Monday 24 October 2011
Women's careers
Emily has been talking about professional realities and professionalism - reflection is a way of looking at what we do in a neutral way to find out how we can make changes.
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I found this article quite inspiring as I am guilty of all the 4 points it covers.
ReplyDeleteMany of the comments disagree with the article as a lot are made by more confident women who have been knocked back in their careers through putting themselves forwards and not "blending in", but like everything there is a balance and it's important to find this.
It's something to think about while writing a reflective journal; there needs to be a healthy balance between professional criticism and praise in order to move forwards professionally and personally.
Thank you Paula
My first thoughts as I started reading this article were "Is confidence really something that can be measured?" It seemed odd to me that the article was talking about statistics and percentages with regards to confidence. For example, one of the statistics read:
ReplyDelete"Men were more confident across all age groups, with 70% of males having high or very high levels of self-confidence, compared to 50% of the women surveyed."
How on earth was that measured? How have they defined confidence? How have they separated "appearing" confident and "being" confident. I am certain that most people that appear extremely confident have plenty of doubts about their ability, but they have learnt to appear to have none in order to be perceived as confident.
After all, if you do appear confident, if you do everything that your boss would expect of a confident and competent employee, he will perceive you as such regardless of whether you "feel" confident.
Yes my PhD supervisor often makes the point about how statistics were formulated? That is why the way the research is undertaken is always written up in the report of the research.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this article, I think that maybe subconsciously there is still the feeling among women of that they are a less dominant sex in certain careers, or that they are still more suited to a domestic, rather than professional way of life, leading them to question their abilites and reducing thier confidence. Is there still discrimination and inequality at the workplace or do we just add to it by having low self esteem?
ReplyDeleteThinking about what Liam said- how do we measure confidence?- I think the survey will have been made with a multiple choice answer format eg. very under confident, under confident, neither confident nor unconfident, confident, very confident- and it is down to the surveyed person to answer accordingly.