What do you do if you’ve accomplished a milestone or a major personal achievement? Do you shout it from the rooftops or do you smile to yourself on a job well done and keep quiet?
Recently I had a couple of projects come to fruition – one of which was getting a with a major publisher. I was so thrilled of course because the book was a culmination of many years of hard work.
My initial instinct was to not say much on my social networks about it. I figured people would find out eventually when the book was released. But once the publishing press release came out I couldn’t help but shout about my book from the rooftops.
But I found it interesting, my instinct to keep quiet. It’s common amongst women and people of colour (POC) to want to be discreet about our achievements. It has been ingrained in us to keep our head down and do our work and not sound boastful about the things we have achieved. Many of us believe it’s crass to openly be proud of what we’ve done or to tell people when we hit major milestones.
Women especially are prone to not bragging about their work. And it’s impacting them in the opportunities they get for promotion.
There are studies about this too. How women especially are . And it’s impacting them in the opportunities they get for promotion. As a found, women were far less likely than men to self-promote. And this meant they were less likely to get hired, promoted, or receive a salary increase, or bonus.
The study concluded that one of the reasons women were less likely to talk up their achievements was due to confidence. We now even have the term ‘confidence gap’ coined as a result.
As , “Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence. No wonder that women, despite all our progress, are still woefully underrepresented at the highest levels.”
As women many of us have it beaten into us pretty much from day one that speaking out makes us sound bossy; being confident often gets mistaken for being bitchy. This sort of thinking severely impacts us when it comes to openly talking about our achievements. Instead we tend to sit back and often let men do the talking which means they end up getting that bonus or promotion.
But there’s another more sinister reason for why women don’t self-promote. As the Harvard Business Review study found, women are often for being assertive at work and that talking about their achievements has a negative impact on how they are perceived by others. Much of this impacts how likeable women are perceived to be.
“As women get more powerful, they get less likable. I see women holding themselves back because of this, but if we start talking about the success-likeability penalty women face, then we can do something about it.”
What does this mean for those of us who want to celebrate our achievements? I often get the feeling that people want me to pipe down. I'm not sure if this is a subconscious thing or it's real - for example there are people who are meant to be close to me who have not once congratulated me for my achievements. And yes, that hurts.
I also look at POC and women around me making great strides in their fields and barely making mention of their achievements.
The one thing I realised is that visibility is important. The more women and POC talk up their achievements the more it gives other people awareness of not only the success that people who look like them are achieving, but that success is possible in industries which seem to be set up against us.
The more we talk ourselves up, the more it becomes the norm, and our likeability won't be a factor when success comes our way.
My daughter's presence is reminder enough that there are generations of women coming up who are looking at female success to emulate and aspire to. If you've ever felt hindered in talking about your success as a woman, to put those doubts away because I'm here to say, girl talk yourself up! I'm here to back you and support you! Because sometimes it's not enough to have success do the talking - you have to do it too!
