My mother works as a high school English teacher. She cooks and takes care of my father, and me and my brother, whenever we are around, packs lunch for us, takes our dog for a walk, tends to the garden ( 21 coconut trees, flower garden and a kitchen garden) all before she goes to school in the morning. She comes home and does this all over again apart from regular school work like essays, notes and answer scripts which she brings home to check.
At least twice a week she walks to the market which is a
kilometre away to buy fish and other home related shopping. She has no time for
T.V although she sometimes sits with us. She is also pretty active in the local
community and because she is popular as a teacher, every other weekend she is invited
to speak at a community event.
Most people would think of all this as an achievement. But
not my Mom. In fact despite all the praise she gets for her work, I have not
come across a woman more unsure and self-critical of her abilities!
Virginia M. Rometty, I.B.M.'s first
female chief executive, was earlier offered a big job, but she felt she did not
have enough experience. So she told the recruiter she needed time to think
about it.
That night, her husband asked her,
‘Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?’
"What
it taught me was you have to be very confident, even though you're so
self-critical inside about what it is you may or may not know," -reports the
New York Times which incidentally is also headed by a woman.
If the
first female CEO of Big Blue thinks she's under-qualified, one wonders how the
rest of women are stacking up on the self-confidence and self-promotion scales?
Here's where I think women get it
wrong: we are perpetually rounding down, where, by all rules of mathematics, we
should be rounding up. And that
slight miscalculation has huge repercussions in our professional lives……
A female CEO of a commodities trading firm
once told me every time she posted a job opening requiring eight qualifications
for a candidate, she would have a trove of men banging down her door demanding
the job or promotion. They would invariably tell her they were the absolute right
person for the job while actually only having four, maybe five of the
qualifications listed. She'd then notice that no senior women approached her
about the job. So she would reach out instead, and time and time again, the
women would respond, "I wanted to
apply, but I only have six of the qualifications, so I'm not the right
person." The men rounded up,
often lobbying for the job when they had a mere 50% of the stated
qualifications (not even 51%!) while the women with 75% of the skills needed,
took themselves out of the running……..
In the corporate boardrooms women face a different but a
familiar problem, tokenism or under-representation For example, having a woman
CEO surrounded by males! I believe it is irresponsible to represent
women in such a way that they are shot down more than they are heard.
Representation for women is not a question of equality or
merit or fairness as much as it is about diversity. Diversity is about balancing
testosterone with a more cautious approach. It is about Emotional Intelligence as much
as business intelligence. It is also about ensuring that mistakes
happen less often simply by exposing company decisions to more points of view
before implementation.
Having said this, I do not see top-down policy level changes
favouring gender diversity on boards unless of course there is undeniable
statistical proof of improvement and since companies are painfully slow in
implementing such initiatives, there in no way of knowing the benefits of
better women representation without shareholder activism.
In other words, women face an inner struggle of confidence just as they
fight for their rightful place in the outside world all at the same time! They
need to reconcile both to get ahead without losing their natural advantage of
Emotional Intelligence in the process. That’s not easy.
No wonder so few of them make it to the top!
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