To the Editor:
Re “There’s No Extra Credit at Work,” by Lisa Damour (Sunday Review, Feb. 10):
The most obvious reason that girls do better at school than boys, but less well at the office, is institutional sexism. Isn’t that why “underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” and “women feel confident only when they are perfect”?
When you start out with a 22 percent pay inequality, that is quite a handicap to overcome. Couple that with workplace attitudes that have not changed for many decades, notwithstanding the passage of laws designed to protect women in the workplace.
Add the failure to properly discipline men who sexually harass women in the workplace. Finally, take a look at the burden of caregiving responsibilities borne by women.
Once you do that, it is not hard to understand why girls work as hard as they can and still suffer from a lack of “confidence.” Counseling girls to be more confident, avoid overworking and economize efforts won’t be enough to help women catch up to men in the work force. Insistence that employers pay equal wages and combat sexual harassment will do far more.
Cathy Harris
Silver Spring, Md.
The writer is an employment discrimination lawyer.
To the Editor:
I was dismayed to read Lisa Damour’s article. I guess we’re now blaming girls (in addition to women) for sexism.
Dr. Damour claims that girls work too hard in school, and that sets them up for failure in the workplace. Now, after years of being told to “lean in,” are we going to have to suffer years of scolding to “lean out”?
When girls — and women — act with confidence, make bold moves and lead with courage, we get shot down. We get accused of being abrasive, unlikable and worse. Study after study indicates that the biggest obstacle facing women in the work force is sexism. This discrimination is compounded for women of color.
I want an article that explores what happens to bold, confident girls at school. How do parents and teachers treat their rule-bending daughters? My hypothesis is that there are two standards of behavior: a lenient one for boys, and a rigid, demanding one for girls. Unfortunately, because of Dr. Damour’s tired girl blaming, we’ll have to wait to find out.
Homa Mojtabai
Santa Monica, Calif.
To the Editor:
This was a thought-provoking article, but I wish it took the stance that boys should be doing more work, not that girls should be doing less. Extreme work-related anxiety and stress are undeniably unhealthy, but it’s better to teach children and teenagers to work above and beyond when they’re passionate about something, instead of encouraging them to just do what they can to get by.
Being a student involves learning how to prioritize, which solves the time-wasting problem, but too many are uninterested in schoolwork and put in only enough effort to get an adequate reward. We end up focusing on the prize, losing joy and motivation in the learning process. Why hold back ambitious girls instead of teaching boys to follow their lead?
Lila Rutishauser
New York
The writer is a student at Vassar College.
To the Editor:
Not too hard to figure out why girls do better at school than at work. Schools are very female-oriented. The majority of teachers are women. Work is male-dominated. The majority of bosses are male. School does not adequately prepare women for any work other than the pink ghetto. It is just a reflection of the current state of our culture.
Sandra Firnhaber
Oxford, Mich.
To the Editor:
Lisa Damour’s article focuses on one side of the equation, but omits the other. As a woman who worked in corporate management for 30-plus years and supervised hundreds of people, I totally agree with her assessment that women lack confidence. It was the single most prevalent reason I witnessed highly competent and extremely intelligent women being unable to rise up the corporate ladder.
But the other piece of the equation is the extreme overconfidence that men have about their own abilities. In my experience, even men who were utterly incompetent would never hesitate about proclaiming to all the magnificence of their intellect and performance, and because they said it with such conviction, they developed a reputation among their higher-ups for being someone who was destined for higher positions.
And all this went on while women, many of whom could run circles around these men, sat quietly at their desks too afraid to speak up about their own incredible abilities.
In addition to helping girls gain more confidence, something needs to be done at the school level to teach boys to have a more realistic assessment of their own performance, or at a minimum, to be able to acquire a more realistic assessment of other males’ abilities independent of what those males proclaim about themselves.
MaryAnn Pocock
Montclair, N.J.
To the Editor:
I’d like to thank Lisa Damour for sharing these insights. As a millennial female who strongly identified with the Hermione Granger overachieving bookworm stereotype, I found that the stories about her young patients and the research into girls’ education left me with a mixed reaction of empowerment and frustration.
I’ve read what feels like dozens of articles recently that shine a light on the workaholic culture of the millennial generation. To see the role that gender plays in shaping our perceptions of work and success gives me helpful (albeit frustrating!) context for my own experiences.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have supportive parents who helped guide me toward balance and happiness in my adolescence. Still, I see the effects of hyper-conscientiousness playing out in my life and the lives of my female friends and colleagues all the time.
Laura Marie Davis
Durham, N.C.
To the Editor:
Having had an A-plus sister whose mother took her out after every report card for reward ice cream sundaes, while I stayed home reading novels, I can relate. (I would not be bought by a grade-oriented mother.)
I’ve had to advise my college freshman girls not to retype and color code their voluminous class notes, while the boys show me half a page of handwritten ones.
At my high school reunion in Houston in April, I was pleasantly surprised when the guidance counselor announced that the school had scholarships for B students.
I love the line, “The difference between a 91 and a 99 is a life.” So true.
Sandra Hancock Martin
Montvale, N.J.
The writer is an adjunct professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a former high school teacher.
To the Editor:
When Lisa Damour considers ways to address the problem that “school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters,” she neglects to mention schools that have built both confidence and competence for women: women’s colleges.
According to a 2012 Women’s College Coalition Study, women who graduated from women’s colleges were 22 percent more likely to say that their college had helped them to develop self-confidence and initiative than students at flagship public universities. Women’s college graduates continue to be overrepresented in Congress and business leadership, demonstrating the personal and social impact of that confidence.
While Dr. Damour’s proposed solution — parents encouraging girls to focus less on being perfect — may help, parents and daughters who seek an education that builds confidence should consider women’s colleges.
Kimberly Cassidy
Bryn Mawr, Pa.
The writer is president of Bryn Mawr College.
To the Editor:
As the daughter of a working mother and a graduate of an M.I.T. doctoral engineering program, I am concerned about why girls perform well in school but women are not well represented among Fortune 500 chief executives and in Congress.
I was disappointed that “There’s No Extra Credit at Work” attributes the disconnect between girls’ performance in school and women’s performance in the workplace to girls doing extra work in primary school without exuding sufficient confidence to get a promotion later in life. Another article in the Sunday Review, “The Mommy War Against the State,” points to the crucial problem: Women can enter the workplace with strong educational credentials but then be entirely overwhelmed by the burden of child care.
Reading these two articles side by side made the idea of girls working too hard at school laughable. Let’s encourage changes in policy and societal attitudes that promote women in the workplace rather than tell girls to not work too hard in school.
Georgia Lagoudas
Cambridge, Mass.
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Why Girls Outpace Boys at School but Not at Work
Opinion | Why Girls Outpace Boys at School but Not at Work
To the Editor:
Re “There’s No Extra Credit at Work,” by Lisa Damour (Sunday Review, Feb. 10):
The most obvious reason that girls do better at school than boys, but less well at the office, is institutional sexism. Isn’t that why “underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,” and “women feel confident only when they are perfect”?
When you start out with a 22 percent pay inequality, that is quite a handicap to overcome. Couple that with workplace attitudes that have not changed for many decades, notwithstanding the passage of laws designed to protect women in the workplace.
Add the failure to properly discipline men who sexually harass women in the workplace. Finally, take a look at the burden of caregiving responsibilities borne by women.
Once you do that, it is not hard to understand why girls work as hard as they can and still suffer from a lack of “confidence.” Counseling girls to be more confident, avoid overworking and economize efforts won’t be enough to help women catch up to men in the work force. Insistence that employers pay equal wages and combat sexual harassment will do far more.
Cathy Harris
Silver Spring, Md.
The writer is an employment discrimination lawyer.
To the Editor:
I was dismayed to read Lisa Damour’s article. I guess we’re now blaming girls (in addition to women) for sexism.
Dr. Damour claims that girls work too hard in school, and that sets them up for failure in the workplace. Now, after years of being told to “lean in,” are we going to have to suffer years of scolding to “lean out”?
When girls — and women — act with confidence, make bold moves and lead with courage, we get shot down. We get accused of being abrasive, unlikable and worse. Study after study indicates that the biggest obstacle facing women in the work force is sexism. This discrimination is compounded for women of color.
I want an article that explores what happens to bold, confident girls at school. How do parents and teachers treat their rule-bending daughters? My hypothesis is that there are two standards of behavior: a lenient one for boys, and a rigid, demanding one for girls. Unfortunately, because of Dr. Damour’s tired girl blaming, we’ll have to wait to find out.
Homa Mojtabai
Santa Monica, Calif.
To the Editor:
This was a thought-provoking article, but I wish it took the stance that boys should be doing more work, not that girls should be doing less. Extreme work-related anxiety and stress are undeniably unhealthy, but it’s better to teach children and teenagers to work above and beyond when they’re passionate about something, instead of encouraging them to just do what they can to get by.
Being a student involves learning how to prioritize, which solves the time-wasting problem, but too many are uninterested in schoolwork and put in only enough effort to get an adequate reward. We end up focusing on the prize, losing joy and motivation in the learning process. Why hold back ambitious girls instead of teaching boys to follow their lead?
Lila Rutishauser
New York
The writer is a student at Vassar College.
To the Editor:
Not too hard to figure out why girls do better at school than at work. Schools are very female-oriented. The majority of teachers are women. Work is male-dominated. The majority of bosses are male. School does not adequately prepare women for any work other than the pink ghetto. It is just a reflection of the current state of our culture.
Sandra Firnhaber
Oxford, Mich.
To the Editor:
Lisa Damour’s article focuses on one side of the equation, but omits the other. As a woman who worked in corporate management for 30-plus years and supervised hundreds of people, I totally agree with her assessment that women lack confidence. It was the single most prevalent reason I witnessed highly competent and extremely intelligent women being unable to rise up the corporate ladder.
But the other piece of the equation is the extreme overconfidence that men have about their own abilities. In my experience, even men who were utterly incompetent would never hesitate about proclaiming to all the magnificence of their intellect and performance, and because they said it with such conviction, they developed a reputation among their higher-ups for being someone who was destined for higher positions.
And all this went on while women, many of whom could run circles around these men, sat quietly at their desks too afraid to speak up about their own incredible abilities.
In addition to helping girls gain more confidence, something needs to be done at the school level to teach boys to have a more realistic assessment of their own performance, or at a minimum, to be able to acquire a more realistic assessment of other males’ abilities independent of what those males proclaim about themselves.
MaryAnn Pocock
Montclair, N.J.
To the Editor:
I’d like to thank Lisa Damour for sharing these insights. As a millennial female who strongly identified with the Hermione Granger overachieving bookworm stereotype, I found that the stories about her young patients and the research into girls’ education left me with a mixed reaction of empowerment and frustration.
I’ve read what feels like dozens of articles recently that shine a light on the workaholic culture of the millennial generation. To see the role that gender plays in shaping our perceptions of work and success gives me helpful (albeit frustrating!) context for my own experiences.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have supportive parents who helped guide me toward balance and happiness in my adolescence. Still, I see the effects of hyper-conscientiousness playing out in my life and the lives of my female friends and colleagues all the time.
Laura Marie Davis
Durham, N.C.
To the Editor:
Having had an A-plus sister whose mother took her out after every report card for reward ice cream sundaes, while I stayed home reading novels, I can relate. (I would not be bought by a grade-oriented mother.)
I’ve had to advise my college freshman girls not to retype and color code their voluminous class notes, while the boys show me half a page of handwritten ones.
At my high school reunion in Houston in April, I was pleasantly surprised when the guidance counselor announced that the school had scholarships for B students.
I love the line, “The difference between a 91 and a 99 is a life.” So true.
Sandra Hancock Martin
Montvale, N.J.
The writer is an adjunct professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a former high school teacher.
To the Editor:
When Lisa Damour considers ways to address the problem that “school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters,” she neglects to mention schools that have built both confidence and competence for women: women’s colleges.
According to a 2012 Women’s College Coalition Study, women who graduated from women’s colleges were 22 percent more likely to say that their college had helped them to develop self-confidence and initiative than students at flagship public universities. Women’s college graduates continue to be overrepresented in Congress and business leadership, demonstrating the personal and social impact of that confidence.
While Dr. Damour’s proposed solution — parents encouraging girls to focus less on being perfect — may help, parents and daughters who seek an education that builds confidence should consider women’s colleges.
Kimberly Cassidy
Bryn Mawr, Pa.
The writer is president of Bryn Mawr College.
To the Editor:
As the daughter of a working mother and a graduate of an M.I.T. doctoral engineering program, I am concerned about why girls perform well in school but women are not well represented among Fortune 500 chief executives and in Congress.
I was disappointed that “There’s No Extra Credit at Work” attributes the disconnect between girls’ performance in school and women’s performance in the workplace to girls doing extra work in primary school without exuding sufficient confidence to get a promotion later in life. Another article in the Sunday Review, “The Mommy War Against the State,” points to the crucial problem: Women can enter the workplace with strong educational credentials but then be entirely overwhelmed by the burden of child care.
Reading these two articles side by side made the idea of girls working too hard at school laughable. Let’s encourage changes in policy and societal attitudes that promote women in the workplace rather than tell girls to not work too hard in school.
Georgia Lagoudas
Cambridge, Mass.
Source: Read Full Article