Stop Giving Women Confidence Training

As a woman I am frequently bombarded with posts, blogs and training to boost my confidence, learn to negotiate better and gender specific leadership development training. I also notice many female leadership programmes including, very well meaningful initiatives to support women further their career. Yes, it’s important to support women but I wonder are we doing it in the right way?

Women are constantly bombarded with self help books to learn to assert yourself in the workplace or how to act like a man in the workplace because let’s face it, the workplace has been designed for men and we need to fit into it, not change it!

We don’t do this with any of the other minority groups so why do we do it with gender?

Yes, as women we have babies and as a result do more unpaid caring duties on top of probably a very challenging job but that doesn’t mean that we need to choose between whether to have a career or family. Which is exactly what’s happening around the world.

Despite my alluring title I do believe in confidence training, negotiation techniques and leadership programmes, what I don’t believe is that they need to be gender specific. We are missing the problem by miles with this approach to gender equality.

We need to challenge the norm.

The title of this year’s International Women’s Day Campaign #ChosetoChallenge. So, rather than simply accepting that women should conform to the current (male) way of doing things we need to challenge the system.

In the book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the author Caroline Criado-Perez highlights many areas in the workplace and beyond where the male is seen as the default and anything that falls outside of this is seen as abnormal.

This is the way we have designed our world because of the data we have collected based on who has been in charge and it has been so heavily dominated by male bodies and male perspectives that it seems the natural order of things, she goes on to outline. We need to start collecting data on how much unpaid care work women are doing and we need to know that so that we can start allocating resources efficiently in order to design services that properly support women.

Yes, some women a have great partners and if you’re a man reading this that genuinely supports his female partner’s career, fantastic, but what about single mothers who don’t have that support and are equally entitled to have a career and children? Change needs to start in the home and in our social structures and expectations in order for this to happen. Yet, here we are putting the responsibility onto women to change rather than society.

And then this starts to impact things like our health.

Stress and burnout are higher amongst women in the last year during Covid with many having to leave their jobs to care for children. We’re striving to give 100% to work and 100% to home and feeling like failures when it’s the system that is actually failing us!

Women’s bodies are intrinsically different, we are not just smaller men. We have hormonal systems and organs that are impacted differently and when stress is high reproduction is the first thing that is impacted. Over the last decade we have seen much higher rates of infertility, early menopause and more female related disorders. I feel that the challenge women have to climb in their careers whilst juggling parenthood is one of the major contributing factors to the rising female specific health issues. And so what do we do? We add more things to our wellness programmes like fertility testing, insurance cover and yes, more training rather than tackling the problem.

Even in a situation where you’re trying to improve the prospects of women your still taking men as the baseline and thinking how we can make women like them. How can we train women to negotiate for pay rises better, how can we give them confidence to apply for more senior roles?

According to research, women are in fact asking for pay rises as much as men but they’re less likely to get them.

I also listened to Caroline and author Helen Lewis in an interview pose this interesting research and to further question..

“Why are we assuming that men are negotiating the right amount? Why are we assuming that men are asking right? Maybe men are asking for too many pay rises but we don’t question male behaviour because it’s the norm.”

Another study mentioned in the interview found that women are really good at assessing their own intelligence but men of average intelligence think they are more intelligent than two thirds of people. If you apply this to the workplace and consider who is asking for promotions and pay increases you start to wonder perhaps if the whole system is flawed.

It’s time to #ChooseToChallenge the system.

I think it should be acceptable to ask in your organisation what the process is for assessing promotions and salary increases and whether it’s fair and just.

Equally, it’s important for both men and women to drive change in society and question social constructs and drive social and political change that support women outside of the workplace so that they can be at their best in the workplace.

In our latest whitepaper we talk about organisations becoming more sociocentric, in fact 80% of businesses will be more society centric in the next 5 years. It includes a quote by Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO for Blackrock who stated

“To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society”.

Our research shows that part of having a more society centric business means being inclusive and diverse, and organisations will not thrive in harnessing the true benefit of diversity if society doesn’t change. And organisations have the power to drive this change.

I think we are going to see organisations look at ways they can support women outside of the workplaces. We already see some that provide discounted childcare and flexible work arrangements. And this is a great start but its not enough, legislation and policy need to change in order to support women.

A prime example of this is Anna Whitehouse's Flex Appeal Campaign in the UK which strives to change legislation and societal norm for all workers, because working flexibly is important for all people not just working parents.

Without this change outside of the workplace nothing will change in the workplace and we will continue to make women think they are the problem rather than challenging the system.

#ChosetoChallenge