashing. If you look at someone and say, "I am going to do this!" and they stare at you with scorn and tell you how unreasonable you are, it is not reasonable to then proceed and do it again. Females are acting completely rationally not to attempt brave achievements; there is no reason for them to do such a crazy thing. This article is telling reasonable people to "just be more crazy!" It just doesn't make sense to me. But best wishes -
From what I've read, the primary reason women earn less at the office is that they turn down overtime. I never see it referenced in the media, tho'.
3
Your thesis is unfocused and you seem to be doing mental cartwheels to avoid the obvious reason women’s success in school is not mirrored by a fulsome representation of our numbers in the top echelons of business. White men see themselves in other white men, and promote themselves. White men live in a world where they are at the top of everything and so they expect to be at the top. Their confidence comes from the knowledge that they can be confident and be rewarded for it.
Seeing anxiety and perfectionism in girls in your professional practice is meaningful, but I believe that you’ve drawn all the wrong conclusions from your observations. You have
anectdotal evidence (did you think about how the race and class of your patients might be affecting what you hear from them? Did you consider how your race and class might be affecting what you see in them?)
It’s worth asking why your anecdotal observations warranted a NYT op-Ed.
*It’s also worth noting that I am only writing this comment because the The Times has specifically pointed out that women don’t write a lot of comments/letters to the editor.
8
There is a much larger problem: Gender disparities between (a) parliamentary (ie legislative) bodies and (b) the populations they represent.
Consider, "No taxation witout representation."
A more relevant protest would invoke, "Don't tread on me" with the words, "No legislation without representation".
While "No taxation without representation" protests the subjugation of US pesons to English taxation, the subjugation of female-gendered US persons to US legisltation (produced over decades by gender disparate legislatures) warants this more profound protest, "No legislation without represnetation".
A century after women got the vote, the election system continues to fail us all. After all, truly effective elections are never about merit but about representation (witness Trump).
Globally, election systems fail consistently to achieve sound representation: Over 90% of the world's parliamentiary bodies remain gender imbalanced by 2-to-1, or worse. The USA is far from a leader on this front.
The horror is that unless this problem is solved, all measures to defeat sexism are futile. The beauty is that it is a childishly simple matter to correct the disparity: All male gender persons will assert that each person appointed (eg by a democratic election) to a parliamentary body will be accompanied by a person of a different gender.
Will men have the courage?
reference:
http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm
@Democracy Watcher
Women, it seems, often vote for men to represent them.
1
Studying hard and producing quantifiable proof of capability is the only thing girls have in their control. They can't change society, and they can't change the fact they are growing up and maturing in a culture that bombards them with messages that their worth is in their body, which is constantly at risk of violation. How can they possibly have "confidence" their ideas and analyses will be valued, when the message is so clearly that they won't be.
16
@Mineola
Life is a tussle, all the way up, and all the way down.
1
This is so very, very insightful. I have seen so many female students who are "afraid of success" that I've stopped counting. When they ask me, I counsel them the same way this female psychologist does. And I always tell them the truth; that they are so much better than they think they are.
5
I’ve certainly witnessed this phenomenon in my personal life and career. My brother worked hard in high school only in the subjects that intrigued him. I worked hard at everything. My daughter was likewise a perfectionist while my son was the poster child for “good enough is good enough”. At work, I managed two people who typified this phenomenon. A female programmer was extraordinarily productive, always solving problems without being asked, but very shy about her achievements. The male programmer was always overpromising to clients, not following through, and leaving others to clean up his mess. So, he was plenty confident. Guess who I fired?
My point is that overconfidence in men is not something we should laud or overlook or, worst of all, ask women to emulate. Sure, women could use some more confidence (although, in the face of constant undermining and gaslighting, I understand why confidence is hard to come by), but men could work on becoming more accurate in their self-assessments and perhaps more humble.
12
I don’t disagree with the gist of this piece. But I find it amusing that for the last 30 years we have read that girls are unfairly treated at school, the teachers favor the boys, and so on. Now finally everyone agrees that girls do better in school, period. As a college professor with many decades of experience, I heartily agree.
4
This sort of narrative is built upon layers and layers of ideological dishonesty about how actual discrimination works in the real world. Feminism is built on bleaching out human direct understanding of life, stomping on nuance, and then oversimplifying what's left into a reductive narrative, for the sake of distorting life. When I was in fourth grade, the founder of my school gave a talk to my class. We had all been warned - threatened, really, with no explanation as to why, not on any account to ask him why he'd founded the school. In his presentation, he went into that topic anyway. He said that as a boy he'd done something bad to a girl, and had felt intensely guilty for a long time afterward, until he finally decided that it had happened because there was something inherently bad about boys, that needed to be crushed out of them - so what he'd done was the fault of this inborn aspect of his nature, an inheritance, something he hadn't been trained out of, so in a sense it wasn't his fault. Of course, what he was saying had more background than he was letting on. This idea was already an older calculated cultural attitude, one revived and worked back into the culture again and again for it's poisonous utility in manipulating society through psychologically degrading children - one of many such tools in certain kinds of narrative. I knew many gleefully malicious female teachers. Obviously, boys want to create time to think about something else, and thus control the stress.
I disagree. As a seasoned female technologist in the field of information technology I can tell you that it is not about women's confidence... there is entrenched old boys club privilege we don't get.
I'm plenty confident & I believe fairly efficient in my ratio of output to input. But when I applied for an internal position of software architect in my company (one I was very qualified for), I did not even hear back. I waited and the position eventually just disappeared from the site. So I called the recruiter to whom it was assigned. He naively told me the truth. The hiring manager had created the position for someone (another guy) he already had an eye on. The whole process was a farce. As someone who had consistently received high reviews in that company I should have been at least considered, given a chance to prove my competence... but the decision had been already made before I even knew of the opportunity. No amount of confidence from my side was going to change that.
18
@OceanBlue Exactly! As the mother of daughter who is just beginning her career in the field of engineering, just thinking about how often this happens is depressing. I have no doubt that she will outperform many of her co-workers, but I fear that will never be enough...
2
My greatest frustration with modern feminism is the tendency to encourage women to acquire or demonstrate traditionally-masculine traits. I don't want to lean in or interrupt my peers or suffer from inflated confidence. A dose of humility, hard-work, and thoughtfulness might benefit everyone.
Further, I've taught boys and girls who produce work that exceeds expectations and truly impresses me. I've taught boys and girls who do the minimum. I've taught boys and girls who meet expectations and are happy to be finished. Obviously, we don't want to stress our children. But, I also won't discourage a student who thrives on producing excellent work.
I'm also bothered by the assumption that people who do well in school want to be executives. There is this sneaky assumption that the choice to pursue careers outside of the corporate world are indicative of less intelligence or ambition and that's just not true.
18
This is just half the story. Girls don’t feel they have a right to be confident because we drill into girls that their mistakes are disqualifying whereas the mistakes of men are bumps in the road. Boys are assumed to have a place at the workplace table. So when they make an error in judgment or effort, it is glossed over. Women are out of place, particularly in leadership positions. When they inevitably make mistakes as humans do, they are penalized to a far greater degree and usually sidelined for men. I say this from ample personal experience working to climb the corporate ladder for the last 25 years. Poor attitudes, errors in judgment and outright incompetence were forgiven in men. Women, including myself, who made even small mistakes were just knocked to the side.
The sense of entitlement is enforced at an early age. My daughter liked to play with trains at the age of 2. The boys in her preschool class didn’t want to share the trains with her. The teacher said, “You know how boys are. I try to get her to play with the girls.” The idea that boys shouldn’t get to set the rules didn’t occur to her.
We should not make girls doubt their own instincts and treat them like they’re irrational. Instead, we should ask them why they feel like they need to work harder. We should observe whether they are dying by a thousand cuts. The tone of this article makes it seem like something is wrong with girls. I feel this is yet more victim blaming.
26
Yes evolution favored men because what: we have a better union?
1
Evolution favored men?
Simple, school is a made-up world. Business is real world.
7
Here's an idea most men would never sign on for -- let's create a world where men share all child rearing and home chores/responsibilities equally with their working wives while also managing their careers. After 20 years of that social experiment (Good luck making it happen!) tell me how well the men are doing at getting ahead of the women at work? (71 year-young retired Big Pharma engineer.)
24
Is it really a matter of confidence, or that those who play the "social games" (largely controlled by men) correctly are rewarded?
In corporate America, a certain set of behaviors are rewarded. An outward projection of confidence(to the point of bluster) is certainly part of that, but that's not the full extent of it. There are plenty of other unwritten rules, networking, and games to be played that are more essential to career advancement than actual competence in many companies.
Those that elect not to play these games(both male and female, but more frequently the latter) frequently suffer the consequences in terms of lost opportunities - once again, not because of their competence, or necessarily even their confidence, but because there are a bunch of nonsensical social constructs that result in behaviors that have little to do with one's ability to perform well at a particular task, nonetheless being disproportionately rewarded when it comes to promotion.
When our corporate cultures get better at rewarding true competence rather than one's willingness to play silly alpha-male social games maybe we'll see more women(as well other highly competent people who don't fit the current perceived executive archetype) elevated to positions that match their skills and contributions.
11
I taught middle school for 4 years in the late 90’s early 00’s. Occasionally a teacher or staff member would need help moving something heavy like tables, stacks of chairs, large boxes of materials etc. So I would get buzzed in my room by the office and be asked if I could send a few strong boys to help. I really thought nothing of it. Then one day after a request was made, Jennifer raised her hand and said “why do the boys always get asked to help and not the girls. We are just as strong and can move tables just like the boys.” Well, she was right and as a young teacher I thought her point of view was quite insightful. From then on, if I got a request, I would ask are there any strong people willing to help. In the back of my mind I thought if a girl got hurt moving something I would feel worse than if one of the guys got hurt.
7
Every job I ever held I believed I was pulling a fast one over people - that I’d be found out. Or that it was a lucky break when a boss resigned and I was promoted. Perhaps this began when, after only six months, I was fired from my first job - as a copywriter. I had asked my boss just the month before my six month review if I could sign a 2 year lease for an apartment and he assured me I was fine. He fired me the week before Thanksgiving saying I was an incompetent copywriter, not understanding the material I was presented. (Parenthetically, every ad I ever created for the agency was used over the next couple of years)
This impacted the remainder of my career. I worked very very long hours - always the first in and last out. And my insecurity has lasted throughout my career.
10
Boys and men also seem to be praised much more enthusiastically for doing comparatively less than their female counterparts. The bars are persistently set at unequal heights from an early age on.
16
By all means...tell men to start respecting and promoting women... Why exactly would they ever want to do that? Men want to be around other men that they can pal around with and tell their inside/sexist jokes to, and on and on.
Until we can tell men how they personally will benefit by hiring and promoting women, they WON'T. It has to get them more money and promotions for themselves. People don't do something unless there is some benefit to themselves, especially in business - it's as simple as that.
Women need to stop being so naive thinking that by merely telling people to be fair and nice that they will be - nice guys (women, in other words) finish last.
7
Women who have children are mothers first. Single mothers have a double challenge in navigating work expectations and those as a mother.
5
My partner told me that when she was in 4th grade, and tests were handed back to the students with their grades marked in red on top, she saw that the boy in front of her had a "D" on his test. He turned around and saw that she had received an "A." When he saw her looking at his paper, he said, "I have more room for improvement than you do." He was not upset about his grade, while she continued to overprepare for every test for years in fear of spoiling her straight A average. Nonetheless, she rose to lofty heights in the corporate world and now squires me around in her Mercedes. I wonder where "little D-boy" ended up!!??
6
What a misogynist article: It's all the girls fault for working so hard. Baloney. It's because in the work force and society women are constantly put down, questioned, condescended by men who have the power. You must be nearly perfect when in a meeting where you are the only woman. Every man demands you know every minutia about a topic you bring up if you hope to have your idea get any traction, even then it's unlikely. Not so with a man at all. Been there, had to deal with that. The STEM and upper management positions are the worst with this.
62
I think the last presidential election is the only thing you have to look at to prove the point that women no matter how well prepared, how confident, how intelligent will be passed over by a man no matter how unprepared, how overconfident and how stupid he is. Not to mention being a liar, lazy and a sexual predator.
54
Schools in America started to recruit women more, mainly after WW2. Now almost 75 to 80 percent school teachers and staff are women (and mostly white.)
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/08/15/the-nations-teaching-force-is-still-mostly.html
American schools need to recruit more men and people of color as it can restore balance in teaching and also grooming girls and boys on a more equal footing in terms of gender and racial equality.
7
The premise of this op-ed is that we would expect success in school to ipso facto lead to success in the workplace. This premise is flawed.
School and work are different worlds. Skills for succeeding at school are only partly needed to succeed in the workplace. At school you are not responsible for making your superiors look good. At school you are not competing for promotions. At school you cannot negotiate your compensation or the assignments that you get. At school you do not have to make decisions where the "correct" answer is not known. You never have to read the politics of the school to get good grades.
If we want to see more women in leadership positions, we should not discourage hard work and discipline. But parents and educators need to remind girls (and themselves) that doing well in school is only a small part of a very large puzzle.
389
@David
Boy, if we can just get women display the self-assuredness of a man who just flat out says without reservation, qualification, or consideration of the author's thesis, "This premise is flawed."
Actually, if you thought about what this bright, professional woman who's given a lot of well-informed thought to the matter wrote, her premise was exactly that work and school are different worlds, and that the school world isn't preparing young women for the work world.
105
@David Probably the best comment here!
14
I completely agree with you. This has been my own experience and this is what I teach my four sons. When I hire people I am looking for someone who has the ability to learn and be self taught which (for me anyway) shows that this person may be able to work more independently and not be a constant drag on my time. I also look for those that can get along with other people. This factor alone is perhaps one of the largest factors for me. I have seen too many brainiacs or uber confident people who can’t figure out how to get along with others and end up isolating themselves and watch in wonder why others are getting promoted who aren’t as smart or work as hard.
Assuming you have the skill set to do the job, it is the soft skills that really help you succeed in my experience.
25
Articles like these feel dated by not taking an intersectional approach to gender dynamics, chiefly by not considering how race plays into the discussion.
By not acknowledging race, the assumption is made that gender is the biggest determining factor in the school/career outcomes mentioned here, when one's race may have a significantly larger impact.
For example, the scenarios here do not account for the difficulties a POC could face "leaning in" to a mostly white meeting, even if they're of the same gender. Would a group of white men more readily listen to a white woman, or an asian man? I have a guess!
Without seeing the authors photo I would have bet $1000 they were white. Get with it!
118
@Kristian MT, Asian man. Hands down. I’ve seen it over and over again. Yes, race is a factor. But, gender is a big issue.
20
@Kristian MT
Not sure why you felt the need to change the focus of this essay to race, rather than sex. Feel free to write your own essay about POC in the workplace. Unless you think females are predominantly POC and males are mostly white, race is not the issue here. Feel free to study the professional disparities between tall people and short, married people and single. This essay is about males and females.
40
@Kristian MT An "intersectional approach" is shorthand for maximising virtue for noticing discrimination and minimising the ability to do anything about it. Every kind of analysis uses models that simplify some variables in order to study others. "Intersectionalism" is a perfect way to maintain the status quo.
18
I say we leave Hermione out of this! She is the greatest witch of her age.
9
CEOs tend to be psychopaths. Should we teach our girls to lie about how awesome they are?
21
Why not just focus on raising your kids to be decent and conscientious citizens instead of perpetuating the rat race?
14
I think this has to do with the culture of perfection that drives girlhood as much as anything. It's always been there. Boys can be dirty, tousled and untucked and talk about farts; girls have to be neat, tucked in, hair combed, and never revel in the imperfect perverse. It's a general rule and not every boy or girl fits into what's expected, but I think boys have always been and continue to be encouraged to be imperfect. They have more leeway to gain weight, to dress badly. No one expects them to grow up and personify sex. They're encouraged to explore and play with their environment, which is really the best way to learn and cultivate passion; they're free to make mistakes.
And that's really it. Men and boys can make mistakes. They give themselves wide berth for that, and it begins in childhood. They are free to explore and learn to manipulate their environment and aren't held to insane standards of perfection, on a micro or macro scale. No one's asking a boy -- a white boy in particular, let's be honest -- to scramble to earn his right to be in the world: he's free to imperfectly explore it and figure out for himself who he'll be in it.
But girls have that same right and that same freedom to be messy, imperfect weirdos, really -- it's their world too, and they have every bit as much right to be confident in it.
18
You articulated exactly what I observed, but could never quite put my finger on, when raising my two now 20-something kids - a boy and and girl three years apart! Not growing up with brothers, I was surprised and continually baffled by the unearned confidence that my son and his male friends displayed with just about everything. My daughter worked 10 times harder at almost everything yet wasn’t nearly as confident in her abilities. It would drive me crazy! They boys never seemed to doubt their ability to get through or bounce back from a bad decision or risk so they would go for it while the girls didn’t want to make a mistake or appear foolish so they would hold back or not even try. My son embodies the “just enough” mentality when it comes to things he knows are important in the big scheme of things but doesn’t truly care about; however, he will pour his heart and soul into things that truly matter to him. I think if we all did this we’d be much happier!
Their schools also made things worse by insisting that the girls always play nice with everyone even and follow the uniform code to a tee while disagreements among boys were acceptable and blatant uniform violations were just ignored! Boys frequently got free passes for mistakes and bad decisions while the girls were punished!
2
@Julie Jewell I don't know how much this is nature v. nurture, but I do think the standards of propriety and perfection are often most enforced by other women and girls. At least, that's my experience. If you want to break out of the "pink penitentiary," as Harper Lee called it (though she was referring specifically to womanhood), you hang out with the boys. This is not universally true and changing, I hope. I have no idea what to do about that except when little girls begin exhibiting their own unique, quirky selves, I hope the world can learn let them have and then keep those selves. There's nothing very interesting about perfect. Perfect is conforming to someone else's idea to begin with.
1
'Why Girls Beat Boys at School and Lose to them at the Office.'
For a moment, just think about that header...
Competition and shame over losing (at anything) and therefore being a vulnerable, and weak loser is inherent in male gender ideology. This headline transfers that shame wholesale to women.
When this happens (it happens a lot) women are sucked into a system of gender-class competition by a disappointing vulgar feminism that is misunderstands gender conflict while internalizing two patriarchal ideological bullets that read:
*never appear to be vulnerable,
*win at all costs.
For woke men or waking men, who are sick of the patriarchal order that has prevented men from having a full emotional life (and dying early from unexpressed stress) for about 7,000 years (see Gerda Lerner) this is a very disappointing trend.
Patriarchy must end. Michelangelo's David does not outweigh nuclear missiles and global warming.
And patriarchy is ending...the signs of its dysfunction are everywhere, but it must not be replaced by a matriarchy that is equally intolerant, competitive and ignorant. We need gender equality. We need woke men and women working together to save what's left of our embattled world.
4
Sorry to be a pest here, Lisa. But I just thought about the relationship between your literature and your conclusions. We might have to wait 10 years or so before we suggest theories and generate hypotheses about why females outperform males in school but subsequently fall behind them in the work world.
Your literature that has shown both better school-related self-regulatory skills and school performance among females than males was based upon samples from a subject population that isn't old enough to be CEOs yet. These kids would be no older than about their late 30s by now.
If in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, girls were working harder and getting better grades than boys, but as women were being shut out from the top echelons of the corporate world (given they entered rather it rather than sacrificing their careers in order to care for their children), then you would be on firmer ground.
Feel free to ignore me if the conditions stated in the second paragraph were met (I'll bet they were and I've just made an ass out of myself. It's been that kind of day).
3
I've always scratched my head over this. I often wonder if girls decide to "get stupid" so they don't intimidate potential suitors, and it sticks. You know, "Oh, silly me, I just can't figure this out." And then they start obsessing over shoes instead of careers. This is a bit of satire I'm writing here but there is a kernel of truth.
3
Hypothesis of Greater Male Diversity. More females above average but more male dunces and geniuses.
2
Just have to comment on how powerful Wenting Li's illustration is for this article...
After all - 'anybody' can even become President
1
This article sums up the 2016 presidential race: The ever-prepared super-qualified woman vs. the supremely underqualified, over confident bozo
24
To be honest, I couldn’t even finish reading this article. As a mother of a ten year old girl, I am fed up. What you write here is more of the same, like so many others you are telling our girls they are not enough. They don’t approach life the right way. They accomplish their goals incorrectly. Stop. Girls are not boys. Girls are not all the same. And that is fine.
22
Misogyny. Sexism. Male Bonding. These are the reasons women are less successful in the marketplace. This is a terrifyingly retrograde article, so full of victim-blaming that one has to question what kind of therapy this psychologist is practicing. It's time to dust off that most useful book by Dorothy Dinnerstein, Mermaid and Minotaur. Dinnerstein's post-Freudian feminist analysis is much more helpful in explaining our gender arrangements, beginning in the ways males and females from infancy learn their places in the world and then behave accordingly. We still lack role models in too many homes and in too many boardrooms.
19
Stop blaming women. Stop it.
I came into the workplace brimming with confidence and knowledge but it doesn't matter. The guy that looks like the boss and is happy to go to strip clubs with him gets promoted. Women work harder and don't lack confidence. The world lacks confidence in us.
Stop blaming us for this. I'm so tired of this. I refuse to accept the blame.
54
You are working awfully hard to avoid the obvious conclusion...sexism.
374
@Jay Strickler: I agree. I was always an over achiever in school. It was my brother got the new car, he was a dropout and a drug addict. I supported my self since I was 17 years old. My brother was give the down payment for a new home after he was released from prison. Go Figure!
7
@Jay Strickler
Are you saying that schools and colleges are discriminating in grades against males?
Or that school and college curricula are not relevant to real life?
3
@Jay Strickler That's been debunked so many times at this point. Sexism plays almost no role in job outcomes for women. Even a female Harvard economist found this to be the case.
