#5 Read-Watch-Listen
Read
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome
by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, Harvard Business Review
If like me, you are a women in her thirties, you’ve probably had a bout (lifetime?) of imposter syndrome. Maybe you started a new job or got promoted and felt like, while you had worked your ass off, in some way you didn’t deserve it the same way as someone else you know had. Where does this feeling come from? What makes us believe that we are so undeserving of the things we’ve ultimately worked so hard for?
The article to read this week outlines how Imposter Syndrome is a result of micro-aggressions brought about via unconscious bias and direct discrimination. They also argue that telling or suggesting to women that they have imposter syndrome, puts the onus on individual women to sort themselves out, rather than address the structural issues that are at play in various places.
“Even if women demonstrate strength, ambition, and resilience, our daily battles with microaggressions, especially expectations and assumptions formed by stereotypes and racism, often push us down. Imposter syndrome as a concept fails to capture this dynamic and puts the onus on women to deal with the effects.”
There is also the problem where people and companies equate confidence with competence, “The same systems that reward confidence in male leaders, even if they’re incompetent, punish white women for lacking confidence, women of colour for showing too much of it, and all women for demonstrating it in a way that’s deemed unacceptable. These biases are insidious and complex and stem from narrow definitions of acceptable behaviour drawn from white male models of leadership.” So, then the question becomes, how can women win at all or even get by when the signals of success/competence don’t match up with the expectations that are placed on them? The article ends with the same conclusion that I come to all the time - fix the biased structures and systems that dictate how people are seen and how things get done.
Watch
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Trump Is The First White President
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
I first started reading The Atlantic about 7 years ago when my sister applied for a job there. I got an email to some vein of “here read this - basically just read everything by Ta-Nehisi Coates” and I didn’t read everything, but enough to get me to think that he was a “genius,” as put to him by Stephen Colbert.
What I like so much about this interview is that Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about how important data, history, and perceptions are in having conversations about race in America. Our perception of historical figures and ideas drastically changes overtime depending on how we progress as a society. Martin Luther King was very unpopular during his lifetime, the concept of whiteness has drastically changed, and we easily forget how incredibly malleable definitions and accessibility to participating in society are over time. He also makes a really good point about how people reach out for direction and vision, often from the wrong people “I’m not the person you should go to me for that, you should go to your pastor… or your friends for that.”
Listen
How to Optimize Your Apology (Ep. 353)
by Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
Sorry, not sorry - apologising has become a recent art form. In the last couple of years, the drama of the internet and celebrity has strangely become newsworthy with spats between youtube celebrities and the back and forth on platforms like twitter and instagram. The most recent example, Justin Timberlake apologising to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson for basically being everything that this guy looks like. Everyone likes JT, so it is hard to see through his loving charm down to his silence and other shitty actions (most people on his insta feed commend him for being “brave” and speaking out). I read recently that cancel culture has always been a thing (think Britney, Winona, Laura), it’s just more recently it’s become a thing for men (metoo movement, specifically) - and that is why it now has a name. But what’s amazing is that people aren’t very good and saying sorry, and in some ways have gotten better at the non-apology. Is there an optimal way to apologise?
Sorry (courtesy Of Justin Bieber’s New Vid) GIF - Sorry Justinbieber GIFs Freakonomics did an episode about how economists have figured out the best way companies can optimise saying sorry. Specifically, what actions should companies take to ensure loyalty when they’ve bunged up? Ben Ho and and John List from Uber ran a large scale field experiment to test the efficacy of an apology with the main goal to understand how best to repair relationships with customers.
“I think the economy is really based on relationships, and relationships are based on trust, and trust depends on knowing who is trustworthy, that you want to interact with over and over again….And an apology is something that sort of helps restore my trust in them by sort of signaling their trustworthiness to me.”
Ben argues that apologies are more likely in long term relationships but also that those apologies have to be costly. Now, cost doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary, it can be status and there are other factors to take into consideration when doing it : “first of all, apologies are not a panacea. Secondly, there will be most likely to have an impact when they are costly to the apologizer, and the apologizee understands that there’s a cost. That’s the second big lesson. The third lesson is that you should use them with proper discretion. And what I mean by that is don’t overuse them because of the next major result that we find in our data is that if you overuse apologies, they can actually backfire, and they can be worse for the firm rather than better.”
In observations by another sociologist Cerulo, it really does matter how and when apologies are made,“It turned out that what you say first, and what you say last, goes a long way in whether or not people forgive you.” This is actually a fairly common phenomenon in human psychology and behavioural science - people also remember their entree and dessert and critique it far more heavily than the main meal, we remember the first and last candidates better when interviewing. She suggests,“you would start out by talking about your victim, and talk very little about yourself or your own justifications, and end your apology by talking about how sorry you were. And if possible, stating that you’d make some restitution. Those types of apologies were the most effective”
She also gives quite a checklist of how to apologise:
- don’t wait
- don’t mention what other people thought or said
- don’t give context
- identify your victim right up front, then express remorse, and, if it’s possible, make restitution
democratic national convention dnc GIF by Election 2016
Bill Clinton is not good at apologising
There’s a lot more in the episode - it’s a highly recommended listen!