{"id":3352,"date":"2012-07-24T10:47:18","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T00:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/knowledgetoday\/?p=3352"},"modified":"2012-07-24T10:47:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T00:47:18","slug":"promotions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/blog\/2012\/07\/promotions\/","title":{"rendered":"What is holding women back?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Knowledge@Wharton today\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deirdre Woods, former associate dean and chief information officer at Wharton, made a point during her years as a senior manager of encouraging other women to advance in their professional careers. One thing has always surprised her, however.<\/p>\n

Women who are offered promotions \u201cgenerally feel they need to know 80% to 90% of their current job before they feel ready to step up into a new role,\u201d she says. But if you are smart and knowledgeable, \u201cprobably somewhere closer to 40% to 50%\u201d is all that you need.<\/p>\n

Men, on the other hand, feel no such constraints. \u201cMen will start thinking about their next promotion right after they start their new promotion,\u201d says Woods, who is currently interim executive director of the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s open learning initiative and has started her own consulting company. \u201cI\u2019m not sure if men are necessarily more ambitious, but they are much more overt about having a plan and moving forward.\u201d She remembers attending a conference where another woman made the same point, in a different context: In government, the speaker said, \u201ca six-term congresswoman doesn\u2019t feel she is ready for the Senate yet, whereas a first-term congressman does.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a phenomenon in the non-profit sector, according to a report last May in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> titled \u201cThe XX Factor: What\u2019s Holding Women Back?\u201d<\/a> The article quoted an executive at Google saying that the company \u201cmust invest extra effort to persuade women engineers to nominate themselves for promotions\u2026. Men jump at the chance, often before they are ready, and are often turned down.\u201d<\/p>\n

But women, the executive noted, \u201cmust be prodded.\u201d Indeed, he tells them that by not putting themselves up for promotions, they are holding themselves back. \u201cBy the time a woman says she is ready, she was probably ready a year ago,\u201d he said, adding that the company promotes women engineers at about the same rate as men.<\/p>\n

Woods agrees. \u201cWomen tend to be ridiculously over-prepared for everything. But at a certain point, over-preparedness doesn\u2019t get you moving forward. It doesn\u2019t leave you open to other opportunities.\u201d She suggests that women should be able to clearly define what type of job they want to do next. \u201cThey should be thinking about the next step even if it feels overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n

And \u201cas scary as it seems,\u201d she adds, women who do get promoted \u201cshould start signaling, at least to their bosses, that this isn\u2019t the last thing they want to do. They should show they want to do a really good job in their current role, but that they also have ambitions.\u201d In addition, she notes, men know that wandering around the office and chatting with their colleagues qualifies \u201cas work. Talking to the boss, running into him or her at the coffee machine, having interactions \u2013 men understand that this is part of their work. Women don\u2019t understand that. They think it\u2019s a distraction from whatever they are supposed to be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell<\/a> suggests that there is \u201csome evidence that women are held to a higher standard in the workplace than men, and that because women are stereotyped as less competent than men, any mistakes they make tend to reinforce those kinds of attitudes towards them as individuals. You can imagine that if this is the case, then it\u2019s even riskier for women to take on that promotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Journal<\/em> report was based on the comments of a task force set up to study the obstacles that women continue to face in the workplace. According to a McKinsey study quoted in the article, women get 53% of entry level jobs and \u201cmake it to \u2018the belly of the beast\u2019 in large numbers.\u201d But then \u201cfemale presence\u201d drops sharply, \u201cto 35% at the director level, 24% among senior vice presidents and 19% in the C-suite.\u201d<\/p>\n

The McKinsey study cited by the Journal<\/em> article also noted that hiring and promoting talented women is important \u201c\u2019to getting the best brains\u2019 and competing in markets where women now make most of the purchasing decisions.”<\/p>\n

This blog was previously posted in Knowledge@Wharton today\u00a0blog<\/a>: Do Women Shy Away from Promotions?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Knowledge@Wharton today\u00a0blog. Deirdre Woods, former associate dean and chief information officer at Wharton, made a point during her years as a senior manager of encouraging other women to advance in their professional careers. One thing has always surprised her, however. Women who are offered promotions \u201cgenerally feel they need to know 80% to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":336,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,12672],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-leadership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/336"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3352"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3354,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3352\/revisions\/3354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.unsw.edu.au\/BTOpinion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}