10
95% of CEO's are men. 100% of Mafia Dons are men. Hmmm, should we be striving to have more parity in the Mafia?
5
It is the natural order. God made Adam and then Eve as a helpmate from Adam's rib. We have done well with this model. The leftists would reverse this. Good luck.
Women are detail-oriented. Men are more likely to damn the details and let's think outside the box. The two should work perfectly together -- problem there is that men feel threatened by women and women feel threatened by men. It's the primitive part of our brains that no amount of education can silence.
4
Miss D’amour,
Interesting article. But as a teacher of 35 years I’m surprised you haven’t factored in girls desire to please, while the boys are obsessed with competition. The girls always outperform the boys in the classroom while the boys are preoccupied with chasing the balls around the playground. These, I think, are the dominate two factors affecting success in the classroom verses success in the business world. Give it some thought and see what you think, it’s a very important issue.
6
So much discussion to determine why girls do better than boys in school and college, yet not a study regarding the much slower rate of physical and mental maturity or men versus women. When most girls are 11 or so years old they are generally in puberty, soon to be full sized. When boys are the same age they are still little boys. Boys do not begin maturing physically until they are about 14 years of age. During that same period of time the girls mental age and maturity is growing much faster than boys. The truth of these observations are evident to anyone who observes boys and girls in and out of school. This is the reason why girls do better in school right through college.
Why do boys do better in the real world? It is because slower grown organisms, even trees and plants, have physically stronger structures. The girls who beat the boys in academics in their youth and adolescence can never beat the boys in athletic endeavors. In addition, boys mental development is slower, and it is much different.
Start accounting for the physical and mental differences between early developing girls and slow developing boys and you'll see that your answer is not that sexism is holding the girls back. These studies seem to desire that women stop being women and that they give up the qualities that make them especially valuable to society and push like men. That is, in my opinion the wrong direction to go in, studies, with their predetermined conclusions, nonwithstanding.
159
@Joel Friedlander
One of the most interesting and perceptive, and sagacious comments out of the 1,000+ comments.
18
@Joel Friedlander Is the crux of your argument really that things that take longer to develop are stronger? And are then comparing human development to tree development?
Nobody would disagree that men are, on average, much physically stronger than women. Or that men tend to be more risk-prone and aggressive than women. But these are attributes that exist on normal distribution curves - curves which overlap between genders, in addition to being skewed by both genetic and environmental factors. Sometimes, the curves don’t overlap much - for instance, the average male has over twice as much upper body strength than the average female; only the physically strongest females can hope to compete with the average male. And sometimes, there isn’t even a difference between genders - for instance, men and women have virtually identical averages for IQ scores.
The way you talk about female vs male ‘qualities’ implies a binary view rather than a statistical view. ‘Women being women’ likely (although I don’t want to assume, so do correct me) means you think of women as inherently compassionate and nurturing. Well, we don’t have a good way to measure how much of that is inherent vs. environmental, but we do know that women aren’t always interested in being any of these things, and men sometimes are.
The way forward is to acknowledge these distributions, treat people like people, and adjust based on what individuals are good at rather than whether they entered puberty at 11 or 14.
60
@Joel Friedlander
I've heard this argument for 45 years. It's just plain wrong.
43
Substitute “male” for “female” in your comment and watch the outrage.
I believe women are too emotional and irrational to hold positions of authority or responsibility. They’re best being left to homemaking or school teacher roles.
Only men have the rational analysis ability and work ethic to be in charge.
If it’s OK for you to be a misandrist, I can be a misogynist - sexism is now acceptable in the NYT.
12
Schools no longer teach logic and critical thinking skills. Rather they have become PC conformism indoctrination centers where good intentions and holding favored beliefs are rewarded. I’ve read nieces’ “A” work essays that were utter garbage: full of misspellings, poor grammar, run-on sentences, and a complete lack of support for stated positions BUT they espoused some PC drivel. In the real world facts and logic matter.
16
In med school girls do much better but never seem to head up department s.
7
There's a reason (aside from the author's name) that it's the "Peter Principle" and not the "Pamela Principle."
7
I'm a 5th grade teacher. When I asked students to self-assess their projects, many boys rated their effort 10/10, including several who hadn't even done the project. They claimed the ideas they had merited the top score. Not one girl rated herself above a 9, even with stellar outcomes. They told me 'there's always room for improvement.' Most of the kids had a realistic view of their project, but I've rarely seen girls be as overconfident in their skills as some boys have demonstrated. I think it's a reflection of our culture.
808
@MIna Same goes for resumes. The difference in the level of confidence displayed in male resumes as opposed to female resumes is staggering.
13
@MIna you are 100% correct. This research goes back to the 80's, showing girls much less confident, even when they are justified in being more confident. It is our culture that subtly reinforces this behavior in girls, and boys.
11
I, a boy, was assigned a persuasive letter to write and I decided to defend daca. When one of my friends, an excellent writer who is very critical read it, she claimed that it looked written by a professional. I gave myself a 90. When I was handing in the rubric I saw the two girls at the desk next to me both give themselves 100s on everything including extra credit that was impossible to have done. I personally read one of the girls letters and to put it bluntly it was terrible. The problem with this article is that it claims things in broad sweeps. Girls work harder and boys have an easy time at work. This is just not true. Is hard work the reason whites outperform blacks in school because I doubt that conclusion would get a very good reception.
8
Or maybe, instead of blaming women and saying they lack confidence or don't use their time efficiently or don't lean forward hard enough, we could consider that maybe schools, dominated by women in a low paying profession, don't have the same double standard women later find in offices dominated by men who often make much more money than teachers. It took me nearly 20 years in the workforce to realize that as a woman I am assumed incompetent and must diligently prove myself otherwise, while my male counterparts are assumed competent and must screw up royally to be possibly thought otherwise. Recognize and eliminate this double standard and women will thrive in the workforce. I know once I accepted it as a given, I started doing much better.
451
I completely agree with @Penny. After a number of years in the workforce, I have observed an entirely different standard applied to men and women. The "value" women are seen as bringing to a team is diligence and attention to detail - if you do not meet these expectations you are penalized and pushed out of the company. Men can get away with skipping these aspects of the job and relying on others, mostly women (who often toil behind the scenes with no recognition and less compensation). Simply put, someone has to put in the hard work in in most professions, it is not as simple as saying "skip it" and all will be ok. Women are expected to "do it all" if they want to succeed in the same way as men - not a physical possibility under these circumstances, and not something that men would be capable of either.
I am not sure that the advice in this article is setting women up for success in the workplace, with the exception of those women who go way overboard with preparation and could scale back a bit.
13
@Penny I agree, and that goes for nonwhite people of any gender even more. Safely white, academically superior and a prematurely powerful leader in my firm, I acted on these fronts. My promotion of women was legendary, and often ridiculed by my male colleagues. My push to have Martin Luther King Day made a firm holiday a year or more before it became official succeeded, but angered the firm’s controller and a number of others over the lost revenue. As powerful as I became before illness destroyed me, I never felt I could do enough. I recognize how atypical I was, reading this column and knowing the world. But I have an astoundingly accomplished wife, and helped raise four incredible, independent daughters. Our society needs to change, and is (look at Congress), but it will be a long process.
I intend to do my small part in my remaining years to assure that our clever little devil of a grandson, for whom I am the only male figure in his life, grows up respecting girls and women and people of all colors and creeds. I sometimes think that is how a lot of progress happens-quietly, one family, even one person at a time.
11
Women can have it all.. and it's still never enough.
6
Really, though, we would all benefit more from working toward a society in which industrious effort is rewarded more than boozy, schmoozy self-confidence. I could expand vehemently on this point as I've done before, but anyway... The writer means well but hits on the wrong solution, indeed the reverse of the right solution. Don't punish girls by making them as stupid as the guys. Make the guys try harder.
11
or . .. schools are fairer than the workplace? Schools tend to have more females in power than the workplace? duh.
7
Testosterone wins every time. Look at Trump. Dumb as a brick and his followers think he's the cat's meow because "Daddy," as he is sometimes called by the sicker ones, will protect us from all monsters. Why do you think Trump juts his chin out like Mussolini? This is all that anyone seems to want: outer strength. Appearances. Many women too. Look at all of the women who voted for Trump over Hillary. Why? For the same reason that most every superhero is a man. A dignified lady in a pantsuit holds no superpowers. She holds no threat. All of those crossed t's and dotted i's practiced by girls don't make any difference when the world plays the game of dog eat dog. Our biological nature bucks the idea of having anything but the stereotype of the mighty male in charge. Men have gotten used to this. Women try to make up in effort what men have in the symbolism of their biceps. We are that base. We are animals. But women can overcome. It just takes bravery. Take Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples. Although among what they used to call the "fairer sex" they speak their minds and talk to corrupt men as if they would take them down with their bare hands if need be. Dare them to hit you, ladies, and stand your ground. Suddenly muscles won't mean a thing.
6
girls become what they are by nature mothers so they stay home and take care of babies and the home like they are supposed to.
1
The author incorrectly assumes that the consumption of facts and repeating them back to the educator has anything to do with success in the world of work.
6
We will have reached true equality when incompetent women are as likely to be promoted as incompetent men.
10
This sounds like an argument for dumbing-down with the rest of them.
2
Guys hang with other other guys in a pack. If girls got "mobbed up" in the same way they could give guys a run for their money.
2
Goodness. I grow weary of pitting women against men - blacks against whites - whatever against whatever. Please, we're all born with the DNA chance gave us. But we are all God's children. I'm a Christian, so I love you - whomever you are and whatever you believe.
5
Let's put aside the extremely low quality social studies (they are full of bias and rarely establish causality, if ever) and the quasi-balanced arguments this author is making based on them. What's up with the title? Few weeks ago it was "fire your male broker" now girls "beating boys at school" and "losing to them at the office." I realize it is actually the NYT editorial staff that comes up with the titles and not the author, so my question is why is the NYT so intent on giving the impression that they have nothing but contempt for men? How do you think these titles (and sometimes the openly misandrous articles) make boys and men feel? How do you think their mothers feel? Is alienating people who do not hate men worth the clicks you are getting with your inflammatory and divisive rhetoric?
8
Where to start, from the biased assumptions to the cultish unthinking parroting of politically driven radical feminine doctrine this article is an example of what is so wrong in the world regarding conversations on gender differences: namely the thing that cannot be spoken – misandry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misandry ). Gender differences exist. Feminist dogma rules the education system, it does not (yet) rule the corporate world. The real world where most of us live recognizes this, those of us who have been initiated into the cult of feminism do not and it appears neither do the New York Times.
6
Perhaps many women take a long look at what it takes to get to the top; the dysfunctional sociopaths in many of those positions, what the jobs do to the men physically and emotionally, their ruined marriages, and the damage to their children, and say the heck with this.
5
Genetics?
I have been trying my best to post, mysteriously my comments never get approved even though I always post in polite and professional language. This article is dangerously misguided and blames the victim. It is especially dangerous as it is penned by a professional pscychologist. Please goto google scholar to find numerous articles on workplace gender discrimination, including some that precisely discuss the sad influence of sexist *teacher* attitudes towards so called "overachieving" girls. Example (among many, many others): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02783193.2011.580500?casa_token=KN1CD17n4P8AAAAA%3AAuvuuI4JkJTyQi5BnNBiOcWaMEM79BRHsZZlnSFMkdHYx_pJai4Jck1hwt7ghETfd_PK5XA9h17B&
I believe overachieving boys are told they will be leaders, but hardworking or overachieving girls are just "bossy" or "working too hard". Women lose confidence in the system, not themselves. Please don't blame the victim.
10
Let's try jazz. Why aren't there more female jazz musicians? I could answer that after 30 years of experience but I invite you to a blog about the current experiences of women jazz players.
http://www.sashaberlinermusic.com/political-and-social-commentary-1/2017/9/21/an-open-letter-to-ethan-iverson-and-the-rest-of-jazz-patriarchy
it doesn't matter the field, it still sucks for women. Men need to change, not us.
6
Gender bias??? This article is all about how girls are different from boys, and that the differences should by considered.
Some might consider the special attributes of girls to be an advantage, some may consider the special attributes of boys to be an advantage.
Let's not selectively deny the existence of the differences.
3
Interesting that nowhere in this conversation is how we help boys do better in school performance vis a vis girls.
6
There is sexism, wherever money is concerned. The entrenched power structure is self sustaining.
4
So we are just gonna disregard race as a factor for hindering women in the workforce, or are we not ready to have this conversation?
1
So school isn’t the real world? Wow, who knew this might be the case? Men struggle for dominance with other men on the playing fields of life, not Eton.
2
School is not the real world. It's anything but.
2
Did I read this right? Is the author, in essence, proposing that girls should as incompetent and unprepared men and jump straight in, for the sake of having a shot at attaining the professional levels of those incompetent and unprepared men? Say it ain't so!
2
School rewards following.
Power rewards leading and risk taking.
13
Again women blamed for more of the myriad constraints and impossible standards set for them. Platitudes! Ask, Speak Up, Lean In, Sit at the Table, You Can Have It All, Don't Be So Perfect ... how can a girl win when from her very first day every step is scrutinized while her brother is extolled for just showing up? Harsh? You bet. Laying the blame at the feet of girls and women for sexual bigotry that has been firmly baked into human culture for millennia only reinforces the status quo. Until females and what is considered feminine are valued, prized and rewarded as highly as the male and the masculine in family, in school, in work, in community and in religion we will continue to hear this well-intended, but ineffective lip-service. Talk is cheap! Yes, #me angry too.
10
why do we assume the perfect or optimum of business leaders must always be split 50% between men & women?
3
The statistics in the first paragraph belie the author's thesis; the fact is that one group ("girls") uses the entirety of the US population, and the other (95% of of top positions in companies) is based almost entirely on wealthy indivuals from wealthy families. This discrepancy makes the entire article nonsensical, and it's pretty shocking coming from a "clinical psychologist."
In order to create a valid thesis, you'd need to look at the population from which C-level executives spring, and find whether girls from that population outperform boys in school.
And if they do (which I suspect is still the case), you'd need to focus on a whole separate class of schools that are, in fact, mostly non-public.
But you'd also need to look at what else might be driving the girls of wealthy families from excelling in business at the same level as boys. I suspect that the results of such a study would be fascinating. Certainly, it would be more useful than this deeply flawed article.
5
This article rehashes an idea that is not new. I have read about this weak theory more than once over many years. The NY Times should have higher editorial standards.
Discrimination against women in the workplace is systemic and there are no repercussions for systematic gender discrimination. Write about and publish that.
Articles espousing such weak, unsubstantiated theories are clickbait and harmful, offering lame excuses instead of understanding and actions that can make a difference.
4
Just as we should question negatively those who feel a need to spend too much time at work (why can't you do your work within the time provided?) so should we question overwork in school (you know there are other things to learn, right?).
3
This article resonated with me in an intensely personal way. This is how I was...always feeling the need to prove that I was worthy of an A and working exceptionally hard to achieve in that regard. Even now, in my professional career, I've noticed that I am the one who volunteers to actually get things done. I've also noticed that when it actually comes to getting work done, it's the women who are willingly tasked and volunteer for the work. Men aren't the worker bees, but somehow manage to get the recognition and resulting promotion.
13
This is not only a problem in our professions, it is also a problem in our households. Women spend more time on chores and child rearing than most men. Which is something that should be reflected on and changed.
7
maybe it's the system and not the person, ms damour.
4
At what point do we look at the statistics of girls outperforming boys and think, "Do we have a boy problem to fix?" Maybe a solution to this would have benefits for all genders. Why is this author suggesting we should further micromanage girls?
10
Not hard to figure out that you are on the wrong track. Chinese, Japanese and Korean young people work very hard in school and are perfectionists. They succeed very well.
On the other hand sexism is rampant, not only in the work-place but everywhere, - even in the messages that many parents, often unwittingly, give their daughters.
3
I haven't encountered what the author is talking about. In my experience, I've met just as many girls who are happy to get the A in the laziest way possible, and just as many boys who anxiously over-prepare. Any difference in confidence seems to stem from sexism and patriarchy beating women's self-worth down, not homework.
Of course, that's just my anecdotal experience. But then again, the author only cites anecdotal experience herself.
7
Shocked by this article. While I agree with the thesis, this is not another thing that girls need to fix. As a culture, we confuse confidence with competence. Fix that and we can fix sexism.
9
Women's general lack of confidence stems from the fact that they constantly seek approval and affirmation from outside sources, rather than realizing their own strengths. The truly strong women I served with and under their command in my military career knew their own strengths and acted accordingly and it showed.
The article is simply yet another cry for Affirmative Action needed for upper middle class privileged women wanting to be in white collar executive positions.
They never publish articles about the lack of women in oil rig jobs, or any other high paying skilled jobs requiring hard, nasty labor in work spaces that don't involve air conditioning and cubicles.
7
Once again, the proposed solution to structural sexism is to tell women and girls to be different, instead of examining why the system we have is failing to recognize excellence in women.
How bout we start demanding of our leaders that they actually ARE “over prepared and under confident” — female traits, apparently—rather than the reverse?
Why is hubris considered a good leadership trait? This author swallows this line of thinking—which has brought us needless wars, the financial crisis, and global warming, among other joys—hook, line and sinker.
But maybe some “over prepared” and humble leaders are just what we need.
10
I've always heard that girls and women had more emotional intelligence than boys and men. They certainly seem to have more empathy as a rule.
But bulling their way through school by overworking themselves seems to me to be emotionally unintelligent.
In the working world, I encountered more than one woman who worked herself relentlessly without being compensated any more than those of us who did a good solid job, but didn't go over the top with the hours. And I was in a field where the managers were mostly women and the individual contributors were a close mix of men and women.
5
Oh please. The girls at the high school where I teach (and have taught for 22 years) have ALWAYS outperformed the boys. This isn't to say there aren't smart boys--it's just that there are 8-10 really high achieving girls for every high achieving boy. The girls walk in with color coded folders; the boys stuff everything into a binder that looks like a trash heap. The girls raise their hands, the boys shout out answers; the girls take their time on every test and proofread, the boys compete to see who can finish first. Girls work differently, think differently and process differently. Boys today need a giant dose of mental discipline. Boys in eras past got that; more was expected of them because NOTHING was expected of the girls. I remember in 1979 being one of two girls in pre-calculus class. Most of my girl friends were told they didn't need math beyond geometry. Girls are trying to catch up, in essentially 2-3 generations, for thousands of years of missing out on everything save motherhood, and cooking and cleaning. Even now my Hmong immigrant girls have me tell their parents through interpreters at conferences, "She plans to become a pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor, an engineer and support you in your old age. Her brother, the one continually playing video games, who does no chores, she wonders if he'll be living in your basement when he's 40!" Mom and dad are amazed but when they look at Junior's C's versus Daughter's A's, they see the light.
6
...or, maybe the problem is the workplace
5
Guess what?
Academic performance is not the same as workplace performance.
4
Politics - by BOTH men and women - I have seen women bosses who stopped advancement and pay of other women more often than men
8th grade math did not have politics - answer the objective question correctly and score the points
4
Maybe we should just demand more competence and conscientiousness from men at work...
I am always bemused that the (over)confident mediocre man is held as the desirable standard.
11
Boys mature later but then have equal smarts and disciplines as girls. Also they aren't getting any kids. When I was a student the saying was always that the boys aimed for an MSc and the girls for an Mrs - Just saying.
4
It's a bit ridiculous to say I should encourage my daughter to be a lesser student. Striving for excellence has served her well and is not a flaw. There is scant evidence in this article supporting the thesis. An anecdotal account of a boy crushing it at school with no effort isn't very useful to the conversation.
4
You are describing “over studying” as a disease to escape from. Imagine more students would have been infected and that this was classified as an epidemic of “over studying”. Our over educated people would have made better decision in life - starting with not electing Trump...
3
The only way women will ever achieve equality with men in the workplace is if they start to care much less about their children--like men do. Rising to the executive ranks requires an ethic that prioritizes work over children. To get to the C-Suite, you have be totally comfortable letting someone else raise your children (or else not have any). Trust me. I've done it.
There simply are not very many women, in my experience, willing to put their kids on the bottom shelf like this. But for men? No problem. The stats back this up--unmarried women with no children advance as far and make as much as men.
So, until women care less about their children--like men--and are involved in their kids' lives much less--like men--they will not achieve at work like men do. I know this is a hard truth. But if you think about it, anything else would be unfair. The plum jobs should go to the people willing to give the company the most.
2
I’ve worked with a lot of women over the years. I’ve even had a female boss for a few years. She was okay. Here’s the problem with women. Some are good and some are bad. But, the bad ones are difficult to deal with. Women get away with bad behavior at work. When they’re emotional, the men are expected to just deal with it. I remember when I got my first job out of college. There was a woman on our team. One day, my boss came to me and said, “Candice is upset.” That’s right. “Candice is upset.” Why? Because I helped out a client of hers and it made her feel inferior. But, you need to understand that he (my boss) would never have come to me and said, “Bill is upset” no matter what I did. And that’s the thing. Women can be difficult to handle in the workplace if they’re emotional.
3
Women who lean in are called B’s men are called stars. Women who excel are criticized. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it. It’s not school it’s the way things work. Women must do 2 or 3 or 10 times more work to get ahead.
When women are told by churches, polticians and the rest that their lives are second to their roles as wombs, how else do you think they will behave. Until women are seen as true equals and valued for the strength of their character and not the products of their wombs, it will not change. Anything else is a trivial distraction!
9
It always seems that the people with the least competence have the greatest confidence in their abilities.
I’ve always found that the more I learn in a given field, the more I realize I don’t know or haven’t mastered. This doesn’t occur to some people. Some of these incompetent people become Preside.
4
Blame women again. How about looking at the workplace: a closed system to benefit men and exclude women. When women are valued enough that they are paid at the same rate as men perhaps the workplace will become a meritocracy, rather than a bastion of male mediocracy.
