Although Shih would go on to graduate with the highest GPA of any computer-science major in her class, she told us that at times she “felt like an imposter.” As it happens, this is essentially what Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told us a year before her book, Lean In, was published: “There are still days I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.” But as an undergrad at Stanford, she told us, she was convinced that courses she found difficult were easy for others. The tech entrepreneur Clara Shih, who founded the successful social-media company Hearsay Social in 2010 and joined the board of Starbucks at the tender age of 29, is one of the few female CEOs in the still-macho world of Silicon Valley.
Read the full story by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the July/August 2012 issue "Although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men." Related story Why Women Still Can’t Have It All She still entertained the notion that her public profile in America was thanks to her English accent, which surely, she suspected, gave her a few extra IQ points every time she opened her mouth. Katty got a degree from a top university, speaks several languages, and yet had spent her life convinced that she just wasn’t intelligent enough to compete for the most-prestigious jobs in journalism. Comparing notes about confidence over dinner one night last year, despite how well we knew each other, was a revelation. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt-that is, when they include women at all.
In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people you would assume brim with confidence. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn’t really deserve the big promotion she’d just got? What did it mean when the engineer who’d been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn’t sure she was really the best choice to run her firm’s new big project? In two decades of covering American politics as journalists, we realized, we have between us interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. To our surprise, as we talked with women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn’t quite identify, a force clearly holding them back.
The elusive nature of confidence has intrigued us ever since we started work on our 2009 book, Womenomics, which looked at the many positive changes unfolding for women.
But these explanations for a continued failure to break the glass ceiling are missing something more basic: women’s acute lack of confidence. Other commentators point to cultural and institutional barriers to female success. Maternal instincts do contribute to a complicated emotional tug between home and work lives, a tug that, at least for now, isn’t as fierce for most men. Some observers say children change our priorities, and there is some truth in this claim. If I had to pick, I'd rather be a witch than shut out." - anewleaf "I had quite a few stare-downs with folks who thought I was being unseemly and it did cost me, but ultimately, the trade was worth it. Typically speaking, men have a propensity to be overconfident, leaving them irrelevant and exposed to failure more often than they should." - Steven Smith "The great irony is that women have more of the natural traits of real confidence than men. "The best advice as I can give you as someone who started out with no confidence and has been in the workforce for 8 years now, is fake it 'til you make it." - Kiki "When most women, however accomplished and intelligent they may really be, attempt to demonstrate confidence by (consciously or unconsciously) trying to imitate male confidence, it all too often comes across wrong, like a singer hitting a wrong note." - Rozzer Excerpts from comments posted to this story: