No girl power

International Women’s Day. Have you ever wondered why although girls regularly outperform boys in board exams, outnumber boys in graduation rates and school leadership positions, and have proven themselves professionally over and over, they make up fewer top positions as we move higher up the heirarchy — until there are just a handful of women in top CXO roles?

Why don't all those school medals and honours end up translating into real world achievements? According to Rachel Simmons, educator, life-coach and author, it is because women are still afraid to ask for what they deserve because they are socialized from birth to be modest, “good” girls and don’t build the psychological muscle to name their strengths.

Girls look terrific on paper — their resumes as good, sometimes better than boys. But get them to ask for a raise, and they fail — partly because they don’t have what Simmons calls an “inner resume.” Most women suffer from a sense of low self-esteem, so that even when they collect dozens of achievements, they often don’t give themselves the permission to own those achievements and leverage them. The pressure to live up to the image of the “good” girl sharply truncates our power and potential from an early age because we don’t learn to fearlessly express what we think — and say no.

Oh, I’m not saying all this off-the-cuff — although I see it every day in the wonderfully accomplished women I meet who are always getting paid less or have a lower title or shorter professional trajectory than their male counterpart. It was Simmons’ talk in Palo Alto, California that opened my eyes to something I already knew.

All of us in that room that day felt this could be our story, as she told us about the “psychological glass ceiling” that women create for themselves by invalidating their authentic selves through speech, body-language and weak handshakes as they strive to seek approval and “be liked” from an early age. By the time we realize we can’t please everyone all the time, we have driven our most powerful emotions underground, sacrificing our real selves for those we love — and even those we don’t, just so they won’t dislike us.

This is truer in Asia, where women are not just expected to conform to the artificial version of selfhood that is modest, polite, nice, selfless, but also be more deferential than their Western counterparts. Imagine! A selfhood that is selfless? I mean, how much more confusing can you get?

Now add to this, the Indian tendency to worship women (who was it who said a pedestal is as much a prison as a small, confining space?) and you’ve got the perfect formula for chronic low self-esteem — women’s need to achieve perfection, without the tools manage the failure to do so.

Girls are socialised differently from boys from an early age — so while it’s okay for boys to express their anger with fists and blows, but not okay to cry, girls are expected not to express direct aggression or engage in open physical conflict. So they learn to internalise their anger, or channel it through sadness into tears or depression.

Making mistakes also feels different for women. As people-pleasers, our relationships get linked to our psychological health. So now, we won’t take risks, because we don't want to make mistakes and let down our bosses, our co-workers, our families. But if we become so afraid to fail, how will we ever succeed?

This is exactly what takes away women's leadership potential and imposes a ceiling to their accomplishments, says Simmons, who runs a girls leadership institute. The ability to assert and express ourselves authentically is what builds that psychological muscle that helps us to ask for raises we deserve - or appreciation at home for all the work we do stitching together the family fabric.

Yes, we need to feel valued by society - but we have to begin by valuing ourselves, so that we can finally give ourselves permission to walk through those doors of opportunity that our feminist mothers fought so long and hard to open for us.

Writer & journalist Jyoti Pande Lavakare recently relocated from California to New Delhi