3
This article has it backwards. It's not our schools that should change to encourage more confidence in girls. The girls have it right- knowing your stuff is the right thing to do. Instead, it's the workplace that needs to change to discourage overconfidence in men. This article talks about confidence as if it's universally good. To a degree, confidence is good, but overconfident and incompetent leaders destroy organizations and society. In my experience, almost all the mistakes of organizations and teams I've been on are due to overconfident men not putting in the hours to really understand the issues. They think they can wing it and cut corners and they're usually wrong.
2
I have heard and read of hundreds of women wanting to feel “safe.” Never once have I heard a man express this same desire.
2
Have you noticed that these over-prepared, over-achieving, over-anxious, over-nervous girls also can tend to develop eating disorders? I sure saw that growing up.
1
Boy, that piece was SO much better than I expected. Well done.
lt's biological. Male brains have less of an attention span than female brains, bc it benefits us in hunting, warring and establishing hierarchies. Without a tangilbe reward, boys will always be less interested in sitting quietly and studying with multicolored pencils. When they get into the real world, however, the fact of a paycheck and the competitiveness of office politics sparks their brains and they take off.
2
A friend of mine told me a boating story. He and his wife were approaching a port. "Which side of the red light should we be on" he asked. The response was "I don't know". But, he responded, "didn't we both take the seamanship course and didn't you get an A while I only got a B". "Sure" she answered, "but that was only to get a good mark. I forgot all that stuff when the course was over".
2
I was an female engineer for over 30 years. "Cutting and Pasting" and the acceptance of plagiarism did me in. For most of my career, taking good data, doing good analysis, and writing a good memo with my name on it, were all I needed to get ahead because it was hard to argue with results. No longer. Now that memo can just be lifted and pasted into a "team document" with me a "contributor" and some guy as "team leader." Often that guy did almost nothing but expound pointlessly at meetings for upper management. Nonetheless, he was off to greener pastures in a year, because of his superior cutting and pasting, er, leadership skills.
For me it was harder to be a female engineer in 2014 than it was in 1984.
7
As a high school psychology and sociology teacher, this article resonated with me. Though I can't really speak to the work place ramifications, I have long seen these differences in academics in boys and girls in the classroom. Of course there are exceptions, but I consistently see girls working harder than boys. I have also long sensed that girls are sometimes so focused on dotting every i and crossing every t, that they sometimes aren't learning the big ideas as well as boys do. Couple that with boys' confidence for asking questions, I would say boys are often more involved in their own learning than girls.
2
Sexism still is and may always be the underlying current to support the statistics of women outperforming in school and underperforming at work. In 1977, at the age of 22, I took a Hunter Safety course in Colorado. There was a test at the end of the course and as the instructor finished grading, he called out my name. "Did you cheat? he demanded to know. "No, why?" was my reply. "Because you got 100% right and no one gets 100% right, especially not a girl." To this day, my blood boils when I remember this.
281
@Marie
I suggest that you have a thing or two to teach that instructor.
Girls study and grind because they know that they are under more scrutiny. They have to work twice as hard to get half the credit.
It not so much about confidence as it is about entitlement and expectation.
31
What's wrong with competence?
It's not the conscientious girls who need to change; what needs to change is the system-- built on attitudes, bias and cronyism-- that rewards “[u]nderqualified and underprepared men [who] don’t think twice about leaning in”.
Competence and confidence are not mutually exclusive. This piece offers some good advice for building confidence without belittling competence; for example, taking sample tests to see how much is already known. It's too bad that the tone of the piece seems to favor doing "just enough to keep the adults off their backs" while shaming girls who "polish.... each assignment to a high shine".
4
I have two problems with the article.
First,as with so many of these analyses, the finger points at women/girls. They should do this, they shouldn't do that. (Should they lean in more too?) We all know that it is more complicated. Implicit bias in a workplace contribute to perpetuating the problem. I am a VP in a large tech company and I know for fact that I am paid well below my male peers. On a good day I am capable of understanding that it is not my fault. On a bad day, I question my competence. I am almost 50 and the unfair fact that I am paid less still undermines my confidence. Internalizing unfair treatment kills confidence, whether it is at school or at work.
Secondly, "parents and teachers can stop praising inefficient overwork, even if it results in good grades". Really? I thought learning was meant to be "inefficient" in that broader knowledge produced more competence. The fact that girls/women work harder, even if more "inefficiently" is the only reason why I always pick female physicians.
12
I also think that many boys focus their efforts more narrowly than girls. Where many girls try to be good at everything, boys are more comfortable with being very good at one or two things and getting by or even slacking off on the rest. I certainly was that way. As a high school student, I slacked off in math class, but went all out for the lead role in the school play. That focus can actually pay off later when people choose the careers that interest them most. Studies have shown that valedictorians, who get all A's in all classes, usually don't fare as well in the real world as some students who prioritize their true interests over other obligations.
3
Some data: I taught high school physics and astronomy for 20 years. In my 20 years my female students always outperformed my male students overall.
2
Success in school is mostly about the mind.
Success in life is a combination of many factors, as human beings are mind, body and some would argue: a soul.
Real life is life in the jungle.
A classroom is a very controlled and confined environment. Real life is like the Wild West: dynamic, political, where the intangible matters a great deal, such as thumos, charm, a gift for friendship, many of which fall under the term "EQ".
Think about it: Everyone forgets what they learned in college and graduate school a few months after leaving each school. Grades are merely signals and essentially meaningless, beyond helping one to get to a higher level of schooling or a job.
Einstein didn't have the greatest grades, and didn't care about them much, as he cared about the grander arena of ideas. In comparison, lawyers, who have much lesser life of the mind, care about grades a great deal, even years after law school.
High-achieving girls often rest all of their identity as a person of importance on their grades. But what happens when school ends and there are no longer any grades to achieve in the working world?
Life is mostly a confidence game. When one's identity and confidence is fueled by multiple areas of life, one is much more resilient.
An athletic frame of mind, learning how to fly a plane and getting a private pilot's license, learning how to do things that others don't like how to build a car, etc., are marvelous for developing and maintaining confidence.
1
Is it true? Academic achievement, good marks actually make someone excellent in a given field. Does a medical student graduating at the top of their class make a good physician? Confidence factory? With boys dropping out at far greater rates in all grades?
NPR disputed Presidential candidate Harris statement people's wages were not keeping up. NPR said lower wage males were falling behind but upper class women's wages were going up cancelling mens losses. With statistics to back them up they concluded since women were doing better there wasn't a problem.
Is this a problem for a clinical psychologist to solve? Maybe if they impartial scientist first and didn't let their feminist bias cloud their results but I'm afraid a very misinformed electorate will have to figure it out for themselves. Academia seems to lost touch.
2
A fair and open minded man, I enjoy reading this piece and almost all comments, partly because girl students do better than boy ones in my school. I agree that sexism plays a role.
To play devil's advocate, here are several points. First, although boys may not be as good as girls in study as a whole, a very small portion of boys distinguishes themselves. Take a regional public school as example. Almost all math count members are boys. This applies to its history club and its quiz ball club. Their teachers and advisers are women, and I do not think that they discriminate against girl students in selecting members. Second, leadership is an different animal. Smart and nice people are not good leader materials. Being a leader, you should have good interpersonal skills, and enjoy playing politics. I doubt a really smart and nice person really enjoy dealing with not so smart and nice people all the time. Third, to know what is important and what is not important is essential to success in almost all fields. We have limited time in this world. If you try to do well in all things, you will not be to shine in anything. Boys are more focused, unbalanced and passionate. This gives them some advantage. Finally, when people start to work, marriage and family life assume importance, and they are time-consuming. Most women have to bear and rear children, and this fact works against women.
6
I've often wondered how women's academic outperformance translates into college acceptances. While women are now attending colleges in record numbers, for some reason most of the top universities do not reflect women's academic achievements in their admissions - one notable exception being UCLA.
Places like Harvard appear to (over) gender correct (52% male, 48% female). I wonder how this affects the debate around Affirmative action. For example in Fisher v. University of Texas, could the case be argued that Abigail Fisher’s potential university spot was not taken by a person of color but by a man. And in the recent case against Harvard couldn't the same argument be made?
4
Was born in 1965, I remember growing up that my feelings, about anything, were never validated. I was the first girl after two boys and so my role was that of second mother. As soon as I was old enough, I had to take on house cleaning and other (women) oriented tasks that my own (working) mother would then inspect. My (3) brothers and even my younger sister were never subjected to such scrutiny. I am now a professional woman but still feel relegated to do the tasks that men don't do (and I am the most senior on my team), but get no recognition while they seem to just skim by getting accolades for the little they do. At this point I am just looking forward to retirement in a few years and if I take another job it will be very different because I won't feel the same obligations to make sure I cross every T and dot every I. It's truly disappointing that hard work and being detail-oriented, along with being a team player are just not recognized as they should be. You have to be a social butterfly and kiss up, neither of which I am.
10
When I was in college, I read a report that a male student had prepared. It started: "Great men have always done ..." and then went on with the rest of the narrative. It would never have occurred to me to begin a report that way. That was when I realized how differently men and women interact with the world.
Men stand buttressed by the weight of thousands of years of knowing their priority and stature in the world, and that this primacy is due largely to their gender. They may not articulate it as such, but its core to their being.
By comparison, any woman who exerts her power on history is seen as an interloper, an antagonist, to be criticized and stopped. At least that's been the case for most of human history.
I believe this difference is fundamental to why women double down, aim to perfect, and sit on the sidelines versus jumping to the center. We just don't have the same sense of our own primacy in the world.
Instead of trying to break out of the cage, we focus on making the cage as good as it can be.
15
Women represent the overwhelming majority of elementary school teachers. The curriculum is largely formulated and delivered by women. School board membership at the town level also skew heavily toward women. See any connection?As to why competent women thin out at the highest levels of corporate America, the article doesn't account for the fact that women leave their professions (they don't necessarily leave the work force) at significantly higher rates than men by early to middle age.
1
Perhaps this article is addressing the symptom, not the problem.
Perhaps corporate America should be rewarding competency instead of confidence.
15
With all due respect, you base the whole hypothesis on a one client that you see in your practice. A girl that is seeing you for anxiety is NOT representative sample for all middle school boys and girls.
As a parent of a boy, I see that school system caters more to girls than boys, so that's what I see as a reason for academic overachievement of girls.
5
I would ask you to consider some of the recent polling we are seeing for Democratic candidates for President. Thus far Joe Biden who hasn’t even declared his candidacy is running well ahead of all the women candidates and in many instances so is Bernie Sanders. This is not because they are more confident and or their platform is distinctly different. This is sexism pain and simple. Just like women face in the work place. In addition, their are both white males which also carries an advantage. Enough said.
4
I appreciate the author's efforts to shine a spotlight on this issue. However, I disagree with the premises made in almost every other paragraph. Firstly: hyper-conscientiousness and lack of confidence are two very different things- but the terms are used interchangeably throughout the article. One can be extremely conscientiousness while exceedingly confident. I agree that all exercises and studying should be done for good reason- grades are certainly not everything, and students should understand and be motivated by the utility of what they are studying. Perhaps my view is controversial, but I personally believe that if the content of one's studies are based, for example, on rote memorization rather than true conceptual understanding, then in certain cases it can be perfectly fine to gloss over that content, as long as it does not impair acquisition of useful future knowledge.
Secondly: given the structural and societal barriers that women face, perhaps it is an acute awareness of the challenges ahead (and the ability to think in the long-term) that drive such children to do their utmost best. If there was a reasonably equal balance of high-achieving role models and leaders for girls to look up to and identify with, then perhaps more would perceive this as being an achievable task. All students need to hone their instincts with regards to how much they work, and I fear that the author's advice could actually set girls back, just when they have begun to surge forward.
5
Wow...more people wondering why getting straight As doesn't equal a fast track ticket to a perfect life. Marks only matter so much. Personally, Ive seen plenty of high scholastic acheivers crumble in the real world and there are plenty of examples of only moderately successful academics doing insanely good work out in the real world. Marks and acdemic success are only important up to a point. Also - A type academic perfectionists should only be given so much control anyway. The world would not be able to survive the constant stress they feel and share about not being perfect 24/7.
2
Depends on your field
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
"National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track"
"Abstract
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at 371 universities/colleges from 50 US states and the District of Columbia. In the main experiment, 363 faculty members evaluated narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships who shared the same lifestyle (e.g., single without children, married with children). Applicants' profiles were systematically varied to disguise identically rated scholarship; profiles were counterbalanced by gender across faculty to enable between-faculty comparisons of hiring preferences for identically qualified women versus men. Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non–math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference."
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
Or collaterally, men are discriminated against 2:1, except in Economy Departments
2
The problem isn't just confidence, it is the failure of adults to instill fairness and equality early on in children. Girls work harder than boys and reap less than a tenth of the rewards in life because teachers, parents, coaches, and so on routinely gloss over girls' hurculean efforts and then praise boys for doing the bare minumum. By the time girls reach college they have learned that their work will go unnoticed unless they are "perfect", ie, have done far more than their male peers and perfectly. The solution would involve intensive training for teachers, parents, coaches to engage and praise boys and girls equally while at the same time addressing the glaring differences (usually) between young girls and boys' development. Girls mature intellectually and emotionally well before boys, so girls should be given more leadership positions early on, in order to both recognize their gifts and propensities and to also condition both sexes that girls are capable and effective leaders. The U.S. continues to fail girls through overt and tacit sexist conditioning in the early years. This needs to change.
3
No, not school per se, but college. Specifically, college majors. There are actually majors, such as Mechanical Engineering, where women earn slightly more, but most women don't gravitate to those majors.
A Glassdoor study* found:
"Many college majors that lead to high-paying roles in tech and engineering are male dominated, while majors that lead to lower-paying roles in social sciences and liberal arts tend to be female dominated, placing men in higher-paying career pathways, on average.”
****************
* "Women Dominate College Majors That Lead to Lower-Paying Work", Harvard Business Review, April 2017,
https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work
5
Schools are a closely managed environment where the objectives and the methods are defined in advance. The "real world" is a far different place.
It's amazing to me that if boys outperform girls, the prescription is more help for girls, and if girls outperform boys, Lisa Damour prescribes... more help for girls!
I guess nothing much has changed since this 2003 editorial in USA Today: "Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin."
(link:
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-08-28-our-view_x.htm)
From the editorial: "One fact explains why educators are ignoring boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. The U.S. Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning."
Fifteen years after that editorial, girls still get extra help, and boys still get Ritalin.
2
We Will Prove Women are Equals to Men By Any Means Necessary!
1
Maybe girls like school more than boys do. As the parent of a boy, I can say that it has been my experience that teachers (at the elementary level, especially) favor girls and have little patience for, or interest in, boys. My child is a great, hardworking student with good grades so he did OK. But every conference was about his fidgeting.
8
My first thought upon reading the headline of this article was the fact that one (school) is meritocracy-based; the other (business) is based largely on camaraderie. I would estimate perhaps 10-15% of the gap is influenced less by women "leaning in or leaning out", than corporate hierarchy's comfort level with the familiar, the traditional. While a gaffe made by a man in business can be a temporary stumbling block until his next success, the same error made by a woman can derail her upward career trajectory by years or end it altogether. Caution is the only sane response to this culture.
5
@Anita "the other (business) is based largely on camaraderie. "
Do you really think Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates are successful because of "cameraderie?" These are hard-charging guys that are often hated.
If anything, I'd say their success is due to their being willing to be hated, not to "cameraderie."
Now as a woman in my early 70s, I look back on my school years. I was definitely a slacker (in all advanced classes), got through with a solid B average, went to college at a good, semi-prestigious school. Now hold a MA. Two things strike me. One is that this was before the days of the be all and end all homework. I often didn't do it all -- just a few of the harder problems to be sure I got the concepts. I BSed my way through a few literature discussions by listening to the other students. Yet today I am an information and understanding sponge. I learn everything I can get my hands on. What I do feel is a bit of sadness that back in those days no one encouraged me to consider medicine or law -- that now, when I could really use extra income, I have little to fall back on in terms of credentials. But then again, I have a lot of knowledge and experience. Maybe I need confidence. Not sure overworking in school is the theft of our confidence. Maybe it is just sexism. Incidentally, there are many jobs I could do as a volunteer -- just no pay check. Been there, done that.
4
In school, everyone does the same assignment and is graded by the same teacher. Students who work hard can be recognized, because their work is definitively better. Girls can succeed if they put in the effort, even when there is sexism in school. The math test doesn't lie. And girls, who are under more pressure to be "perfect," can work hard and do well. At work, not everyone is doing the same tasks, group projects disguise who is doing what, and socializing well with a (mostly male) management team can impact who gets ahead. Women have to work even harder to get recognized, and get penalized for things that men don't get penalized for, like being outspoken, showing assertiveness, or even being confident (for women, it's seen as "too confident" or "bossy"). In the workplace, it's also easier for managers to be outrightly or subsconsciously sexist ("she's just not a cultural fit" or "she's just not ready for leadership"). Just telling women that they need to be more like boys or more confident is not going to solve all issues in the workplace. A recent study showed that women who followed the networking strategies of men (network widely and shallowly) had less work success than those who had a smaller network of stronger (and more female) ties.
8
"...the difference between a 91 and a 99 is a life." Best line in the article. That said, I would drop that bottom number down to around 85 since that represents mastery for most and still provides opportunities for excellence in tasks that matter.
Learning Specialist
3
This article yet another one again blaming women- in this case girls- for a sexist world. When I read that boys get A's for work with less effort than girls put in for an A, my immediate thought was, "why are boys being rewarded with stellar grades for less than stellar work?" The author's conclusion is that girls need to lower their standards rather than teachers and employers raising their standards. Maybe girls have anxiety because tbey know they are held to a higher standard than boys. As a woman in an overwhelmingly male field, I think this article described my experience. Yet my conclusions are quite different from hers. I am all for helping girls with anxiety gain relief. But in a man's world, the man's swagger will continue to be rewarded. Women's approach to the world will continue to be defined down as defensive. Perhaps we need to let girls know we do not live in a meritocracy.
10
@Alex: Why do you interpret the example cited as "boys being rewarded with stellar grades for less than stellar work"? The article doesn't say that. It says, "Her brother, in contrast, flew through his work. . . If his grades slipped a bit, he would take his effort up just a notch." Maybe in this case the brother is smarter or even just a better test-taker than his sister? It's one anecdote.
4
1. 100% of the salaried jobs I have had in my career (a total of 5 companies across a variety of industries) have put a strong emphasis on "face time". It's fine if someone (male or female) can get the work done in 4, 6 or 8 hours, but the expectation is to be there way beyond 9-5
2. Women have children and absent themselves from the office, which negatively impacts the ability to participate in "face time".
7
Some of the conclusions regarding C suite bias, culture, confidence and nature may be a bit of looking in the rear view mirror although confidence is a trait that successful men more often exude. With a grown son and daughter both in non-gender stereotypical relationships, my son does the cooking and my daughter while sensitive is less nurturing. And now there are more female freshmen Democrat congressmen than men, the times they're a changing. I do believe that some of the perfectionist traits making more women better students often results in women as their own worst enemies, being critical of each other which perpetuates a vicious cycle leading that saps confidence.
2
I see more laziness in boys than girls. Perhaps it is the lack of conscientiousness or even laziness that I see in boys more than girls. A dear friend laments that his grandsons do well in school when their parents are on top of them. The minute they back off, it is back to good enough. I see a thread of laziness in all of them and a lack of conscientiousness. One of the boys is supremely confident despite being an average student and athlete - where those that come from? The other is shy and not a go getter and he does lack confidence. The third is similar to the second one. Perhaps conscientiousness is something that can be passed on. It goes a long way.
1
Stop blaming teachers - who are products of deeply rooted and historic biases just as we all are - for every problem. I teach at a low-income high school where both boys and girls, for the most part, have a strong, anchored sense of self. They don't overcompensate with ineffective perfectionism or baseless self-confidence - and most teachers I know would never let either habit slide by in student work. If they do, the students themselves will call this out. The biggest anxieties these young, very talented kids face is not the stuff of any feminist think tank - it's poverty, not knowing how to pay for college, having parents who work two jobs or night shifts and aren't home, or having to work themselves after school. And let's not forget the endlessly distracting, achievement-gap-enabling cellphone.
6
Hello? The clue phone is ringing!
No. Just. No.
What happens when women at the office choose not to kill themselves to outperform and exceed expectations yet still get passed over for that advancement and still earn less than their male counterparts?
Absolutely something needs to change but it ain't women.
12
@jessbro: That makes no sense. You're saying directly that a person should be rewarded equally for "choos[ing] not to kill themselves to outperform and exceed expectations." What? Not until men can choose to cut back and still get rewarded.
This article may get at one important consideration; girls may be more anxious, may overwork. But the larger concern (for me) is gender bias in grading. Girls have learned that they need to be stellar to get an A, whereas in many settings, due to gender-based assumptions about competency, boys work only has to be very good. Shankar Vedantam, the PBS correspondent, did an interview back a few years where he quoted an Israeli study showing that boys math papers were graded higher than girl's papers when the genders were known, but gender-blind grading yielded no such disparity. (And, intriguingly, most of the graders were women.) As many comments have already reflected, girls can't feel safe in changing until the system (our biases) change. This seems to be equally true for our daughters in classrooms as it is on the streets, or at college parties.
6
My experience in school included a keen sense, from the get-go, that boys were favored over girls. They would get called on first, they wouldn't be punished as harshly for being chatty, or whatever. As a result of this, I became the embodiment of "lean in," as early as 7 years old. I would blurt out the answers faster than anyone so that I wouldn't get beaten to it by boys who would get called on first. Yeah, it was rude, but it served me well through school.
