Self promotion and gender
posted by rhdaly Jan 17, 2010 @ 4:18 AM • 1 comment
in ch1x0r clay shirky girlhacker howrobotsaremade jerks linda babcock metafilter negotiation and the gender divide rachel simmons rant sara laschever self promotion the curse of the good girl women don't ask
On Clay Shirky’s blog, he rants, ‘not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks,’ and thereby excel in the self promotion that he feels is required in business and academia.
He’s not the first to propose that, though this is the furthest extent of the claim I’ve seen. Commenters recommended Women Don’t Ask as a more measured discussion of the problem and recommended The Curse of the Good Girl as advice for raising assertive and capable daughters. This is all complicated, of course, by studies showing that women are disproportionately penalized for counter-stereotypical behavior, including aggression and assertiveness.
In what is sure to be an ongoing crime spree, I have stolen much of this content from a boisterous MetaFilter thread. Is Shirky just a jerk? Is being a jerk necessary for success? Is he blaming the victim? Yet another man explaining “the way the world is” to women?
Particularly relevant to the mission of stemming.org, were these comments by users girlhacker, howrobotsaremade, and ch1x0r.
What do I think? I don’t have a solution, but it’s an impressive problem.
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at 2:56AM 01/18/10 clara said:
This is a problem that needs attacking from multiple angles. On the one hand, self-promotion is part of life, and manager-types or others in power can’t necessarily be expected to evaluate everyone they ever meet to see if they’re just being modest about their qualifications. On the other hand, managers should be aware that these issues exist and supplement their judgments-by-self-promotion with other types of investigation.
I’m partly through Women Don’t Ask right now, actually! One of the earlier examples in the text is of the sort that managerial interference can address — a graduate department finds that more men are designing their own classes because that privilege is given to those who ask for it, and that they get more gender balance once the administrators start reminding all students that this is an option. (Another great point given in this text — women will more often not even think about the possibility of self-promoting or asking for more compensation/perks, and just reminding them that this is possible helps equalize the situation somewhat.)
As always, there’s also a great post at Geek Feminism on this topic too.