That advice to women to ‘lean in’, be more confident it doesn’t help | Hacker News Reader

That advice to women to ‘lean in’, be more confident it doesn’t help

theconversation.com

11 pointsrustoo15 comments

"be more confident" is some of the funniest advice ever, invariably the people who don't need to hear it are the ones who take it to heart.

> ‘Fixing’ women is itself a problem

That's been my experience as well with female bosses. The best ones I've had seemed genuine, and led in their own way. The ones that tried to act like males usually fed into the "confident women are bitches" stereotype because everyone could tell that they were insecure about being in charge, and tried to overcompensate by trying to emulate super aggressive alpha-male types. Males make the same mistake, but it feels like they get an opportunity to correct their behavior, whereas females don't get another chance once they are painted as "that bitch boss".

I certainly cannot say what the solution is, but I can say that not speaking up, not getting noticed, and generally quietly toiling does not seem to attract opportunities and promotion.

Since people generally seem to underestimate the work and effort that any job other than their own takes, being quiet and capable means forever remaining quiet and capable in the same position. This applies to men and surely also applies to women (although there likely may be additional factors for women).

My point is, regardless of what gender you are, being calculatedly outspoken and visible is surely a necessary element in one's career progression.

She showed a graph of 'hope for success' versus 'predicted probability for promotion'- it's just outright silly to attempt to represent something as complicated as this on two axises. Any attempt to quantify something like "hope for success" can branch into endless debate about setting success criteria, defining hope, measuring anything in this space, etc. This is a philosophical or psychological issue, not a mathematical one.

Data visualization is a terrible way to make an argument about human behavior.

Case in point, she is a woman. She's oversimplified her world so much that she thinks she's found THE answer

I have seen men over-generalize things just as much as women. Case in point: your comment.

OK this is not an appropriate comment for HN

edit: or anywhere else

This complaint seems like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good - the author took the data she had, applied it in what sounds like the best way related to the problem, and reported the outcome. It didn't seem like an especially strong result to me, though - while there is clearly a relationship between the chosen measure of confidence and promotion probability for men, it sure looks like it's there for women too, even if it doesn't pass the author's test of statistical significance.

It's also a reductionist view of what the advice in "lean in" is actually about. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection is that it is about actually doing things like staying in the workforce even if you have kids, putting your name in for promotions, etc. I would be extremely surprised if choices like those are not correlated with likelihood of promotion.

Women of HN: how do you think your male peers can best help to close the gaps in tech (and otherwise)? A lot of us want to help, but I fear we are often misguided.

- don't talk over women in meetings - don't ask women to do informal "secretarial work" for the group, e.g. note-taking, summarizing meetings, ordering the Christmas cards, buying birthday presents, ordering furniture - don't expect all women to have the same personality (warm, bubbly, cold, bitchy, etc.) - don't say dumb shit about maternity leave (the day I came back from maternity leave, my boss told me he wished he had been on "vacation" for 3 months) - hire men too for traditionally "women-dominated" roles, e.g. office manager, customer support, chief of staff, HR. Show that gender balance cuts both ways. - don't make assumptions for women with kids (oh, you probably can't come to that happy hour, etc.) that you wouldn't make for men with kids

I personally think on-campus recruiting is a great way to get young women into tech. I loved mentoring the young women we hired, managing them, promoting them, etc. (before I left to found my own company).

There are no gaps, women want to be what they want to be and they don't want to be in tech. trying to shoehorn them into tech just going to end up with products that suck because you got employees that don't want to work in the industry really and don't care about their work. See "firefox pocket" whole team hired on diversity and nobody likes the product at all

lol yeah we need more Juiceros

I make more than my male peers. I think they would like the advice more. I don’t worry about making friends at work, I’m here to do a job to the best of my abilities.

As a woman I totally agree. Leaning in had done absolutely nothing working as a software engineer on a massive government contract. Producing good work, good code, and a focus on getting the job done has (it seems) been the primary driver of promotions here. Maybe because it’s government, but the whole overconfidence and fearlessness just falls flat here and make you sound like a tool - male and female.

I recall some conspiracy theorist that "Lean In" was heavily popularized by a right wing think tank, because at a surface level, it's message recontextualizes a lack of opportunity for women in various fields, not as a system issue of sexism, but as a personal failure. 'The reason there aren't more women engineers is because women just aren't confident enough! There doesn't need to be any national policy changes to maternity leave!'

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