The problem is the world. The "leaning in" isn't appreciated but if you don't lean in, you get ignored. So it almost boils down to making a negative impression or making no impression, neither is a formula for success or being taken on an equal basis with the guys.
It boils down to the fact that girls and women are severely undervalued. Severely.
6
I went to an all boys high school. I’m speaking anecdotally, of course, but it seems that having one gender may have helped the situation.
I took honors and AP classes. We were all middle and working class kids, mostly from the suburbs, and we were all grinders. We weren’t competing with girls, just ourselves and each other. And we worked hard to achieve class rank, student government positions, honor society accolades and all that. I think many of us knew that our only route to college was to rack up the achievements in high school and get scholarships.
That said, the corporate workplace in particular is a sexist boys club. I don’t envy women who are trying to succeed in it. But I’m glad I’m not part of it.
1
One could with equal fairness ask, "Why are schools set up to reward girls' dutifulness and compliance, and not to reward boys' restless activity, risk-taking, and ability to say 'no'?"
8
@Tom Oh, indeed. One thing we definitely need to do is to reward boys more.
As a very successful Professional Civil Engineer, I ran a consulting office in LA where the senior engineers were all female. Some married with kids, some married with no kids, some single. They were all great. Good engineers with sound technical judgement, competent project managers, good communicators, hard working but most did not let the job run their lives. Now this was 20 years ago and women had to fight to even get into and through engineering schools (MIT, Cal, Cal Poly, A&M, etc.), on occasion they seemed a little defensive, probably as a result of their educational and previous work experiences. But on balance they exhibited sound technical judgement, did not cut corners, and could stand toe to toe with a male counterpart and successfully argue their point.
Can't say that Ms. Damour's article is nonsense, blaming women for their lack of success, but it sure has not been my experience. (BTW, I am Julia's husband, a very straight male and combat veteran, civil engineer and all that. Julia has never let gender get in her way either)
5
"Work smarter, not harder" is touted in tech, and even Bill Gates said he'd rather have a smart employee who works less than someone who works too hard and is inefficient. The deification of "work ethic" in the US needs to end. It's left over from the Puritans, it's been touted to enrich the rich, but in today's era, it's obsolete. Hard work isn't all that it's cracked up to be. We should be maximizing our efficiency and enjoying our lives. When we stop teaching our kids that nose-to-the-grindstone work is next to godliness and the only means to educate ourselves or "get ahead", chances are our girls will ease up on themselves.
3
Rather than encouraging girls to take it easy, perhaps we should require boys deliver work product comparable to that of their female counterparts, or suffer poorer grades (forced curve and blind grading, perhaps?). Maybe if our culture were one where all students are incentivized to work harder and strive for excellence, our country would not lag behind so many others in academic achievement. This is particularly true for math and science achievement, fields traditionally demanding heightened discipline, focus, accuracy and perfectionism. This could in turn have the latent benefit of helping eliminate the "confidence advantage" suggested by the author.
2
I think it is at the same time simpler and more complex than this - from the beginning, we're told (likely not so bluntly) that we're not good enough because we're female. We feel we have to work harder to prove people wrong, but the "not good enough" messages keep coming, so we feel we have to keep working. Of course, our confidence is shot! I'm mid-career and faced a situation like this at work just in the past week. My background is extremely privileged - just think of what it's like for women not as fortunate as I am.
2
I found it interesting that the author's prescriptions for fixing the problem focused on what girls should be doing differently - work smarter, not harder, dial back the effort, don't seek to excel when you can get away with less. That doesn't seem to the be right message to send to our girls. The problem is a system that doesn't reward their efforts, not with our girls trying too hard. I would have liked to see more discussion of the larger structural reasons why our society rewards the over-confident and under-qualified (both men and women). I understand that the author is a child psychologist so that discussion might be outside the purview of this opinion. But it's a question worth considering - and harder to fix.
15
Guidance counselors in many high schools continue to dissuade girls from competing with boys by advising them to enroll in courses less intellectually challenging than such courses as AP calculus and AP physics. It's not as bad as it once was, when counselors were persuading girls to take home economics instead of higher math and science courses. But the problem still persists. Once they reach the work force, women continue to battle the glass ceiling. That, too, has been somewhat mitigated, but women still face an uphill battle for equality.
1
A lot of the discrepancy probably has to do with the entrenchment of men in upper management. Add in the who'd you rather have a beer with / play golf with / take with you on a business trip to Vegas factors and you get men, hiring and promoting men. Another major difference between school and work is that School is an individual game. Work is a team sport. Qualities like perfectionism are great in individual games, but not exactly pleasant to be around in team activities.
11
(I am a woman and professional counselor. This is my husband's account.) Confidence is a core issue for girls, and they certainly do try to make up for its lack by working hard and harder and aiming for perfection. We think perfection is how one succeeds because the social pressure on us is intense, but in the workplace what we need is support from those in power, not just another approach. Many women realize that men get into positions of power by tapping into social and business networks that keep power centralized, but they think that means they just have to work harder and be better. They don't realize that women can work as hard as humanly possible but without the support of men they will usually end up spinning their wheels. That is the hard truth and one that's difficult for both genders to deal with.
8
Excellent article! As the mother of two daughters: one who went the extra achievements mile on a regular basis, and the other who was content as a B student, both became successful in their own ways professionally. They also have "chutzpa" which isn't necessarily taught in schools.
2
Your underlying assumption is that teachers and schools judge the talents of their students in a meaningful way and that worthy girls get shoved out of the way in the rough and tumble world of business and the professions where aggressiveness and other less worthy traits prevail.
Is it not possible that the teachers at grade school, middle school and high school levels simply do not do very well judging the boys?
Boys are often less controllable and less tractable in class and may challenge the authority of the teachers and be downgraded.
As the mother of sons, I was intrigued to see how much "smarter" they got the higher the level of education they rose. By college both sons were at the top of their class (rising above the girls) and in medical school they somehow were judged even better.
At their middle school, 40% of the boys but only 10% of the girls were being treated for ADD.
The problem, dear professor may not be in the boys, but in the teachers.
8
I studied in a male dominated field in college (electrical engineering) before going on to medical school. My college professors bent over backwards to help me, I had amazing advisors and got really great opportunities. I worked my rear end off and was rewarded. But my male classmates were also rewarded, even when they didn't do as well on the exams. I never went on to engineering grad school because despite success in college I was *sure* I wasn't good enough; meanwhile some of my male classmates went on to get PhDs easily. I went to med school mostly because I didn't have any other plan. Med school was a different beast than college-- I was fast tracked by a "mentor" into a "woman's field" (pediatrics, btw. I have no interest in caring for sick children though), while almost all of the men in my class were mentored into surgical specialties and medical specialties. Eventually I found mentors on my own, but it wasn't easy. And one day in our last year, while in a group of students we found out who made the top 10% of the class, and my male classmate scoffed- "I can't believe they wasted a spot on you, you're just going to get married and have babies and go part time." I called him out, but no one came to my defense.
My point: Even when overworking and being showered with praise and mentorship, I didn't think I was worthy. And then by the time I figured out I was, I also figured out the system was rigged against women. The article is only addressing half the problem.
7
We should also probably acknowledge there is nothing magic in the criteria that we have established for success in school and that it translates pretty poorly to real life. There are basically no situations in the actual economy that reward someone for studying a subject for a finite period, taking a test on in for an hour and have success determined by the result of the test.
It’s a false paradigm and telling children that success in it will prepare them for the workplace is misleading and unhelpful.
8
I feel as though I need to work extra hard to get good grades, so I can have a safety net. This happens to men too. Maybe not a lot of men, but it's not purely women.
Also, I would argue that men being underprepared and overconfident is the problem, not that women are overprepared and underconfident.
I don't want my doctor to be some rich kid who has felt like he can rely on his wits his entire life. I want my doctor to be someone who studied hard.
It seems like a short sighted solution to tell women to be like men.
12
@agarose2000
And sadly, this means that despite your experience and “empathy,” you’re perpetuating the same problem that women face in the workplace; an assumption that they will be unable to rearrange their priorities to put career ahead of family. No one makes this same assumption for a man with kids. And what about a single mom whose career prospects directly affect her ability to provide for her kids? Doesn’t she deserve the same opportunity to advance, improve her income and thereby her family’s opportunities?
After numerous years in the classroom at both the collegiate and secondary level the problem is brilliantly articulated thus:
“Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” they wrote. “Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect.”
1
While this article is spot on with the gendered behaviour in school, it is extrapolating to this being the root cause of what is happening in the workforce. School taught me what the expectations were and to perform to meet them, the expectations in the workforce are the same. In the professional workforce, women are expected to be more detail oriented, go above and beyond and deliver perfection. When (exactly as described in the article) I observed that those who got ahead were skating by with 80%, I tried to follow suit. I got my wrist slapped for not being "detail oriented, letting things slide and making mistakes". I'm smart enough to differentiate between the 80% that matters and the 20% churn. Case in point, all those who sailed ahead were men. Sexism is the problem, not school.
8
WOW! My mother (the only African American in her 1957 class at Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania) gave me (now her physician son) this advice in 10th grade (1971) when she saw how much work I put in Biology to end up with the top grade in class at each six weeks reporting period.
Never impressed by grades, she said, “You will never have time to do that in medical school. Now see if you can figure out how to go through that chapter ONCE, and still learn what you need to know.” I did! Even when it was not the top grade, it was always good enough. She simply smiled.
It was that advice that changed my study habits at age 14 and made me so comfortable with college, medical school, and with getting a good night’s sleep rather than ever pulling an all-nighter. I just knew I would be okay. That confidence was almost certainly contributory to my becoming a successful physician executive in corporate America.
The funny thing is that my mother's brother always said she had "a male brain!" Maybe this article helps explain what my uncle was speaking of.
14
@MW
Thanks for sharing. I think your story is important as it points to a fundamental problem in our society, which is championing a "work yourself to death" mindset instead of looking for ways to improve efficiency so we can live balanced and sane lives.
5
@MW
That's a great story. And thanks for demonstrating that you read and understood the piece. I was beginning to thing that either Luke and I were the only two folks who did, or Luke and I were going nuts.
2
Why not work on encouraging boys to be more conscientious and rewarding conscientiousness rather than overconfidence, if we're going to teach someone to change? Leaving aside for the moment the sexism of always telling girls and women they are doing it wrong (even when it's a case where they are apparently doing things too right), I'm not sure our society really needs a whole bunch more emphasis on confidence over competence at the moment.
9
It's been said a few times already above, but I'll hammer it home again.
CHILDCARE is the biggest factor. You can't ignore it.
I am a male with a good job, and when my kid was ages 0-3, I tried to be the best 'Mr mom' since at the time I was lightly semiemployed and my wife was fully employed with a high paying job.
It wasn't a surprise to me, but you really are still shocked by how this limits professional advancement when you have to prioritize childcare over leaning in. My wife was kind enough to go part-time when my job prospects brightened, but I've never forgotten how impossible it is to keep up both a high powered career track as well as being a primary childrearer.
The worst part unfortunately, that despite becoming more empathetic to new moms in the workplace, when I think of the crushing work+home load they carry, it does make me think twice before I consider them as prime advancement candidates in the workplace. Moreso than before I had kids, unfortunately.
5
Overconfidence is a common characteristic in boys that celebrated and considered 'cheeky'. This translates into greater confidence and social reciprocation later in life, a privilege that girls don't have to the same extent.
But I am worried about the oft neglected converse question: Why are boys underperforming and failing to meet the same academic success?
In terms of the percentage of college degrees acquired, high marks attained, and depth of education, women are all out pacing men, what can we do to close the gap that is forming?
6
Put more women in positions of authority and send the message to men that it’s finally time to step up!
1
We have found this replicated in research doctoral theses. On average the concluding sections of male candidates' research theses, that detail the research claims and their implications, are twice the length of their female colleagues. This impacts their work's reception and their own advancement in their academic field. It has been my observation that male candidates are far more likely to 'lean in' and confidently assert the implications of their research. Though I find no drop-off in terms of initial research work and preliminary findings, it has been my observation that too often women candidates tend to hold back and in general show less confidence in stating their research claims and their implications. Not satisfied with the status quo, we are, through training and encouragement, seeing the confidence gap narrowing, but there is still much work to do.
2
As a girl, I was a very good student who used my time efficiently and had great self confidence. I also had great self confidence in my job but that doesn't explain why I was hired at a lower salary than my male peers, given lower raises, and not considered for certain positions. It had nothing to do with my capabilities, use of my time, or confidence. The same is very sadly true for a lot of my female friends.
14
It’s not that complicated. I’ve seen it with my son and his friends. They abhor the tediousness and artificiality of school. They do not see it as worthy of their effort. Also, boys do not have the people-pleasing gene. They seriously do not care if they get the gold star. Most girls, however, it is either socialized or inherently in them. The problem is, nobody cares how stellar your grades are in the workforce. It’s more about strategy and tactics and when girls polish all of those academic apples, they are looking inward to do the perfect job. Looking inward does not develop skills in strategy and tactics. If anything, it impairs them. And let’s not forget that corporate America was set up by men, for men. Things haven’t changed that much in the structure of it since its inception.
5
There is so much research around the culture of gender. I wish this article would have leveraged some of those insights, instead of positioning women and men as “being” a certain way. Each of us play a role, as a society, in socializing our kids and rewarding them for "being" this way (e.g. teaching girls to build rapport, while teaching boys to build status). More importantly, I wish the takeaway here wasn't to put it back on women to adapt.
3
Social structure and culture are operative, so psychology of making the grade is overwhelmed by more macro factors. Most women don't even get close to powerful strata; structures shut us out way before. With men in the top, powerful structural positions, we get pushed into subservient positions and into bed. There are few good responses, because it isn't really about having a good response to demeaning conditions.
2
@Marilyn Sargent. Why do,you let that happen?
This piece reminded me of myself. I used to rewrite my notes until there were no crosscuts; and my class notes were color coded. I then went to Wellesley, where my classmates and I agonized over anything less perfection. Having said all that--what is sorely lacking in this piece is a full acknowledgement of the workplace obstacles that prevent women from moving up as men do. Let's be real, there are many.
5
So, boys are falling behind in school more and more, but we need to do more to help girls succeed. It’s the GIRLS who need the most help still??
7
@Aaron Michelson
Yes. Maybe we need to stop overly praising boys for mediocre performance, and expecting more from men than bluster, obfuscation and diversion. I am a female attorney and have seen too many mediocre men at the top propped up by too many hard-working women. Too often, the emperor has no clothes.
1
When are we going to drag Public Schools into the 21st Century? This 19th-century model should be updated.
Other reasons why some girls strive for perfection: first, if every question posed by the teacher is answered correctly, then the teacher see that the lesson has been understood and will permit the class move on. Second, the conviction that mastery of the basics is a prerequisite for the eventual achievement of something new and truly wonderful--intellectually, creatively, and romantically.
2
This success at the office canard (or lack thereof) ignores the reality that women and men are wired differently.
Women have DNA coursing through their veins that rewarded their ancestors for being good at nurturing and caring for the next generation.
Men have DNA coursing through their veins that rewarded their ancestors for being good at hunting and defending their families so they could survive/thrive to the next generation.
It's why women can differentiate between 10 shades of red in lipsticks whereas men see a single color....red. Those who chose poorly when picking berries didn't live through the weekend. Those who could...reproduced and those genes that give sharp focus in the rods and cones in our eyes were passed along.
You really have to look no further than the NBA or NFL to see how genetics works. My husband was born with a disease he's been stuck with since birth. Thankfully his inability to touch the rim of a 10' high basketball hoop was overcome by his ability to do complex math and statistics.
Each of us has to first acknowledge we are the creation of 300 million years of hierarchial order and structure fighting chaos on a minute by minute basis.
The ear in our noses and ear canals...the nails on our toes...the trees...grass...animals...all have to survive natural selection to achieve their full potential..
To deny this is to deny science.
Denying women are better at some things and men are better at other things is denying science.
5
@Erica Smythe
Note, DNA does not course through your veins, it is in all your cells and replicates frequently (which is why we shed skin and hair).
Almost none of our modern jobs require either hunting or physically defending families, just like only edible berries are picked and sold at the supermarket (next to the meat that women can easily put in their carts).
Aggression in men and perhaps mistaking the workplace for a family are both not helpful to society. For each bully that commands attention, there are many people in the room who can not contribute. Similarly, women who are not listened too also cannot contribute. Providing for the family in most cases depends on both parents earning enough money, which should be commensurate with skills and effort. Men are also very much needed by their children as role models to both sons and daughters, so they shouldn't be working 80 hours a week.
1
Teachers would do better forcing girls and boys to work together on projects year in and year out with grading for equal effort. It would teach comradery. I truly believe that the reason for my lagging the men in promotions over the last 40 years is that I am a bit foreign to them. Better to work with and promote the guy that shares your love of sports, laughs at your mimicry of a woman's higher voice, is fun to have a beer with and is just comfortable to be around than a potential threat, an other. Promoting professional interaction should start in kindergarden!
8
In order to hold a top (C or VP level) position at a large company you have to put your job ahead of your family. Men have been doing this for years. Women who wish to obtain a corner office need to either remain childless or marry a stay at home dad. The problem with the latter is that study after study has shown that high powered women are overwhelmingly attracted to high powered men, while plenty of high powered men have no problem marrying a woman who doesn't have or want a high powered career. This more than anything else is why there is a discrepancy at the top.
The author would do better to look at both current levels and trends of males vs. females in Director level positions. If they exist at that level and aren't improving, then she has a point.
4
I think it's really that girls and women are judged so severely all the time. We're always too aggressive or too passive, too messy or too neat, too loud or too quiet, too attractive or too dowdy, etc. etc etc. Of course our girls try to get it right, but the culture is ready to criticize them, no matter what. Boys and men, on the other hand, are far less criticized.
6
This is a phenomenal article and the comments are also intriguing. Is lean in the answer? I’m not sure it is. Women are in a tough place.
3
Maybe I was lucky having been hired by a man as a Telecom Project Manager at age 45 who frequently partnered with males in my Dept on large projects and we all got along quite nicely. My daughter is an Engineer who manages over 100 people. I am sure that there are many women who are discriminated in their jobs by their male counterparts and are either not hired or promoted. What do my daughter and I have in common, the ability to say "if you don't like me because I am a woman, that is your problem, not mine?'
3
A point of data in the discussion of gender differences in effort and corporate success:
Ride any 5:15 AM or 5:30 AM train into the City and note the gender breakdown of the professionals on the train with you. I would be shocked if 5% of those trudging into their work in those predawn hours are women. This is across every age group (from the very young to the very old), not just those that may be attributable to age groups that may have to go in later to take care of children getting ready for school.
How would this dynamic fit into the narrative of this article?
6
I would be shocked if more than 5% of those at home getting kids ready for school or daycare are men. Womens work is often invisible but they are usually the ones with the unpaid and thankless job of taking care of the kids that enables the man to get into work early and stay late, Our culture values this office face time as hard work, even though it is no harder or more valuable than childcare.
4
@EJK
I am certainly not saying that women’s work is valueless, but I am saying that along the dimension of corporate succees, men (but not generally women) appear to be engaged in at least one activity that takes a great deal of effort that would seem to contribute to the disparity in results.
1
I am in my 70’s. When I grew up, boys played a lot of team sports and young girls not nearly as much. Boys learned how to work as a team to reach a goal. Today the girls are very active in team sports and the delta between girls and boys has narrowed greatly.
Working well as a team member is one of the most important characteristics an individual can have in life. Learning to be a team player and not using “isms” is the path to follow.
Ask women in my age group what they think.
7
Giving girls advice that they should do "just enough" sends the wrong message. It says that the purpose of school is just to get grades or "keep adults off your back". School should be about the joy of learning and finding your calling in life. Staying up til 2am because you're worried is bad, but staying up til 2am because you're excited about the subject or can't put the book down is fabulous. The real problem with schools, for both genders, is that they don't engage students' intrinsic motivations and passions.
11
@Henry Lieberman
Funny ,boys can spend 40 hours a week shooting hoops in the backyard without being criticized ..
There are other reasons to stay up until 2am:
You are within 1 point of a higher grade
It's a rare event, either another school or non-school event conflicted
Reasons to study more than your friends (but maybe more days and not until 2am)
You want to succeed in a difficult field (STEM)
You want to improve your skills, either tech or writing
You want to be well prepared for a presentation, speech, etc to reduce stress
This class feeds into a whole series (math is classic example, conquer Calc 1 with an A or A+ and the whole sequence will be easier)
You want to really succeed .. Ivy League .. or get into state flagship .. or make
Bad reasons include
Mistaking cramming for studying, short term memory is fickle and unreliable
You actually are getting too tired to perform on the test or other activity the next day
This is a habit and shows poor planning / studying skills
This is due to overscheduling, either your personal one or a school that is too competitive (NJ schools seem to get this rep a lot)
Lots of course content is contained between a B and an A student or even a 91 to a 100. The way tests are made really requires that you use C type questions for the bulk with a few differentiators to determine A or even Bs. These are hard questions and are also somewhat random in content (you have to study a lot of content to cover all the A questions).
1
Is school the problem?
Seriously?
As a woman who put minimal effort into school work growing up, and did very well academically, I've never been short of confidence in school or the workplace. That goes over terribly with both men and women in the workplace.
There is nothing wrong with girls or women. The problem is that women are consistently beat down when we exhibit confidence and fail to defer and fluff the egos of our male colleagues. I would be utterly shocked if this reality weren't entirely obvious to every confident women who has ever set foot into the working world.
Stop blaming the victims. The problem is Patriarchy.
17
Exactly. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
2
To summarize: "What do you call someone who got C's in medical school? Doctor."
Which is all good and fine, but simply recognizing that a 99 and a 91 are the same grade won't change the way women are treated in the business world. This "let's try raising girls differently and see if things get better in 20 years" approach is just kicking the can down the road.
4
@Skip and raising boys differently
One reason girls do better in school than boys in today's America--a reversal of long-standing traditional beliefs that girls just aren't as smart as boys and don't need much (or any) education--is that American culture encourages anti-intellectualism in boys.
Just look at what our pop culture feeds to boys. It's all superheroes and WWE wrestlers and aggressive video games and dumb sitcoms and songs with anti-social lyrics.
Look at the social status and media treatment of the boy who makes the all-state team in his sport versus the social status of the boy who scores high on a national math exam or wins an all-state music contest. The boys with intellectual or artistic inclinations become targets for bullies, unless they can "redeem" themselves by participating in a sport. That's why coaches can claim that they have a lot of straight-A students on their teams. It's a form of protective camouflage for these boys.
Girls can get by with being straight-A students as long as they aren't too geeky about it. Their achievements may also be driven by seeing the many goof-off boys in their class and realizing that they may have to depend entirely on their own efforts to achieve a decent life.
6
Look at Amazon or any bookstore at your favorite type of books: mysteries, lives of saints, history, etc., etc.
Count the number that are by and/or about men. Compare that number to those that are by and/or about men.
Check out your child's grade school readers. How many of the stories and illustrations feature boys? Compare that number to those featuring girls.
Etc.
2
Perhaps the system should encourage boys to be more concerned about excellence, and not just a grade. The superficial clinging to grades as sole and sufficient measures of success are one of the major problems plaguing the US today. If you get girls to cut more corners like some boys do, you will make society worse for everybody. One way to even the playing field would be a more progressive income tax, so that higher salary does not lead to outrageously larger disposable income.
5
Schools in America started to recruit women more, mainly after WW2. Now almost 75 to 80 percent school teachers and staff are women.
American schools need to recruit more men as it can restore balance in teaching and also grooming girls and boys on a more equal footing in terms of gender equality.
3
I found the discussion in the comments about this opinion pieces very interesting, particularly the many contributors who noted possible reasons girls tend to do better in school than boys, at least before college. Some of them that are mentioned/suggested below include relative behavior in class, ability to complete tasks, compliance with teacher directives, and predictability. One commenter observed that girls tend to be quiet, follow instructions and rules while boys tend to be aggressive, bend rules, seek attention by standing out and the teachers either consciously or subconsciously factor that into grades. Another commenter said that assignments often favor girls' strengths and boys' weaknesses. Yet another said that in their experience as a middle school science teacher, the girls were way more reasoned and methodical than the boys.
The reason I find this interesting is because of the debate in NYC (and in the Times' comment sections) about the Mayor's proposed changes to the admission criteria for specialized high schools, phasing out the SHSAT exam and replacing it with a system heavily reliant on 7th grade GPA.
[More to follow]
1
[continued from above]
If commenters here are correct, then using grades to decide admissions would seem likely to result in a bias toward admitting girls over boys, even where the boys might be able to perform as well or better at the academically challenging, exam-heavy specialized high schools. It would also explain a recently promoted study claiming to show that the SHSAT is biased against girls because data shows girls tended to outperform in HS GPA based on predictions resulting from SHSAT scores. And it explains why in NYC screened schools, like Beacon and Eleanor Roosevelt, where GPA and other non-test factors are part of the admissions process, girls far outnumber the boys. Abandoning the SHSAT seems likely to deny many boys the chance to go to a specialized HS, in an unfair way because it relies on GPA, which may be biased in favor of girls based on comments below.
Proponents of abandoning the SHSAT in favor of grades because that is "more fair" or more correlated to success in HS should consider whether that is actually true, whether that admissions system would instead result in a different type of bias, and whether that admissions system would indeed be selecting the students who most "deserve" a place in the specialized high schools.
1
The problem is manners. Politeness is drilled into girls from the moment they are born. By the time they're teens, politeness is almost framed as a compliment (they have so much power and power comes with responsibility so, better to act gracious since you have the upper hand, whatever-that-may-be). Being polite is not stressed as much with boys and if you cut out politeness as a defense mechanism (please/sorry/thank you because you're scared), assertiveness makes it easier to get what you want.
I think it's a tricky topic to discuss because it puts the responsibility back on women when we fail to see that the culture and the peer pressure of society really does have a Huge impact.
6
I read this and said to myself
"Wow-That is exactly how I approached school"
And now work.
Working harder is not the same as working smarter.
3
This article makes a common logical mistake. It confuses outliers with normal people.
CEOs and the like are outliers. 99% of people won't and can't ever be one. For those who aspire to such positions and work towards them assiduously, the odds are better but still not very good.
It would be much more useful to compare how the outperforming girls do in the rank and file positions of individual contributor and first-level manager, where both men and women will spend the bulk of their careers.
Irregardless of the confidence mentioned towards the end, knowing how to moderate your workload is a useful skill. The saying "perfect is the enemy of good" comes to mind. Many employers will happily overwork you until you drop.
11
I wonder if the prevalence of women as elementary and secondary teachers plays a role. I wish more men entered teaching to balance the interactions girls and boys have with both genders.
4
It is not for lack of confidence that women don’t do well at work. It is that the way performance is evaluated changes from school to work. At school, performance is evaluated on an objective standard. At work, performance is evaluated on a subjective standard, and quite often by people who are biased. Women, who work incredibly hard and perform at a high quality level, don’t become mediocre when they enter the work world or have children. Instead, women’s excellence and hard work isn’t validated and rewarded in the work world with promotions and equal pay. It is then, after several years of experiencing this, do women realize that no matter what they do (e.g., too assertive, not assertive enough, too thorough, not detailed enough) that the odds are against them. Women are stuck at lower levels doing the actual work, because management (filled mostly by men) keep holding them to different and subjective standards
22
One point worth mentioning is that males, no matter their age tend to take more chances than females who are generally more risk-averse. So boys won't study as hard at school, and at work may be more likely to find unique solutions to company issues.
Look at all the major tech companies -- all started men. Look at the major crimes -- all done by men as well.
The tendency of males to work outside accepted norms, and for females to work within them, is part of the equation. Maybe the genders can learn from each other, so males can learn to go outside the traditional in only productive ways, and females to take more sensible risks.
4
While there are a variety of factors there is not a perfect correlation between success in school and success in the workplace, I suggest that school values things that are counter to corporate success. For example, a curious, high-energy, outgoing personality is a disadvantage in school -- but an advantage in the corporate world.
4
An advantage in men. Confident, competent females, not so much. Hillary Clinton’s need to be put in there place.
1
I started out as the only woman in the New York City headquarters of an international news agency. I ended up in a leadership position with staffs of mostly men in three other media. I hired women, encouraged them and put them in positions of responsibility. Perhaps I was different in feeling that there was no difference, that in doing your damned best is the way forward. And oh yes, I was tough. I understand the difficulties that others face and I wish I were in a position to help.
Women need to have more unwarranted self-confidence even when they are wrong. Seriously, I've noticed that goes a long way in the workplace. People think you're right just because you act like you are right. Even if you are a total idiot.
6
This blaming men for women’s lack of success narrative must stop.
Women account for 55% of undergraduates on college campus.
Men are victims of 3/4 of suicides in U.S.
Men account for 85% of gun deaths in U.S.
Men are required to register for a draft.
More men die in war.
Women’s groups manipulate statistics in a way to convince women that they are victims of systematic societal discrimination so to benefit from further government action.
The gender wage gap statistic of 78 cents to a man’s dollar does not take into account personal choices, years of education, and hours worked, dangerous jobs held such as logging, fishers and roofers.
11
mediocre white men run the world, and they promote each other and keep everyone else; everyone else has to be twice as good to get half as far
6
Ha! I am currently in a situation where for a long time, I was the only woman in a department of men; expected to clean up after the perpetually sloppy work of the men in my department; with zero cover or support from the department head who never set or demanded standards from them, and left his dirty work to me; and then called abrasive, vindictive and jealous - every hoary sexist trope you can think of; where 6 months of very hard work were disregarded in an instant by a colleague who offered the/MY brand new assistant I had to beg for for months, an opportunity I had not yet been given or offered - on her third day, disrespecting both my position as her supervisor, and then accusing me of "thwarting her ambition". When I called him out for his sexism, he said he wasn't. I didn't have the heart to tell him that men don't get to define sexism, lol. I have males in my department who do the oddest things in transparent ways to avoid being accountable to a women in any shape or form. It's hilarious, actually, as it screams to their own insecurities with women. Oh yes, sexism in the workplace is alive and all too well. I'm looking at a fine line. How does a woman stand her ground and not be called a bitch? I do not want to be a pushover, but nor do I want to be a complainer about every little thing. But internalizing all of those little things that are very real, even if not seen by those with a privilege we don't have, is detrimental to ones health.
8
@Somehwhere:
"How does a woman stand her ground and not be called a bitch?"
The same way a man stands his ground and doesn't get called disruptive. It takes judgement, and the courage to take your lumps when you need to.
My daughter had top grades at her school, though she needed some help because it was her second language. Our son breezed through, also needed a bit of help in this second language, and then got bullied by the boys in his class for having received the best grades in his class.
While my daughter was accepted (despite) her excellent grades, my son was bullied by his male classmates for his excellent grades.
3
Maybe the stupidest article I've ever read. I kept waiting for the part where the author would talk about teaching boys to work a bit harder, but NOPE. Only solution is to tell girls to ~just chill out a bit~, it's lame to work hard.
10
@Mara true, because if there were articles on how to raise men correctly, no one will be reading that, or making a million comments.
The author is talking about a real difference that has important life consequences, but why is she blaming the schools? Many of the schools and teachers I know work hard to REMEDY the problem. It is society's problem; putting it on the schools is unfair and wrong.
Furthermore, Damour's expertise as a clinical psychologist, excellent as she may be, does not qualify her to make general pronouncement about the roots of the problem. She is generalizing from a small and unrepresentative sample. I am sure her doctoral program taught research methods and statistics. She should know better.
5
Why are you calling it "confidence"?
It's actually misogyny, arrogance, sexism, and the old-boys club (which it seems will be with us forever) that creates this harmful and wrongful imbalance in the workplace.
Keep working girls (and you boys who are among those who also work very, very hard at school but are neither cocky nor connected.) Learn all you can. Don't work for a 91% instead of a 99% - or any other number. Rather, keep working to LEARN, UNDERSTAND and "GET" all you can. BTW, also have fun along the way, you know you can do both. After 43 years of teaching high school and now observing some of the accelerating change in American society (look at our new Congress!, watch frats continue to implode, change happens...) I'm sure that your time will come. It may be another 10 years to a generation away (as we all see every day the old breed is trying to hang on to their dinosaur-world by any means possible), but a change will come and when it does YOU will be ready, and YOU will kick tail.
3
I have a daughter who works like crazy and has a 96 average. She is really excited about school.
However, while I do believe that IN GENERAL men are raised to have more confidence than women, it all boils down to sexism in the workplace.
I had a job where a guy--who was nice but obviously a total bluffer--was hired and immediately given the nickname "Boy Wonder" by our GM. He was far less competent than any of the women, but he had been designated the rising star and got promotions galore. Eventually, they figured it and he transferred to another company as a VP. This is endemic, especially in tech and other well-paying positions.
7
Girls are generally raised to be submissive, docile, and indoor. They are less familiar to the "real world" in terms of encountering the brute nature of the society. Fathers, who might be "more ruthless" to their sons, tend to be far mellow and soft for their daughters.
That docile upbringing, less demanding to the family (and later to the employer, which justify wage gap too) are enabling women to join work force in a much higher number in recent days. Companies seem to love women in lower positions as it increase company's bottom line.
But when it comes to top positions, modern work places are more like the way the many/most dads treat his sons. That ruthless executive culture get worse as people with real leadership quality is becoming increasingly rarer in this age of declining social mobility, "helicopter parenting", increasingly expensive higher education that prevent many actual leaders & otherwise excellent employees to get into the leadership positions (or even getting a suitable job), and hype of ceremonial degrees like MBA that can never make a donkey run like a race horse.
2
Mediocre men usually get promoted over exceptional women. Exceptional women are taken to task over minute insignificant errors, while men cover for other mediocre men with great frequency. It's not what our schools and teachers are foisting upon girls, but rather girls adapting to this sad reality.
12
As an instructor I loathe all this “getting credit for the sake of effort.” Too many of these girls think time management is the prime virtue not knowledge, insight, intelligence,empathy or analytic ability.
3
Men will always do what is necessary to get the promotion, women generally will not. Moving for a new job opportunity, working with real jerks or extra hours. There is no solution EXCEPT the one the left wants where government mandates the percentage of women v men in the workforce, a very bad idea.
Last, if women are paid less for comparable jobs, why would any profit driven company hire men?
3
Life in the real world is saturated with bureaucratic company men (and women) that can pedantically fill out checkboxes on an Excel spreadsheet or diligently minute corporate meetings, making darn sure that everything and everyone is in exacting compliance with every little corporate policy and best practice. Ultimately, they are biggest drains and most materials risk to every organization in which they infect.
It is the managers who can triage the economically and organizationally important tasks while disregarding minimizing and procedural and bureaucratic garbage that achieve great things. Similarly, a student learning to blow off or minimize busywork is a skill set that should be rewarded and nurtured, not punished.
Look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – they were able to revolutionize their industry despite having dropped out of college, precisely because they could reject the criteria of getting the next “gold star” and focus on the real issues of technological and economic importance.
4
Cool stuff.
Is there any interest among educated, qualified people, to discuss an observation drawn by Somerset Maugham a while ago (I paraphrase):
"it is a good thing that men don't understand women. Women understand women, and don't like them."
A substance-free, local, hocus phocus and misogyny driven observation? Knee jerk hysteria is one (and most likely) response. Another might be to explore this question as an academic curiosity prior to complete dismissal.
Why? Because a hopelessly self-satisfied, entitled woman wrote a book exhorting other women to 'lean in.' It was a best seller, the author went on a tour promoting this landmark observation. Sure. like women don't know that.
I fully expect men to sabotage women (as they would any threat). Why do women sabotage women?
There is a lot of anti-male hate in the article and the comments. Perhaps the elementary and high schools, in which most of the teachers are female, are biased to favor the girls. Once boys are free of an environment that is hostile to them, they do better. Also: it's possible to grub for good grades in a way that doesn't actually learn the concepts and internalize them. Perhaps boys get less caught up in the grubbing, while still developing their capabilities and not being the lazy oafs the haters assume them to be.
3
The classic example of this is the 2016 election. One candidate was the girl with glasses on the front row with her hand always in the air. She did her homework, she was prepared, and she always had the answers. The other candidate was the smirking, slouching kid throwing spitballs on the back row. If his homework was ever finished, it was because he copied it or conned someone else into doing it.
So, yes, the smarty-pants girl was annoying, but who would you rather trust to make intelligent decisions? And yes, the girl got the preponderance of the votes, but a frightening number of people voted for the spitballer.
6
Another piece of evidence that when women are finally in charge, the world will be run according to competence instead of by back-slapping, traded favors, arrogant posturing, and by other aggressive power plays masking complete incompetence.
5
[Girls...they study harder and get better grades.]
Studying harder produces better grades but it creates a false meritocracy.
Someone who does not study at all and achieve the minimum passing grade may be the one that posses better skills.
5
Hm. Seems this author is basically saying girls & women are doing it wrong. And suggests they need to do a better job assimilating to the man’s world. The message here is “Be more like a man!” by asking girls to care less about being perfect, like the boys do. Meanwhile, boys and men have their own social anxieties and problems that aren’t addressed here. Anyway, it’s societal attitudes that need changing. Not hardworking women.
2
There is some truth in this editorial, but I wonder....
A) Why does the author think that all girls act like the stereotypical girl and all boys like the stereotypical boy?
B) let’s go deeper. Could this be related to the gender imbalance among elementary school staff? (Most of those teaching school actually liked school and were successful there, leading them to reinforce old patterns...)
2
So what you’re saying is that in order for girls/women to be more successful they have to be more like boys/men. Do you see a problem with that?
1
Another male bashing column.
25 years ago boys were getting into college at a rate of 60 to 40 vs girls. Feminists like Lisa Damour cried foul - we want equality. Now that girls are getting into college at 60 40 over boys, not a peep from the feminists, except to say that girls are smarter. But there is ample evidence that schools are being sculptured for the more structured girl behavior and the natural more variable boy behavior is considered deviant and in need of fixing. And now the thoroughly feminized American Psychological Association has declared traditional masculine behavior to be unhealthy, pathological. Really? Thousands of years of traditional male behavior needs changing? How about changing the behavior of these psychologists? And of Lisa Damour who claims that under confidence is not the only reason women don't rise to the top positions in the corporate world - there is also gender bias, sexual harassment and structural impediments.
Its got nothing to do with women wanting to have children and raise families and even have more balanced lives, so they don't work as hard, while for men achievement at work has traditionally been more of a major motivator.
Yes Virginia, there are differences between the sexes which account for greater male success in the business world.
It is sad to read such in your face sexism in the New York Times from a clinical psychologist, who is in a position to cause harm every day.
7
One of the reason is that- girls are generally raised to be docile and indoor. They are less familiar to the "real world" in terms of encountering the brute nature of the society. Fathers, who might be "more ruthless" to their sons tend to be far mellow and soft for their daughters.
That docile nature, less demanding to the family (and later to the employer, which justify wage gap too) are enabling women to join work force in a much higher number. Companies seem to love women in lower positions as it increase company's bottom line.
But when it comes to top positions, modern work places work more like the way the many/most dads treat his sons mainly. That executive culture get worse as people with real leadership quality is becoming increasingly rarer in this age of declining social mobility, "helicopter parenting", increasingly expensive higher education that prevent many leaders & otherwise excellent employees to get into the leadership positions or even getting a suitable job, and hype of ceremonial degrees like MBA that can never make a donkey run like a race horse.
I think this author is overgeneralizing from her anxious female patients to the general population of girls and women. That’s like thinking that all high school students must be tall because you are the basketball coach.
2
Since we dudes are so under-qualified and under-prepared, we HAVE to rely on confidence. It's just our good luck that stupidity and hubris turns out to be a winning formula.
2
The framing in the headline (“beat,” “lose”) is extremely troubling. Gender equity isn’t zero sum nor is it about “beating” or “winning.” When boys fail in school it’s just as damaging as when women lose out in the workplace.
3
A poster boy for confidence over competence is sitting in the Oval Office
2
Honestly I am tired of schools being blamed for everything. A couple weeks ago the NYT ran a piece about how schools were responsible for the abject poverty and dearth of opportunity in reservations.
Now schools are to blame for a society that prefers a man like Trump to a woman like Hillary? Is it this hard to understand?
Your daughters have no confidence because they see what you do to women. They see that you are writing an article only vaguely alluding to “gendered differences” as an early-life culprit and then laying the rest of the blame on the girls themselves for trying to succeed and win in a society that is making sure they can’t. They see that you trust the feeble, dishonest old man tears of a man ranting about abortion over the silent, unspeakable pain and fear of women who have needed them. They see that Trump can be President after bragging about assaulting young girls with impunity, but Hillary was somehow not good enough because of some vague reference to emails or Benghazi or plutonium or something. A woman felled by inarticulable and unproven accusations, and a man showered with respect and praise as he struggles to read, inherited everything, and lived a life devoid of principle or integrity.
I’m 32. My generation did not do this, and the children did not do this. You baby boomers did this. Look who put him there. Look who continues to prop up outdated and oppressive gender norms. Stop blaming the schools and the children, and fix yourselves.
4
Wow! Why don’t we just ask women and girls to be more pleasant while we are at it!
2
Riight...women work harder but men have more confidence. Is that why men work more hours but commit suicide far more often?
2
The over-simplification here is profound, and one-dimensional. It also suggests parents and teachers need to juice up young girls' self-confidence -- leaving men to keep on keepin' on. Argh!
As a man, and an educator (retired), I firmly believe male dominance, male machismo, male networking, male power, male fear, and male golf courses all work to keep women from achieving what they're more than capable of achieving.
Seeing all the newly elected Congresswomen in white stand and cheer at the SOTU (despite Trump's bizarro-world reaction) symbolized change and hope. But a whole lot more has to happen before women rise in the workplace -- but it HAS to happen, soon.
Or is it because high achieving girls girls are consistently treated better than their male peers in school, an advantage that disappears in the workplace. See I can make up stories with no citation to fact too! Isn’t it fun?
3
Why is this the schools' problem? Here's a novel thought: companies (and the rest of society) might stop giving underqualified, overconfident boys a pass and instead hold them to the same high standards they expect from girls.
2
"Dunning-Kruger Effect" ~ "a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is."
I can't believe this wasn't even alluded to by the psychologist author; it would not have been detrimental to her gender-based argument.
It's also odd that no other comments mentioned it, though it's been more cited since the current DC administration of "winging-it" wing-nuts.
It's really nothing new: From Wiki:
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), who, in the poem The Second Coming, said: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."[13]
The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who said, "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."[13]
1
@Jersey Jim - but it seems like boys are actually assessing their cognitive ability quite accurately.
In short: work smart, not hard.
Saved: 500+ words?
3
Ridiculous! A story about school with no mention of the possibility that some of the girls are INTERESTED in their school subjects and do the extra work because they like to LEARN? This author seems to think that school is just a gateway to financial success -- with no intellectual content -- no important discoveries of books and science and art and inspiring teachers that many, many students find in school. The author seems to be encouraging girls NOT to work hard in school and NOT to learn something that may make their later lives more fulfilling -- great advice for the know-nothing Trump era!
8
Is anyone else struck by the implicit assumption that when girls do better, it's because they deserve it, and when boys do better, it's a problem that needs to be corrected?
5
@Chris You just pretty much summed up every story in the media the last 4 years. At first I was excited but the overkill and utter lack of balance lost me ages ago.
1
The even funnier thing is the same could be said of blacks vs. whites in the workplace. I remember reading "Games My Mother Never Taught Me" years ago and thinking, if you replaced "woman" with "black person" throughout the book, you would have perfectly explained black people's experiences in corporate America. It seems that in general both black people and white women are taught that if they work the hardest and get the best grades, they will be successful. However, structural racism and gender discrimination allow less qualified white people and white women, respectively, to leap ahead of them.
1
Like is attracted to like--not surprising men are more likely to socialize and hire other men.
How to combat that?
Require all boards etc to be half women---yes, that is a quota system, but it is necessary to break this problem.
Until we do that, we will be endlessly debating the causes, with the result that nothing improves.
Today's mainstream American society rewards anti-intellectualism in boys. Boys who are good students are called nerds, grinds, and geeks. This is a very serious long term problem for the stability of our culture.
2
Wow this article sure ruffled feathers! I've also noticed how females consistently outperform males at my school, but any advice to anyone to "work less" is wrong.
1
Since many of you are blaming marriage and children for women eventually opting out of the rat race, what's the excuse for those of us who are highly educated, high-performing are neither married nor have children. What's the next excuse? I'm waiting...
3
Sounds good unless you're actually in classrooms and see tons of feckless, or snooty, girls, and many conscientious or anxious boys. Saying all girls are conscientious and all boys overconfident is just absurd. Sexist!
2
Most women will work hard in the beginning, but they will scale back to take care of their families. A few do stick their necks out and become leaders. On the other hand, most men do not scale back because taking care of their families is not generally expected.
3
Wow, all of the space the writer used up writing about confidence without bringing up why girls lack confidence. Before the age of 12, girls have already endured a million cuts, diminishments, signals from the culture that tell her she's not as good as boys. Deeply held invisible sexism is why girls don't have confidence. They even get rewarded when they show they don't believe in themselves. This article really missed the mark.
6
If you mean by “leaning in” white make privilege, then I agree with the article. Don’t over analyze. By virtue of being born to a certain demographic, many underperforming boys are guaranteed a place at the table. Just look at our current “President.”
Women's lack of promotion at the office is due to men who do not want women as around. U worked in high tech, ran circled around the men, resulting in industry awarded products so was feared not mentored
Plain and simple, it's old boys network.
4
Ms. Damour
In development psychology, its a well known, and well understood, fact that female brains, on average, mature faster then males up through and into puberty. However, after puberty, the male brain, on average, catches up and often surpasses female.. in brain development... across a number of metrics
All this is uninteresting...
Whats more interesting, is why do Marxists consistently turn normal biological differences into screeds on social discrimination.
2
One word: patriarchy. It's what all of my girlfriends say to each other before we have to negotiate a salary, go to an interview, give a presentation: lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man. This opinion piece does nothing to address the underlying patriarchal culture that hinders women and empowers men.
5
I can tell you from years of personal experience that school is not a "confidence factory" for males like myself as is written in the article. Despite being relatively successful academically, school has never even remotely resembled that for me. Girls have it much easier in school because of the simple fact that they mature earlier and faster. But hey, I'm a straight white male student so I doubt any of the SJW feminist readers will respect my input, instead shooting me down as a sexist. Do your worst.
2
Boys learn how to fail, girls not much. Knowing how to get up after falling is an important skill in business.
2
Every seen the documentaries of British suffragettes with blood streaming down their heads? Ever seen the photos of Maggie Thatcher and her rows of male appointee/government members?
Women face very very tough obstacles to advancement down at the lodge and other women are one of them.
As a man who loves to work those crazy hours who every woman would say is "Nuts!", my values are deeply rooted in love of work, knowledge and fitness. I am NOT successful as in having great wealth but immensely so in having great tools for furthering my education and keeping fit. I am not really retired, but I am tired.
I seldom see women who want to put head to the grindstone on a regular basis and I may be wrong but I think most women have deeper calls to doing nurture than do men. Many women are born with a desire to have offsprings, some at almost any cost. Few men that I know of have that imperative drive while many do hanker to the idea of getting a bit more done today.
My feelings are we greatly need a meeting of the best and all minds to develop strategies that reward without deference to gender but through qualitative analysis of production. Some special assessments need to be factored in so that women who have suffered so much can get a bit of preference going forward. Some disciplining of men to be equitable parents should be also in the offering. If we men agree and create those kids, we have to learn to bear an equitable part of the burden as well as joys.
I also ask women to NEVER trick men into creating children, saying that she is on the pill because she has divergent ideas from the male makes for hell. I know, been there, wreaked hell out of a budding career.
Last, Great Communications and cooperation in a family means that good workers do better work.
Male workplace confidence is a veiled form of turf marking. I watch it all day long. Perhaps higher primate behavioral zoology should be taught in grade school. (If the subject doesn't exist, invent it under a male pseudonym.) This might arm the next generation of hardworking girls.
1
This article make sense. If you spend time overworking details, you can miss the big picture.
As a man I can agree..
My wife got the Berkeley Phd. While I hustled on the Stock Exchange Floor..
I have now read totally every excuse to explain the discrimination against women in the workplace and ignore sexism. Because girls do to well in school, shame on you.
1
The reasons why there is a stark and gendered disparity in terms of accomplishments in later life are certainly complex socially and psychologically. Perhaps girls and young women do strive to be perfect but this is because they grow up in an environment that favors men. In order to succeed and be recognized as equals, girls and young women have to double and triple check their work and put in more effort, diminishing the possibility of enhancing their confidence and developing real, transferrable skills. However, this is not their fault. And the solution is complicated.
It's not as simple as "leaning in" or become "more confident". Women, especially young girls, are often reluctant to assert themselves sadly because they are conditioned to not be overly confident and assertive. They are also perhaps discouraged by the example of men/boys themselves who do less but attain more. Surely, the environment we live in has to change. Namely, educators have to become more aware of gendered dynamics in the classroom. Having an exceptional teacher who is a fair and an inspiring mentor can do wonders, especially for our girls.
Riight...women work harder but men have more confidence...Is that why men work more hours but commit suicide far more often?
1
Seems like girls need to develop a “bro” culture that young men have, but in a good way.
2
You actually have bought into the lies that men are better at work. America is a right wing and women hating culture, that is why men dominate at the office. As long as Americans vote for Republicans, women will be put down everywhere - the president brags about sexually assaulting women and he wins over a woman. Too bad so many women are Republicans, it is all Stockholm syndrome and it is sad.
1
I am the parent of 2 teens an older girl and younger son. The girl is super high achieving grade wise. She studies too hard in my view, in fact I tell her there is no grade higher than an A so why bother. She is working with a therapist to “not have so much of my self worth tied up in awards”, her words. My son also has good grades. He does not put in as much time studying. He complains that the boys always get in trouble but the girls never do. He is not a fan of school. I think the societal problem is school. There is a belief that if you do well at school there is some kind of magic that happens and you get some great high paying job because you had great grades. Grades mean nothing, no one cares if you had good grades.
We agree as a society there is certain level of education we all need such as to read,write, do math. No one is going to pay someone else because they take good notes or because they can write a good paper analyzing a novel. We are training people to be good students rewarding them with grades and then sending them to a workforce where these things have no value. So girls are being rewarded for things that have no monetary value in society.
Lastly as an adult female with a masters degree, I was on the corporate ladder made it to the director level at a Fortune 500 and it totally sucked. Too many hours, travel, no time for yourself. I quit and get paid less and am much happier. I don’t feel like sexism held me back.
1
I couldn't read past the first paragraph because of its lack of nuance.
"Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies."
Yea, on "AVERAGE"! But boys have a far greater variance in their scores than girls. Meaning that there are far more boys who score very high and boys who score very low. This skews the statistics. As an example, on "average" girls consistently outperform boys in math, but it's the boys who keep on winning all the math competitions.
I find such lack of nuance on this subject quite annoying and sinister, and it's fairly common in NYT op-eds and some left-wing circles.
3
Maybe try reading your thesis back to yourself...slowly. "There are fewer women in management because women work harder. Therefore, we should teach woman to work less hard in school."
Yet more nonsense that places the blame for discrimination on those discriminated against.
4
"And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies."
You mean white men, right? Because I surely do not see any black men under performing academically and getting any top positions.
3
This article encouraged a lot of good thoughtful comments. Be sure to read them.
Is this mammoth overgeneralization week?
2
So wait its men's fault right ? just make it clear. Power and Money are valuable for men to succeed. For woman its not. And hey welcome to reality of harsh world of adulthood. Oh waits its also men's fault for women's short comings.
1
Ridiculous Article..... Women are their own worst enemies because they "overwork" and they should try to be "less perfect". Maybe society should be little less misogynistic? Just maybe?
2
Shortage of confidence? How about PUNISHMENT for competence and confidence. This entire column is an enormous and elaborate victim blaming worthy of the worst mansplainer.
1
Women make very good managers. But then they marry and become mum!
You're missing the obvious explanation-- discrimination.
My wife was treated like garbage in her tech company by her all-day male colleagues. Talked down to, assumed to be an idiot....
Schools emphasize equality and (good) teachers try their best to assign grades based on quality, not a good-old-boy system.
That's not true of many work places, where much of the business is done in social settings, such as golf courses --at which women were banned not too long ago (even today, some golf courses are men only).
4
Schools are meritocracies, and work/office is not.
1
This literature could not be more offensive. It stands for the denial of many people’s humanity. There is no such thing as “Men” and “Women” (patriarchal language, BTW!!!). This to me is so ignorant and insensitive.
Women have to overcome hurdles in the workplace like sexism and the ever-present "boys club" in order to get promoted to top jobs. It's just a fact of life. However, I completely agree that confidence is an issue. I recently moved on to a new role in my company and was helping my previous manager look for candidates to fill my prior role. Overwhelmingly, it was men who reached out to me about applying to the job (even if they were not qualified). It was disheartening to me that so few women reached out, and for the few that did, it was only after a mentor or manager suggested that she might be qualified for the role. Women tend to put their heads down and competently do their jobs while men spend a bit more time looking for new opportunities. Women should be more confident to put themselves forward for promotions. I also believe as women get promoted into top jobs, we should work to help other women to recognize their potential to move up the corporate ladder. Men do this for men, and it's our job as women do do the same for our female peers.
2
The problem with articles like this is that they are looking at things from the wrong perspective: that is the perspective of an ambitious woman striving towards the top of an organization where powerful alpha-men dominate. The thing is, for most humans, this is not experience of most people, male or female. For the remaining 99% of us, being male is actually a drawback. More men end up in prison, homeless, jobless, undereducated, lower earning - particularly if they are men of a nonwhite persuasion. In fact, when the salaries of the high earning 1% are removed from the equation, men do really earn less. Yeah, some of us are successful and some of us do benefit from a residual male privilege (I am likely one of these men). But there is an army of millions of boys growing up heading for an unenviable life - who will be supported by the atlas-like women in the their life, because our elites are more concerned about who is the CEO of Bain Capital instead of why our society fails boys and young men so completely (and thus fails the women in their lives as well).
4
@Will
One cannot expect a few-hundred-word opinion piece in the NYT to address and look at gender differences in outcomes from all possible perspectives. Just because it doesn't explore the aspect of these differences from the angle which you look at them doesn't mean it's wrong.
On the other hand, your comment was interesting and intelligent (I just game it a thumbs up). Submit a piece to the NYT that looks at the problem from the perspective from which you view it.
1
Actually no. The issue is that the people who have power in the workplace - men- don't have any interest in extending that power to women. You can lean in all you want but if that partner is taking you to burger lunch on Friday with the boys, he isn't going to be giving you good assignments and introducing you to important clients either.
Unfortunately, yet another article arguing that, when there are gender differences, it is girls/women who need to change. I am all for improving the confidence of girls and teaching them to be tactical. But why never any articles about how to teach boys/men to more realistically appraise their abilities and accomplishments (often the confidence is not at all well founded) and to be conscientious about trying to do their best rather than simply the minimal to get by.
Boys are at a disadvantage in school, because their early development is slower than that of girls.
Girls settle down and listen earlier than boys, and that makes it easier for them to learn the initial steps of reading. The class then moves ahead with reading at the pace set by the girls.
Many boys are left behind, never having fully mastered reading. With that handicap, they fall further and further behind. Eventually many give up and drop out of school.
Something must be done to help the boys in school.
2
I was a prototypical anxious, perfectionist student, and went out of my way to self-teach computer programming after college to land a career that keeps me out of my parents' basement. My younger brother decided to become a musician/english teacher, and while talented, objectively has more question marks surrounding the certainty of his future. My folks still laud him as a "genius" and claim that he could do anything he wants to -- go to med school! (he has a music degree) go to law school! (he has never worked in legal analysis/expressed a political bent, though is a good writer). I'm like -- how!? They are proud of me but occasionally express suprise that I went into STEM. The point is, and this has been shown in studies of recommendation letters for men vs women, men are more often attributed qualities like "brilliance" "innovation" and being "visionary" while women are lauded as grindstone "hard workers", "diligent" and the like. ("She is a productivity machine" vs "he's a rockstar" -- commonly overheard in academia). This starts at a young age, and men internalize the feeling that they are naturally special/talented and dont always need to put in max effort to prove it. And unfortunately, what makes for great grades does not equate to what employers want -- which is often a degree of confidence and efficient productivity (even amid uncertainty).
2
Be careful with this advice. Corporate America has probably always favored half wits who talk a good game and conduct themselves with a level of confidence not justified by their skills, knowledge or accomplishments. But this phenomenon has been accelerating over the last 2 decades as academics have taken notice and their work has been published. Then came the millennials, a generation that refused to put in the hard work traditionally required of new employees in order to get on the corporate ladder. They want to be the boss on day one.
We are reaching a tipping point. Companies are getting bloated with people who do not understand their businesses but are brilliant tacticians when it comes to self promotion. There will be a backlash.
Your daughter is on the path to developing a strong work ethic, attention to details and other valuable character traits. Should we try to help girls like her develop a sense of confidence proportional to their abilities and accomplishments? Yes. But let’s not be too quick to make her more like her brother? The business world can only employ so many fast talkers who do no real work. The age of merit is coming.
3
This topic is so worthy of deep discussion. I actually found it almost painful to read because of how much I relate -- even decades after having been a student. But I can't help but think about how much of this is driven and created by gendered teacher expectations. As a kid, I still remember doing a project for a class in 8th grade where I actually tried this scaling back in effort. By that I mean, it was good, but didn't display my usual level of ultra competence as described in this essay. But I still recall my male teacher giving me a so-so grade and pulling me aside to explain to me that while my work was better than the others, it wasn't as good as he knew I could perform, so my grade was lower. Thus, it was made clear to me that there was a different standard for me ---basically, to perform like Hermione for the same top grade. (Not to mention all of the times I was seated between the two 'trouble maker' boys in class to help mitigate their behavior but that's another post).
3
I completely understand the point the author makes in this article. And there really seems to be something wrong in the system, that the advantage girls have during school, just vanishes in the workplace.
But, what irritates me rather often, that the lack of success of women in the workplace and the way the excel in school is always highlight. While at the same time, the lack of academic success of boys is just swept under the rug. Why is there no debate about how the school system can be adapted to better support boys so they are able to excel academically just as well as girls do?
1
Wow, can I ever relate. I did well in school and to an extent in my career too....but with all my achievements I'd point to my hard work and not my inherent smarts. Thank you for this...I've got two girls and a boy who can definitely benefit from doing just enough and believing in themselves along the way.
1
Interesting that the author is suggesting that the answer to this dilemma is to figure out ways for girls/women to dial their effort down rather than recommending that boys/men dial their effort up. I'm all for reducing girls'perfectionism and encouraging them to be strategic in putting in the right amount of effort, but can we all please just agree that boys who are doing "just enough" should also be a target of improvement? Couldn't boys be encouraged to do more than just enough to get parents and teachers off their backs?? That's a study I'd like to read.
3
I think I could have written this article from experience. Life has not changed much in 40 years for women in school and in the work place. I see that girls are still performing in high school the way I did. However, at the moment I am raising a smart, very capable teenage boy I wish could work the way I did. I wish he naturally had the same organization, focus and desire for excellence that I did at his age. I would love to hear from Lisa Damour about how to teach our sons. The last thing I want is for my son that develop a belief that "good enough" effort is all he needs. I know it's not fashionable to be on the side of raising boys so they are successful, but that is where I am. Lisa, how can my son learn to recognize and be as concerned about excellence as his female classmates? Is it possible he can learn the habits that girls naturally seem to posess? How can we encourage our boys to appreciate the same high standards that everyone seems to acknowledge that most girls in school have? Why can't we send our boys into the work force much more equipped to recognize what hard work looks like? I think I prefer to build the character of my son in this way, so that someday he is able to work with strong, intelligent women and honor them for what they bring to the table.
4
Good advice but here’s what’s being taught in organizational behavior classes at the graduate level.
Elementary school teachers (majority female) prefer task oriented behavior, predictability, and compliance. Their students who do well in this environment (majority female) do very well up until the educational and workplace requirements start to shift towards the polar opposite.
Because when you cross over into Higher Ed, particularly the STEM and business fields, success is no longer predicated as much on what it took to succeed in a K-12 setting. Here, the professors tend to be majority male. Here, risk appetite, creativity, and agility are more valued, as they are in business and the military.
So those young female teachers and those K12 values are actually setting the little girls up for workplace mediocrity well down stream, but so is the whole structure of the system and the shift from one set of values to the other.
And we probably can’t and shouldn’t unwind this, because we’re operating on millions of years of evolution. No one should be sending their children to K-12 to be challenged in a hyper competitive environment! It’s a place for nurturing and care, it’s a place that should be dominated by young females and their values of empathy and rule following. But in business we need to man up and accept risk, and break out.
Boys and girls, men and women, are just different. And for good reason. We compliment one another.
But the advice given here was good!
2
As university faculty, I often think that all the energy women put into being perfect in class projects & appearance should be redirected into having even better and even more innovative ideas. I try to imagine what women could accomplish and create if they were not slowed down by perfectionism. What women have achieved professionally in the past few generations is just the tip of the iceberg of our capabilities.
3
Believe me, when women in the workforce become working mothers, they become efficiency machines, quickly learning how to turn in exceptional work in the shortest possible time. More often than not though, working dads don't make that transition. They continue to rely on "face time" and the perception that they must be turning in higher quality work because they are spending more time doing it. Very few workplaces praise the working mom who does all her work and does it well in a reasonable amount of time. On the contrary, they "reward" her by giving her even more work that she'll complete just as efficiently.
2
This is a fascinating piece, Lisa. I really like the somewhat unconventional but theoretically intriguing recommendations that you've made here (I'm also a psychologist). They at least suggest some interesting empirical hypotheses.
1
I felt really mixed emotions reading this piece. On the one hand, as a male who grew up with both brothers and sisters, and as a high school teacher for 31 years, I have witnessed many examples of both the hyper-grade focused girls and the "Meh. OK" boys. Truth be told, many many years ago, I was a "But I can play football with those grades, right?" kinda kid. Still, as an urban Ohio teacher, in a setting much different from that of Shaker Heights, a big part of me says "If only that was the challenge my kids faced." While hopefully not minimizing the real stresses of kids from, shall we say, higher-resourced communities, it might be good to remind kids or the world beyond the paper chase. Having taught in a range of schools, I am perforce aware that kids do not choose to be born economically advantaged anymore than poor kids choose to be born poor. For both groups, but particularly the former, developing perspective is always a good thing.
1
Part of the problem is that many school assignments reward girls' behaviors the author outlined. Assignments often favor girls' strengths and boys' weaknesses. I think all genders would be better served and better prepared for the work force with a different mix of assignments -- perhaps more that rewarded argument and competition.
Why do you assume the fault lies in the girls, and not in the boys, and teachers? It seems you are criticizing girls for being too perfect. I don't know what your personal experience is, but a lifetime of seeing the good old boys together, promoting the men seen to be on their "team" , regardless of ability, has showed me that we do not need to look elsewhere for the key to this puzzle. As a psychologist, maybe you should be looking for ways to teach men that they can be comfortable working beside women, and that they should get on the team of the incredibly capable women with whom they work! Men are raised to believe they deserve success, and women are raised to believe they never reach perfection.
1
My husband and I had this exact debate early on in our relationship, as we were getting to know each other. We both did well enough in school to succeed in our careers and broadly achieve our goals. However, I was very anxious about school and would consistently overprepare for tests. In contrast, my husband said he would put in the effort he needed to get the grades he needed. I initially saw that as lack of work ethic, but he seemed to have a utilitarian view of school. Certainly he doesn't lack intellectual curiosity; he reads all the time about topics that interest him. He just didn't see the point of spending hours and hours striving for the A+ when an A- would do just fine.
As a result, I had a higher GPA in college than he did, but we both ended up in satisfying, successful careers. I think the difference is he had a lot more time for fun and was a lot more relaxed.
1
You ask big questions but then don’t answer them -what specific obstacles to work are connected, in what specific ways, to the female work habits and confidence level you describe? And how do girls in school get that way? You seem to assume we know your answer but it’s nevet explained.
In my experience as a middle school science teacher, the girls were way more reasoned and methodical than the boys. In the science and engineering world, by your description, but my experience, girls ought to dominate. It has slowly changed, but the reasons they haven’t previously is the sexism of thinking all that math and science was too hard for the girls. It’s not, but we still steer them more toward career choices, even science based, that seem more in line with our notions of female preference like teaching and nursing, not eg aerospace engineering.
5
Girls want to be precise and tend to memorize. Boys want to be effect and tend to improvise. Precision helps in planning a project, effectiveness gets it done.
2
Our school curriculums select for the perfect rule followers rather than creative thinkers. Boys get by, not caring so much about the rules, and it pays off in the real world because rules are meant to be broken out there (hence sexism still exists). Meanwhile the girls remain steadfast to checking all the rule boxes and they have no idea they are focused on the wrong thing.
2
Perhaps its that School and Work reward different types of behaviours. Girls tend to be quiet, follow instructions and rules. Boys tend to be aggressive, bend rules, seek attention by standing out. (These are not sexist stereotypes. Visit any elementary school) Which behaviors are traits to success at school? Which behaviours are seen a positive traits for success in business? Perhaps parents, teachers, schools, society need to consider that girls and boys are different (not unequal). And that we need to use different ways to educate, motivate, and judge them at school and at the workplace. Quiet, thoughtful leadership can be hightly effective. Rowdy students should not be dumped into remedial classes just to get them out of the classroom.
1
This is tragic, but the damage is usually done long before girls go to school. The example of their ever busy juggling mothers trying to be “perfect” and always trying to do more. The ubiquitous examples shown in all the media of women who are presented as normal, when the reality is that those highly polished image are actually the result of the hours or work of makeup artists and stylists. By the time that girl enteres school, the weakening of her self esteem and confidence is well underway.
1
The author's view is good psychology, but does not reflect the business community I have worked in for 46 years, and does not explain how changing the schools' culture will change business culture.
Business cultures are highly tribal. The owners/shareholders are one tribe. They are often familial (eg. Trump's), or investor elites already self-selected from the 0.1%. Management are a sub-tribe of usually high performers, but are warriors who answer to the chiefs. They are chosen to reflect not just their performance, but how well they represent the values of the chiefs. That includes gender values, as well as tribal identifiers like race. Only the most exceptional 'diverse' warriors might rise to chief, and even those rarely change the culture of the chiefs.
We began the push for diversity from the bottom up: "Just give us a chance". But until the top down effort is more than just lip-service, the chiefs will not change.
"Teach your parents well." - G. Nash
6
This is interesting but anecdotal. The most obvious difference between school and work is that in school, at least elementary school, most of the mentors are women, which leaves boys under-engaged and a little alienated. School is also geared to the sit-still-and-use-fine-motor skills style more suited to girls. Not to mention that they're just less mature than the girls. In my experience, as the mother of a boy and a girl, this doesn't give boys confidence. We might speculate, in a similarly anecdotal fashion, that this accounts for a bit of the machismo in their camaraderie. It could be a compensation for the alienation they feel. Boys often become academically engaged later--in High School or College--when they have more male mentors.
In the office, of course, most mentors are men, which furthers the confidence and success of men.
2
I do not disagree with all those saying we should (also) think about sexism and other systemic disadvantage, but I also do not think this article need be seen as a dismissal of those concerns. It is perfectly possible for girls/women to face some systemic disadvantages AND be more likely to struggle with a kind of perfectionism and school stress that may be hurt their sense of confidence in the long run.
On a personal note, this article hit uncomfortably close to home. I am a (female) college student at an Ivy League institution doing extremely well academically, yet I struggle with stress and lack of confidence. I push myself to the extreme, study to the extreme, for reasons both good and bad: 1. because I am deeply interested in what I learn and am usually not content with a half understand 2. out of various fears of not doing well 3. out of a feeling that I am not actually as smart as people think I am and have only gotten to the place I am by working as hard as I do. I am not saying these things are rational nor that they are representative. I only know my case. But for me, this article resonates (I won't go into my high school experiences, but it fits pretty well).
2
Expectations on boys is lower. Their work is very much appreciated if they just do it (and keep their seats.) If they do a reasonably respectable job on it the teachers are delighted.
Girls are expected to be Madonnas. Appreciation for their intelligence and work comes with a yawn. Reactions to not living up to the high standards come swift. Those reactions don’t have to be harsh to send a message. The girls’ sensitives that later create good mothers are there in childhood.
We are all so imbued with gender role expectations that we are unaware of much that we are doing. Women and girls have been in the background for centuries with few liberties to explore their capabilities or receive recognition for them. What will it take to learn how women can achieve? What women can contribute besides all that they already have. It will take much opportunity and creativity. And it ideally would be achieved alongside and in support of the advancement of men as well. The advancement of humanity.
2
May the universe forgive me, but here goes:
I think this article is sexist. Against men. In the first paragraph it says that girls study harder than boys, which sounds sexist on it's face (the Ablard citation does not at all resolve the question). This hard work is then immediately referenced as the reason why girls outperform boys in school.
On the other hand, male success at the work place - which seems only to be measured in the form of executive roles, senior management positions, and partnerships - is casually assumed to be the result of anti-woman bias (never mind the fact that females dominated HR departments nationwide as well as federal and state laws against discrimination).
If one were to flip the script, there would be howls of protest. If one claimed that girls do better in school because of institutional bias against boys, and that men succeed in high-level employment because of hard work and a willingness to take risks, that person would be tarred and feathered.
Unfortunately this kind of prejudice and double-standard has become all too common. It should be unacceptable to anyone who thinks feminism is for everyone.
8
It's obsession with details. You see see it in 10 and 12 year old girls searching their faces for those first fine lines. For men it's just my face,for women something that must be continuously inspected, maintained and upgraded. Men get by with 80% effort. Women still need to be better but maybe 90% instead of 100% might be better for all around health and well being. Just do it better. Nobody gives 100% all the time. You have to be really in the zone. Look star baseball players feel ecstatic if they hit the ball between 25 - 30% of the time and people think they're heroes and pay them millions. Girls, and anyone, should not feel the need to be perfect all the time. Even the U.S. Mint makes mistakes.
1
It's not boys vs girl. It's the fate of each and every minority community. The loud demand for gender equality is mostly for White women. The same (white) women who rightly demand gender equality, seem to have no problem to enjoy far more privileges (just next to white men) simply because of being white, in work places than, say, brown or black men.
Compared to black or brown women, white women also face far less pestering and derogatory comments from men, mainly from white men- in the work place and also in public places.
In reality, we have established a social hierarchy based on many parameters- gender is less important than skin color or national origin. And religion seem to play a huge role in that as each and every religion assign women a very 2nd class status. Only the extent varies.
3
Sexism, not women's conscientiousness is the problem. Stop blaming the victim.
But teachers who think that (and encourage ) girls are putting in a lot of effort, while boys have natural talent ARE part of the problem. At a parent-teacher conference an Honors English teacher commented on how diligent my daughter was, her essays were so lucid and obviously polished. She was disappointed to learn that the essays were almost always written by my daughter in an hour or so at 11 pm, printed and error checked the next morning, and turned in on the due date. No diligence, no overwork, just talent and grace under pressure.
There are so many factors that contribute to gender disparities. Here are some of my observations as a founder of many companies:
1. Men speak up in meetings much more than women, regardless of how well prepared they are to address the issues being discussed.
2. Girls are more likely to devote equal attention to all their studies while in school; boys prioritize according to their interests and abilities.
3. Culturally, we value assertive men much more than we do assertive women (One of many components of sexism in he workplace).
4. Women are more likely to strive for a work-life balance that allows time for parenting; men often ignore their families, preferring to focus on professional advancement.
5. As a culture, we are much more lenient with men who behave badly. Women who don't follow social norms are often ignored or ostracized.
I've come to two conclusions. First, professional women need good mentors. And they need managers who recognize that people who talk the most don't always have the most to contribute. I often find myself drawing out my female scientists and engineers, as they have a lot to contribute but are sometimes reluctant to do so. With encouragement, their participation increases dramatically.
Second, many women prefer to live broader, richer lives though activities, like raising children, outside the workplace. I wish more men were so inclined. I enjoyed participating in my kids' lives when they were at home. Many men don't.
5
As an educator, it's easy to see that the skills needed to succeed at school are not the same as the skills needed to excel in the work place. In order to get an A, one simply has to follow the instructions given. At work, there is often no instruction sheet to follow, one is expected to solve problems through collaboration and creative problem solving, to think out side the box, and get the most done most efficiently.
Many high achieving girls end up not going to the top of their field in the work place, because the path to excel is very different than it is in school.
The other thing to consider here, though, is , Is it really true that boys who struggle in school are actually more successful? While many industries have men at the top, are there not more men under educated, and underemployed or unemployed? I think so.
When looked at in this light, the skills required to do well in school are not the skills that are helping anybody achieve in the work place.
The problem is teaching problem solving, collaboration, time-management, and the like do not result in higher test scores, either on state exams, by which schools and teachers are judged, or on college entrance exams, by which students are judged. The whole system is geared to reward those who can parrot what the teacher wants, and memorize enough material to ace a test. Then we throw them all out to the work force, and those school skills are useless there.
3
My 16 year old son just got his report card; 100 % in Calculus, 98 in both Chemistry and Physics....should I be worried now? I suspect it is the parents that exert the greatest effect. Be careful not to stereotype and ignore the other sex; many of which are worth consideration. I do worry about my son and he is hard on himself, however he is caring and smart.
School has enough to do in getting kids to learn. When girls score better that is already a confidence builder, but it does not overcome the sexist barriers that are encountered in the workplace. If additional measures were taken in school there is no reason to assume that they would do the job either. The emphasis needs to be on equitable treatment in the workplace.
1
I’m an airline pilot at a major US airline. We have a smallish percentage of female pilots, but a very tiny percentage of female captains. In a seniority-based system, this discrepancy is attributable solely to individual choice. Female pilots are, on average, choosing to remain as first officers (co-pilots) far longer than their male coworkers.
To me, this echos the author’s point that women are less likely than men to jump into positions of increased responsibility. It’s not good or bad, it’s just biology.
@John
I really, really hope there is a NYT reader who happens to be female and a pilot who responds to this!
I am in a traditionally male-dominated field and this sounds terribly simplistic to me. As I have no way of knowing what the impact of this "increased responsilbility" is on this theoretical female captain (increase in working hours? additional travel? perhaps more work without a corresponding increase in pay?) , I can't really comment. But I'm pretty sure that having a uterus or more estrogen or whatever has zero to do with it.
2
Maybe girls are being rational. I mean, they also should work more efficiently- but let's extend the Harry Potter metaphor here.
Hermione was discriminated against in multiple ways in the wizarding community. She had a good reason to work that hard. She might have benefited from putting more effort into say, public speaking, but she did what she needed to do. Just think of what Ron or Harry could have done if they'd put in half the effort she does. You know who's a good male role model, scholastically speaking, in Harry potter? Neville. Not naturally brilliant in most subjects, but he finds his niche and he works like a beast in other areas of his life until he gains competence. That's really admirable.
3
Girls are indeed beating boys in schools--not just grade schools but at the college, post graduate, and professional school levels. Ms. Damour's explanations carry much validity but do not explain the whole story.
Boys enter their first year of school about a year behind girls in emotional and neurological maturity. (See Leonard Sax's book: "Boys Adrift: Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men.") Boys do poorly in early education and are criticized for being rowdy and unable to sit still and focus their attention; girls thrive.
Perhaps in the post-education, professional world girls fall behind boys for other reasons--lack of aggressiveness, lack of peer mentoring, the good old boy network, etc.
The bottom line, however, is that boys and girls need a different approach to early education from what we have now. Perhaps boys should enter the school system a year later than girls. No doubt we need also to change our paternalistic society.
2
There is probably some truth to this article, though my group of friends looked at it in a different way back in the day. Of course the best grade was coveted, but we convinced ourselves that of equal importance was the effort/grade ratio - the lower the better. Not sure this instilled confidence, but it sure helped us all have a good time!
Note that just because there are a bunch of successful men out there that may have known how to get a good grade with little effort, we should not ignore whatever it is that is actually holding boys back from being good students. The article starts off making it clear that boys under perform and this is not good state of affairs.
In any case, I am all for whatever helps women succeed and enjoy their childhood and adolescence.
The corporate world is not like an academic setting. It is full of incompetent and immature people. To succeed, you must be assertive, draw attention to your accomplishments, earn the respect of higher ups, etc. Dotting your i's and crossing your t's perfectly may make an excellent administrative assistant, but that's not the game that needs to be played to "succeed at the office". Taking one's work too seriously in a corporate setting also may be a detriment to success, which may disappoint people who were excellent and diligent students.
1
My daughter was always the one good in school. She applied herself and would do the homework for her previous class while she waited for the next class to start. My son turned homework in when he wanted. He literally skated by in high school.
Today she is the manager. He has a great job in business supply chain and knows how to direct others.
I think the key is getting your kids to have jobs, part time. Learn whT it is like to be an employee, to be on time, and to see how a boss works. It also makes them more well rounded in adult life. They need to be involved in extra curriculars to learn how to work with others in school. Boys do that more in sports. Girls don’t always want to do after school activities. As a parent one needs to encourage them.
Great article however I believe building confidence in young men and women will lead to competence. This is where teachers come into play. I teach fifth grade. This is what all of my students lack: confidence...I don't preach perfection, I preach hard work, staying focused and managing your time wisely. We celebrate small accomplishments and heap praise at the smallest errors.
I also don't give MORE work when one finishes early...this would be counterproductive.
Most importantly? Girls first for all classroom activities (breakfast, lining up, etc.).
We held classroom elections. Who was voted president? A girl. ( I promise I didn't rig the election...a neutral student counted the votes).
I work to empower my female students and don't get me wrong, I work to empower all of my students, however boys seem to need just a little bit more time to mature.
I'm sure someone else has pointed out that perhaps the reason girls work so hard is they know that the educational system won't otherwise recognize or "see" them. My daughter was in an AP Calculus class — she said that despite raising her hand countless times, the male teacher rarely called on her. And when he did, she said that he seemed surprised that she knew the answer and/or had anything relevant to say. Ironic that he made a point at his parent meeting to say that he wanted students to participate more...perhaps he meant just the boys.
4
@L Bodiford
Please work with your daughter to solve this. I would recommend she talk to the teacher after class ,explain her interest in the class and say that she feels her comments in class are not being taken seriously. Her teacher should learn to allow a more diverse group of students, not just aggressive boys to comment in class. Being called on should be done in a random way, allowing both shy and overlooked students to have time to speak and to have successful experiences speaking.
Finally, your daughter has to make sure she is not seeing something that is not there. If her teacher is really surprised to see a girl taking interest, fine, make that lead to either some awakening in him, or in an appreciation of your daughter's skills. In the workplace, she will also have to just ignore those who don't feel comfortable with her or much better, address it is a positive way.
And, if all that does not work or gets a bad reaction, talk to the school. All educators and STEM field people are concerned about limiting the flow of women into STEM professions and should help this guy become a better teacher to all his students.
It really depends on your profession. Being meticulous and hardworking is an asset in a doctor, not so much in a marketing executive. Also, while confidence is important I think many women find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time in life maintenance- housework, child-rearing, cooking, grooming - something their male peers don’t have to do or can get by without.
2
All these hysterical reactions miss the author's point. Of course there is rampant sexism in the workplace. Of course women more often bear household and child-rearing responsibilities that undermine the demand for total dedication to the job.
The author isn't saying these aren't true; she's just saying that one piece of the puzzle in in our schools, where they build confidence in boys and competence in girls.
And that, as a parent, rings true to me. I wish I could get boys to work harder but I also wish I could get girls to work more efficiently. In our schools, boys brim with unearned confidence and girls quake with unnecessary anxiety.
All the author is saying is: this is a problem, and let's work at it. It's part of the solution. Readers who expect an author to identify any single Silver Bullet as the be-all, end-all solution to sexist inequality in America are demanding too much.
6
Is it possible that all these hyper-confident men are successful because confidence and the ability to deal with ambiguity are critical skills for professional advancement? Not because they are beneficiaries of a sexist conspiracy? And why is it a scandal that women aren't as well represented if they don't demonstrate that same kind of confidence?
Think about it. If you have the choice between hiring two people for a role in a risky venture for the company, would you hire the person who demonstrates the confidence and willingness to jump into it and figure it out from there? Or the person who wants to hang back and be 100% certain about everything before making a move? Beneath the surface consider this: what choices are your competitors making?
It sounds like a good place to start balancing out this over-fastidious trait in girls is in parenting and in teachers' behavior. (Is it possible that an overwhelming female teacher population coddles female students?) The article gets at this, but commenters are still stuck on the notion that every bump in the road for women was put there intentionally by a cabal of sneering Kavanaugh clones.
1
@Nick
You aren't listening to the commenters. No one is describing a conspiracy. we are discussing a bias. I am a strong feminist and unfortunately also guilty of a gender bias because it was the hierarchy I grew up on. Noticing the bias takes some careful reflection. You have to want to look under the hood to see the problem.
When you don't want to look closely at the cogs that spin out this situation and yet hold opinions with such confidence, you are exhibiting the exact undeserved self assuredness discussed here. You are confident and you are wrong. Undeserved confidence can lead to risk taking, ie wild investments, wars, becoming president with zero skills, etc. More bad stuff than good. I don't believe that when we use computers to analyze for risk, we input "add in a giant dash of unreasonable confidence!"
2
@Frieda Vizel
Talk about not looking at the cogs that drive the machine! The machine is driven by individuals making decisions every day. When I mention a "sexist conspiracy," I mean it in the sense that hiring decisions made at this level are made specifically to keep women out because they are women. My case that is that if you consider the microeconomics of the decision between the hyper-confident and hyper-fastidious skillsets (profiled in this article as being very male and female outcomes of education), the fact that positions are overwhelming held by men at this level is not the result of sexist decision-making. It's logical decision-making in the context of a broader system that creates this skillset inequity between the sexes.
High level business management is a realm that values and requires smart risk taking. At the end of the day someone's career is on the line because of investments made in specific projects, hiring decisions, etc. Of course, taking bad risks leads to bad outcomes; that doesn't bear repeating and I obviously was not advocating for people acting like idiots.
I don't want this gender imbalance to exist either. I'm just trying to impress the point that the imbalance is not the result of personal sexist malice on the part of the businesses that installed these managers.
@Nick
The number of comments with negative bias towards boys/ men is disgraceful. And this is every single day in the NYT.
1
So, this article posits that women are systematically less likely to have their accomplishments noticed so the onus is on them to change their behavior? Sorry, I don’t buy it. Men perhaps should be more like women— and maybe the workplace place should prioritize conscientious over jocularity and raw volume of throughput.
As the father of three girls, this is a topic that has interested me for a long time. Many factors feed into this and there is no point in trying to find that one thing that will solve the problem.
School is important, but being the best student isn’t necessarily as important as we tell our kids. Employers want you to have the qualifications to do your job. Most don't care if you had the best grades in your class. The guy with the B+ and the girl with the A+ are on an even footing and their success is now a matter of doing their jobs well and learning to succeed according to the values specific to the organization that employs them.
One thing employers do want is availability and that, as others have pointed out, brings in a huge factor that lies outside school and employment altogether: parenting. If men did more, women could work more.
3
As a woman who has excelled in a male-dominated field (high-stakes litigation), and as the single mother of an adolescent boy, I find this subject fascinating. I was never an over-preparer in school. I got good grades but a B wasn't the end of the world. I have always felt confident in a room full of men, but I was lucky to have a father who was a passionate feminist, and to attend a progressive, private prep school thanks to generous financial aid. I’ve had my share of challenges in my life, but there was never a doubt that I had what it takes to succeed in the workplace of my choice. Only now, in my late 40s, am I beginning to understand how rare that is.
Are gender bias and the unequal division of domestic work the bigger elephants in the room when it comes to the disparity in women’s success in the workplace? Absolutely! But confidence plays a role too and we shouldn’t ignore it. My heart goes out to the girls staying up until 2 am with their color-coded notes and their “insurance points.” I imagine they may be the same girls who cut themselves, compelled to exercise perfect control over some small, private domain. How many boys cut themselves?
As a lifelong feminist, I say: let’s look deeply at the differences between girls’ and boys’ experiences, and let’s not be so PC as to rule out the possibility that biology may play some role. Suicide rates among girls are skyrocketing. The issues we need to study arise long before we reach the C-suite.
5
I'd love to believe it is mostly sexism and discrimination that holds women back in the workplace, but given my experiences at work, and having raised two sons, I believe there is a lot valid in this article. At work the men in my department are all about "getting it done." Too often the women are all about "finding consensus" - which can end up turning worthwhile projects into endless efforts that are obsolete by the time they're done. (I got stuck on one such project... It didn't end well!)
Growing up, my boys were the epitome of this article - super smart, but as a woman who worked really hard in school, I felt they were lazy. They are now accomplished adults with graduate degrees and professional jobs. Shows how much I knew.
I know this is the era of bad mouthing boys and men, but honestly, we're all different. Why not acknowledge that sometimes (many) men do have the right idea?
6
The Times had an article about the pay gap between men and women and described a couple studies that looked into it. The studies concluded the main factors driving the gap are child-bearing and rearing and for childless women -- being more likely to make a career sacrifice for a husband.
Perhaps what needs to change is that women should not feel like they have to be the ones to sacrifice their career to have a kid. That said, even if all women felt that way, since women who want kids (unless there's a surrogate) have to be pregnant (which under the best of circumstances is very trying) and, if they want to breast feed, either be there on demand for their baby or pump milk (which on the whole is very time consuming and disruptive), it's likely that women who have children will always be at a reasonable disadvantage to most men.
1
It is not because women lack confidence that men are promoted over them. It is because of SEXISM. Women's talents and accomplishments seem far less visible somehow than men's. And this is likely the reason why boys know, even at a young age, that they can "slide by" at school. It is not some ingenious technique, it is *their* internalized sexism. "Studying hard is for girls." Why not ask teachers if they are not perhaps OVERpraising boys' more minimal efforts? Maybe girls work this hard because they too intuit a system that is rigged against them, NOT because they are foolishly mis-using their time. Believe me, doing less work, less carefully is NOT going to help grown women succeed in the professional realm--only equal consideration will.
665
@rkgar
Nothing about "SEXISM". Find a female Musk, Jobs, or Gates and you'll have your answer. For boys it's innate; for girls, it seems, they have to work at it. Boys start taking things apart while still in the crib, while girls are building relationships. All the social engineering--cultural Marxist stomping--ever conceived will not change the nature of the genders. Seems a cosmic constant throughout human history.
10
Or could it be that (primarily female) teachers are over-praising hard-working girls?
10
You are a bit off. It is not internalized sexism, it is internalized laziness or eager to do other things. Like more manual activities. Whenever I used to "slide by" was not because I was assured to get a pass, was because I had a strong eager to go play and did not care for punishment ...and I used to get a lot. Maybe girls are vain of being the top of their class!!
And believe me, if I observed something in my long years at school was that the large majority of professors were females and in terms of praising and attention, it was excessively towards girls in detriment of "he's just a stupid boy"!
Now that I’m a professor I see a lot of lack of confidence in good female students. The girls don’t feel very comfortable whenever I present a new king of exercise that they had no time to practice before. I found that boys take the unknown as a challenge more often. Maybe due to their nature boys confront the unknown more often, and unfortunately sometimes at things that put their lives at risk.
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Here we go again. It must be a structural problem, right? The homework? The teachers? The grades? Harry Potter? No, women generally don’t have the top jobs because they don’t want them. Not the way men do. A man’s entire identity, ego, and social status is defined by his job, and men are inherently more aggressive and competitive. It’s not our society or our “system”, it’s life.
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Also== in school success is measured by merit, at work, sometimes, success is measured by who you play golf with.
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Such reflections actually perpetuate the anti-intelligence cult that is known as "The United States Of America." As the decades pass us by, Big and medium-sized corporations increasingly relegate thinkers to the back of the board room, depend more often on the cult of Youth, of spontaneous, free-thinking "just do it," chutzpah, and regard the measured, cautious, thoughtful methods of long experience and deep consideration to be too slow and plodding for the fast pace of modern innovation. Avoiding such quick wisdom, avoiding what used to be called being Penny-wise and Pound Foolish, is what you learn in school. You learn to think. You learn to weigh options and defend your choices on paper before you must defend them in court, after having stolen someone's patent or failed to inspect your new, flashy product for safety hazards.
If such Trump-inspired, "I'm so smart, I don't need education" thinking continues to rule America, then future generations can look for America as a small footnote in the annals of world history.
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The reason men dominate the leadership positions in most public companies is that most of those public companies are deeply sexist. On the other hand, might the reason girls dominate in public schools be related to the fact that most teachers are female?
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Yet another article that tells women they are the ones who need to change. No. I'm sick of the victim blaming advice. The people in school and the workplace need to learn to respect diversity and face their hidden biases. Shame on the system that values confident incompetence over humble competence. Stop telling us to act like men do because when we do it backfires. A confident woman is called "demanding", "scary", "stuck-up", and the "B" word behind her back and she is punished in the workplace for her confidence. Something needs to change in the workplace and it's not women.
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Also, sports? Maybe not so much these days but it used to be that (sporty) boys spent so many more hours doing endless hockey, football, baseball, basketball drills, and then losing some games, that they had a different set of priorities for (1) using study time efficiently/cutting corners regularly, (2) not fussing over imperfection, and (3) social aspects of morale and confidence boosting, even if you don’t win them all. “Hey, a swing and a miss” was a cheery bounce-back I heard from a guy in the workplace that amazed my girly conscientiousness when I was young. It was a helpful moment.
Also, in school, teachers admonish underperformers, because they could be doing better. But the message is sometimes falls on the wrong ears. We often had to remind our anxious conscientious daughter “those reprimands are not for you. You are working plenty hard. In fact, harder than you need to. Chill.” Of course, she had to figure that out on her own, eventually.
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@Nell Had the exact same experience in the work place. Even though Title 9 was passed in 1972 my school, or parents for that matter, certainly never invested much in woman's sports. Am consistently amazed by the difference I see in younger women in all areas of life who where raised with more sports, particularly team sports. Title 9 makes a huge difference for women. "Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 is a federal law that states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
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Interesting, however, I am an American living in a highly feminine scandanavian society where women rule the roost. Whereas in this inverted environment the exact opposite is true. Do you think it has to do with those in power and the confidence that position in society provides? Its most likely a social function/response rather than a sexual response. I think the sexual response degrades american women. Theres no data to directly correlate womenhood to lack of confidence and achievement. There is direct correlation between power and confidence.
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The answer is simple: Teachers (mostly women) are in charge at school; men are in charge at the workplace.
Stop telling women how to change. Start telling men how to change. They are the problem.
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@Myoshin So, female teachers discriminate against boys (adults against children) at school- no problem. Men discriminate against women at work (all adults) and this is a problem that men need to change.
Got it.
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I wonder: why do women fight so hard to be LIKE men? Why don't they want to be like themselves? Why do they fight to be equal in men's companies rather than starting their own all-female companies? The problem doesn't seem to be that the men are holding women back, but rather that women cannot do much and always need to steal from the men what they accomplished with their sweat.
As a mother of a son and a daughter, I can tell you boys have it tough in school. Most teachers are women and they don’t appreciate the energy and noise of boys. They like the girls, sitting at the front of the class; quietly raising their hands to answer questions. Girls just seem to do better in school because they “read the audience and play the game”. Well, the audience isn’t all women out in the work world. Our son had a horrible time in elementary school; “he’s depressed, he’s ADHAD”. Except that he’s wasn’t and isn’t. He’s now a Harvard educated lawyer two years out of school. Our educational system needs to change and challenge young girls a bit more.
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@Laura
I surprisingly agree with you. If schools served boys better, including more physical activity, less desk time, more group activities, they might also train girls to be more assertive and have both genders become more comfortable with both their similarities and their differences. Adult men and women in a constructive work environment aren't that different, but many men aren't comfortable with women and many women aren't comfortable with men.
At work, there is a place for confidence, even over confidence. You shouldn't defer to others or engage in group think just to make people feel comfortable. You shouldn't allow bullying at work, whether from men or women (yes some alpha women are bullies too). However, you also do not have to be liked by everyone all the time .. you do need to focus on getting the important things done, sometimes just well enough (C might be OK) ..
Also totally agree we cannot succumb to a culture where we are all just faking it .. hard work is the key to many fields and ... really, there are few slackers who truly rise in their fields (doesn't count if daddy is a billionaire).
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Why does this article focus on making women “lean in”? Why is a woman trying to behave like a man they way for her to become a top manager?
Maybe the managerial expectations need to change. Shouldn’t it be the the results, not the alpha chest thumping g behavior be what matters?
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Girls and women work hard to overcome gender bias. They are stressed because they know they face an unfair world. Saying that now they should be scolded, reprimanded or punished for working “too hard” only increases that stress. It also makes gender bias so much easier. Girls and women literally can’t win. They are either just a dumb girl who deserves nothing or just an overachieving girl who needs to chill. How about we end bias in the workplace? That’s a real stress reducer. (I see that all the men commenting here agree with the author. Of course they do. Now they can be even more biased, while claiming to help. No thanks, gentleman.)
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Also true in science and engineering in college. Boys at the whiteboard confidently steamroller the girls. Who is more likely to get the problem correct? The girl. Who wastes 15 minutes showboating with the dry erase marker? The boy.
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Perhaps we should consider that levels of confidence and experiences of sexism and harassment are connected. Duh. Men—well, white men—learn early that they will be given the benefit of the doubt in most situations, and women learn that they have to exceed the standard to get anywhere, and that any error will be consequential. Is it any wonder that men end up with more confidence and more seats in higher positions? It’s a system of sexism that’s at work here not anything inherently wrong about girls and women. I’m really, really tired of articles about fixing girls and women. Let’s dismantle the sexist system. Articles like this feed that system not challenge it.
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Excellent points and observations. The ability to break down work, determining the critical from the necessary but not critical, the ability to determine whose attention and effort is required for each type of work, is a necessary skill set for an effective Senior Leader. A potential C suite executive.
Aspiring C suite executives dont need to be the best at every type of work . . . They do need to ensure the work gets done effectively. Too often leaders can struggle with a negative self perception, in all likelihood that does not exist, if members of their team are more effective in aspects of the business than themselves. This leads to senior executives extending themselves beyond their skill sets and their physical capacity for work.
Completing an A+ effort on C priority work at the expense of A++ effort on mission critical work can often lead to once promising senior executives being past over for C suite opportunities.
Treating all work as mission critical and attempting to apply the same level of effort: double and triple check, constantly rallying the troops, thrice daily conference calls for updates . . . Often leads to failure. Seen it happen many times.
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I think there is a lot to be said for this perspective.
Decades of simply doing what one is told to do, however diligently or brilliantly, does a poor job of training a person to navigate real world priorities nor find the strategic opportunities that others may have missed. And, in any endeavor, the things you choose to NOT expend your time doing are often as important a factor in success as the ones you take on.
I too have seen many well intentioned teams flounder because no one could differentiate between what is critical and necessary vs. the kinds of comforting busywork that brought them success in academia.
This is not so much a comment on male-female differences, as it is on the bias toward compliance as a defining factor of success in schools. In the larger world, being best at doing primarily what others expect of you leads to neither success, security nor satisfaction. This holds true for both men and women, I think.
The basic argument is that we should virilize our daughters. One way to do that would be to give them testosterone injections. But with or without steroids, this programme is a cultural and moral dead end.
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Of course the simple truth may not be worthy of front page on the NY Times , but complex theories like this can do more harm than good if they become widespread and adopted as fact .
Women lose to men at the office because the office like everything else in America and the Western World is run by men . That's it. No need to look any farther , or pose it to a super computer . The underlying sexism adopted by men was believed to be true until recently. Unfortunately, we have little sign in our Country that this will ever change . After all those with power do all they can to keep it that way .
Sexism may even be more resistant to change than racism .
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Please the only people who get the opportunities are white boys. Affirmative action is only for whites girls. Let’s stop pretending that their is any equal opportunities for all in a country that is based solely on the elite race
The real world is full of whites men no matter how unqualified getting one opportunity after another. No matter what white men go they get over which is a roaring insult to everyone who tries to break through the color barrier.
This article reminds me of a 1050’s take of America. There is no justice in this country, minorities are always second class citizens with the current administration working in overdrive to destroy our lives.
Our public schools that are being destroyed by white men and women in the name of charter greed are not destroying anything it is the wide acceptance of whites men being told that they are wonderful .
However we are what we are white men in charge.
There is unquestionably truth in the author's question and no one should deny that, all too frequently, systematic biases hold women back professionally. Still, it gets under my skin (enough to drag out this impotent comment). Why is it acceptable to presume that female success is the product of virtue while male success is the product of bluster and unfair advantages? Is this still a war, does the objective of gender parity justify offhand slighting of men? An article written with the opposite premise would only appear in Breitbart (I will bet $100 that there is an article explaining that female teachers hold boys back on that site). I hate that women have far more often faced double standards, but two wrongs do not a spring make. One logical conclusion of this zero-sum-ish approach is that a women may blame others for their lack of due success, while a man can only regret his innate inferiority. Both are occasionally valid assessments, but we all (we Times readers) are extraordinarily privileged and all are fools, almost all of the time. Let's celebrate and enable each other, instead. And if we have to hold the each other up in comparison, be scrupulously balanced (and cautious!) in our approach because it is a serious thing. We need healing these days, not division.
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One possible explanation is the much higher standard deviation among men. There are lots of men who are subfunctional. These are the men who drop out of school and commit crimes. On the other side are the men who are high achievers. It is the high achievers who dominate our top positions and it is the subfunctional men who are in our prisons.
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Let's assume the author has at least some class and racial privilege such that they can afford this rather generous view of the social and economic disparities at play for girls and women.
Telling girls/women to "be more confident" and "lean in" is simply gas-lighting and failing to understand just why girls/women are not as confident as boys/men. It's one more thing on the to-do list for girls and not on the to do list for boys. Gee, thanks!
I dare the author to write with such hubris on race and why this or that racial minority isn't doing as well as whites in the USA.
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Is the author going to make a similar claim for why there is a dearth of non white people and folks from working class backgrounds running companies? Perhaps the fault lies mostly in leaders who hire and promote based on "reminds me of me when I was that age". But hey, why not blame women, their teachers and their parents instead of holding successful older white men to account...
School and businesses are different. You don't get grades at work, there are no tests, you get promoted if your superiors like you and think you are a "leader".
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The woman has to change to accommodate.
The system doesn’t ?
Why?
She is not “good enough”.
Same old.
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I think it might be due to a little disillusionment. School is a merit based institution, the workplace isn't. When overachieving girls enter the workplace they enter as...girls, not boys. Women have been discriminated against since antiquity. Things are certainly better than in ancient Greece but still, 2 millennia later and no equal pay??? Even some women like Diana Nyad advocate against women by professing women tennis players shouldn't be paid the same as men because they play best of 3 as opposed to best of 5. So long as we allow it, woman can out perform in academia, but their lack of a Y chromosome will always be the limiting factor in the workforce. Not because they aren't worthy, but because there are no urinals in their bathrooms.
Growing up with some very wealthy friends, I got to see privilege up close. I envied their whimsical view towards rules. A sign says DO NOT ENTER? “Ha! It’s a sign. Who’s going to stop us?!” And these were girls. So it’s not about boys or girls or teaching ladies to relax. It’s about privilege. Breaking rules because you can. Knowing which ones you can get away with. And hobnobbing with the right people. Men experience significantly more privilege than women so... shocker!!!They are in more positions of power.
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Women are the overwhelming majority of K-12 teachers. This is the main reason for boys' lagging girls.
For primary grades, women are 90% of the teachers.
Elementary plus middle school is 80%. High school is about 60%.
This means that during the years 5-15, when boys are becoming men, they are under the control of women. This is a novelty, and suspect.
Women understand girls. They are baffled by boys, and more so as the boys get older. (Mutatis mutandis for men.)Yet, the process of becoming men is guided by women.
Thus, the school environment is cozy and home-like for girls, and alien and frequently hostile for boys.
A personal example. I had eight female teachers for my first eight grades. Half of them treated us boys as equal to the girls. The other half didn't like us very much.
Our natural boisterousness, indiscipline, fighting, cussing, and many other male traits, made us less acceptable than the much quieter, neat, and compliant girls.
Little appreciated by female culture, these male attributes are not pathological, but socially necessary. Men understand this, and if we want boys to be nurtured and refined by education, most of boys' teachers should be men.
The best alternative, probably, is sex-segregated schools, with, typically, male teachers for boys.
It would be expensive: to get male teachers requires higher pay for them. Of course, women would get the same higher pay.
But, it would be one of the finest investments possible.
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@alyosha That might be the sanest comment I've read today. My son had his first male teacher in 7th grade. His IEP meetings, where 17 females (I was the 1 male) pushed for him to be medicated year in and year out, were really disturbing.
What if sexism and male oppression holds girls back in the work force?
Instead of victim blaming, by throwing around a bunch of ways to change women, what if we instead start focusing on the sexism that is actually holding women back in the workplace?
You can work on getting women to change whatever quality you want, but the goalposts will always change and women will always remain far behind, as long as our sexist workplace systems remain in place.
Lisa Damour, why contribute to this dumb charade? If you truly care about the teenage girls in your practice, you should work on making the world a fairer place for them to live and work in. Encouraging them to emulate the unearned confidence and questionable competence of the white male, in the foolhardy hope that this will make their lives easier, is hardly a solution.
There are two naturally procreative biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human genders.
By nature and nurture they have vastly different roles. Comparing humans to their closest living African primate kin exposes the possibilities of other family societal structures.
Bonobos have matriarchal societies driven by sex, peace and love. They are smaller than humans with both sexes being similar in size. The males are relatively docile and submit to female dominance.
Chimpanzees have patriarchal societies driven by male bonding and violence and sex. Chimpanzee males are larger than females. Males tend to be more much aggressive than females. Males may fight to the death.
Obviously chimpanzees are much more like humans. And why that is so is unknown. Bonobos and chimpanzees evolved on different sides of the Congo River. In seemingly similar environments. Both bonobos and chimpanzees have slightly different cultures in different environments.
I think that other factors beyond gender also impact human societies. Only children and birth order along with color aka race.
I am the first born and male of my father's four marriages and two mistresses. I was an only child. I am the oldest of 15 with 7 younger sisters and 7 younger brothers. The first born of the other marriages were females. Me and the oldest girl from one mother and the youngest girl from another are and have always been very aggressive confident alphas by nature and nurture. We are black.
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Please stop blaming women! We work twice as hard because we have to. The crisis of confidence comes after graduation, when our hard work and innovative ideas are demeaned by dude bros.
All these Emails seem to have a similar theme. Here’s my take, over all men are taller incompetent in comparison to women and sports is the only topic they care about.
In high school, I was chastised and sent to detention by my male teacher for pointing out errors in his math formulas.
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Do girls do better in school because women dominate K-12 education?
“Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” they wrote. “Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect.”
Kind of reminds me of A. Burr problem in Hamilton. Girls singing " Wait for it", instead of Go for it.
Really? Are we blaming the victim? Of course, females feel they have to put in extra effort. It's like being a peahen surrounded by peacocks. Women are invisible, even confident ones. The patriarchal business world rewards preening men and punishes "show off" women."
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Maybe it's talent and ability.
Despite the click-bait headline, this is not an article trying to truly understand why girls do better in school and boys do better in the workplace.
It really is an article about girls with low self-confidence and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
This occurs mostly due to sexism and double-standards which require females to be perfect, though this article hardly explores those realities.
Boys don't actually do better in the workplace. They are just rewarded for being male. Females re-route their priorities to their children which are their second full-time job.
This conundrum will not improve until child-care issues are addressed and our society stops praising and rewarding males for being males. And, of course, stop expecting females to be perfect no matter what.
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It is amusing watching politically correct people tying themselves up in knots trying to explain differences between the sexes without ever attributing them to differences between the sexes - blame social norms, the schools, anyone, anything in a desperate attempt to ignore the obvious - boys and girls are just different in some ways
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Any time you find yourself saying, "if this marginalized group slightly modified their behavior, then they wouldn't be marginalized", you're probably wrong.
99.9% of all people fail to get the top positions in public companies, be they women or men.
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My daughter is starting school next year, and although you seem to write this is only an issue with teenaged girls, I will definitely look out for this even at a younger age.
Why write the last paragraph, your an expert in psychology, not gender inequality?
Maybe it’s not school that makes boys more willing to take risks and try, even when they are unsure that they will succeed. Maybe it’s girls.
Boys are still expected by most girls to pursue them, not vice versa. Don’t have a date for the dance? Better ask, young man, otherwise you will be alone.
This may seem like a small thing, but it teaches the value of believing in yourself and daring to succeed, even when you think you haven’t got a shot. 90 percent of life is showing up and you can learn that in real life by asking out the “unattainable” girl and she says “Yes!”
We can tell girls to take risks, to budget their time differently, to try to not be the perfect teacher’s pet, but at the same time we are teaching boys, at the point of their own sex drives (pretty motivating!), to be masters of their own fate and not wait to be graded in life by someone else.
And we can see the successful results.
But let’s not pretend there are only successes in life for boys. Most prison inmates, drug addicts, and homeless people are men, a point which is usually overlooked in feminist laments about patriarchy.
Maybe doing the “right thing” to ensure that girls succeed will equalize society not just at the top but at the bottom as well. Are women ready for that?
Men must have a reckless gene, one that encourages them to do daring, dangerous, moronic things like: crossing a vast unknown ocean in tiny wooden ships looking for a route to China; flying in a soup can size capsule to the moon, just for the thrill.
These reckless things and adventures have taken us far, but if only level headed females were in charge, none of this crazy stuff would have happened.
Yes, men have some strange traits that advance the human race, traits that women lack. You might even say women are not up to the task of getting us to the next level.
Gee, I wonder if men and women are truly equal.
I can agree that men and women are different but I can also say the differences women bring to the world deserve the same pay and respect.
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"What if school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters?"
Huh? How is school, where boys get worse grades and more punishments, a "confidence factory."
Try substituting "black" for "boys" in this essay and see if it sounds credible?
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Cirst we circumsise our boys at birth. Then school girls dress scantly and distract boys. Our culture tells us Masculinity is dumb and is not valued. No wonder boys dont feel like working. The auther points out more men in powerful positions. Wow what 1% of my peers were hand selected for power! What about me? No 1 cares...
Or maybe girls outperform boys in school because of the so called opioid epidemic (boys and some boys being drugged 24/7 against their wishes and without their knowledge).
Beautifully written! Spot on.
maybe work is the problem, not schools
It is true that women have the womb. Biases, harassment, old boys networks - these are all things that really happen.
BUT this article does have some truth to it. I am a PhD scientist and my female colleagues and I have noted that we are much less likely to publish work until we are sure it is good. We have male colleagues (not all) who blast out the "least publishable unit", mediocre, partially finished work. We look at each other and say "that is not good enough". We argue that we have fewer, higher quality publications and we feel good about that. But we have fewer publications and this is the measure of success in our field.
We are not anxious. We are not teenagers (anymore). We are highly successful. But with this slightly more subtle measure (only anecdotally examined), the phenomenon that is presented in this article is accurate.
We also have kids.
Elementary teacher turned administrator here. A thought: in (most) (typically developing) children, the girls tend to have an easier time handling objects safely, showing self-control, following directions, and completing their work.
Well-intentioned teachers, in an effort to engage boys and keep them participating in a positive manner, give them jobs: door holder. Pencil passer-outer. Line leader. Teacher's helper.
How is this well-intentioned act internalized? The boys-- especially the boys who present challenging behaviors-- automatically get 'leadership' positions simply for showing up. The girls, especially the quieter ones, learn to keep their heads down and roll their eyes as their male classmates get privilege after privilege.
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@JHC
Way to burst my bubble. On the plus side, it's my girl who's classroom equipment manager, adding one more anecdote to the pile of evidence that "well-behaved women rarely make history".
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@JHC That is an excellent point.
From the time they enter kindergarten girls cling to the teacher, seeking constance attention and spend most of their time seeking praise.
Meanwhile the boys are running around socializing with each other and building relationships.
any chance in these days to say male and females do have some differences?