Part 2 (1/2)

For women, feeling like a fraud is a symptom of a greater problem. We consistently underestimate ourselves. Multiple studies in multiple industries show that women often judge their own performance as worse than it actually is, while men judge their own performance as better than it actually is. a.s.sessments of students in a surgery rotation found that when asked to evaluate themselves, the female students gave themselves lower scores than the male students despite faculty evaluations that showed the women outperformed the men.4 A survey of several thousand potential political candidates revealed that despite having comparable credentials, the men were about 60 percent more likely to think that they were ”very qualified” to run for political office.5 A study of close to one thousand Harvard law students found that in almost every category of skills relevant to practicing law, women gave themselves lower scores than men.6 Even worse, when women evaluate themselves in front of other people or in stereotypically male domains, their underestimations can become even more p.r.o.nounced.7

Ask a man to explain his success and he will typically credit his own innate qualities and skills. Ask a woman the same question and she will attribute her success to external factors, insisting she did well because she ”worked really hard,” or ”got lucky,” or ”had help from others.” Men and women also differ when it comes to explaining failure. When a man fails, he points to factors like ”didn't study enough” or ”not interested in the subject matter.” When a woman fails, she is more likely to believe it is due to an inherent lack of ability.8 And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman's self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree.9 The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.10

And it's not just women who are tough on themselves. Colleagues and the media are also quick to credit external factors for a woman's achievements. When Facebook filed to go public, The New York Times ran an article that kindly reminded me-and everyone else-that I had ”been lucky” and ”had powerful mentors along the way.”11 Journalists and bloggers rose up to highlight the double standard, pointing out that The New York Times rarely ascribed men's success to having been lucky. But the Times didn't say anything that I had not already told myself a thousand times. At every stage of my career, I have attributed my success to luck, hard work, and help from others.

My insecurity began, as most insecurities do, in high school. I attended a big public school in Miami-think Fast Times at Ridgemont High-that was far more concerned with preventing fights in the halls and keeping drugs out of the bathrooms than with academics. When I was accepted into Harvard, many of my high school cla.s.smates asked me why I would want to go to a school filled with geeks. Then they would stop short, remember who they were talking to, and sheepishly walk away without waiting for an answer, realizing they already had it.

Freshman year of college was a huge shock for me. First semester, I took a course called The Concept of the Hero in h.e.l.lenic Civilization, which was nicknamed Heroes for Zeroes. I didn't have a burning desire to study Greek mythology, but it was the easiest way to fulfill the literature requirement. The professor began the first lecture by asking which students had read these books before. I whispered to my friend next to me, ”What books?” ”The Iliad and The Odyssey, of course,” she replied. Almost every single hand went up. Not mine. The professor then asked, ”And who has read these books in the original?” ”What original?” I asked my friend. ”Homeric Greek,” she replied. A good third of the cla.s.s kept their hands up. It seemed pretty clear that I was one of the zeroes.

A few weeks later, my professor of political philosophy a.s.signed a five-page paper. I was panicked. Five whole pages! I had only written one paper of that length in high school, and it was a year-long project. How could anyone write five pages in just one week? I stayed in every night, plugging away, and based on the time I put in, I should have gotten an A for effort. I got a C. It is virtually impossible to get a C at Harvard if the a.s.signment is turned in. I am not exaggerating-this was the equivalent of a failing grade. I went to see my dorm proctor, who worked at the admissions office. She told me that I had been admitted to Harvard for my personality, not my academic potential. Very comforting.

I buckled down, worked harder, and by the end of the semester, I learned how to write five-page papers. But no matter how well I did academically, I always felt like I was about to get caught for not really knowing anything. It wasn't until I heard the Phi Beta Kappa speech about self-doubt that it struck me: the real issue was not that I felt like a fraud, but that I could feel something deeply and profoundly and be completely wrong.

I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common for females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he's a pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart-wrenching life-and-death decisions. Although we had the same upbringing, David has always been more confident. Once, back in high school, we both had Sat.u.r.day night dates who canceled on us in the late afternoon. I spent the rest of the weekend moping around the house, wondering what was wrong with me. David laughed off the rejection, announcing, ”That girl missed out on a great thing,” and went off to play basketball with his friends. Luckily, I had my younger sister, wise and empathetic way beyond her years, to console me.

A few years later, David joined me at college. When I was a senior and he was a soph.o.m.ore, we took a cla.s.s in European intellectual history together. My roommate, Carrie, also took the cla.s.s, which was a huge help since she was a comparative literature major. Carrie went to all of the lectures and read all ten of the a.s.signed books-in the original languages (and by then, I knew what those were). I went to almost all of the lectures and read all of the books-in English. David went to two lectures, read one book, and then marched himself up to our room to get tutored for the final exam. We all sat together for the test, scribbling furiously for three hours in our little blue books. When we walked out, we asked one another how it went. I was upset. I had forgotten to connect the Freudian id to Schopenhauer's conception of the will. Carrie, too, was concerned and confessed that she hadn't adequately explained Kant's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. We turned to my brother. How did he feel about the test? ”I got the flat one,” he announced. ”The flat one?” we asked. ”Yeah,” he said, ”the flat A.”

He was right. He did get the flat one. Actually, we all got flat A's on the exam. My brother was not overconfident. Carrie and I were overly insecure.

These experiences taught me that I needed to make both an intellectual and an emotional adjustment. I learned over time that while it was hard to shake feelings of self-doubt, I could understand that there was a distortion. I would never possess my brother's effortless confidence, but I could challenge the notion that I was constantly headed for failure. When I felt like I was not capable of doing something, I'd remind myself that I did not fail all of my exams in college. Or even one. I learned to undistort the distortion.

We all know supremely confident people who have no right to feel that way. We also all know people who could do so much more if only they believed in themselves. Like so many things, a lack of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know how to convince anyone to believe deep down that she is the best person for the job, not even myself. To this day, I joke that I wish I could spend a few hours feeling as self-confident as my brother. It must feel so, so good-like receiving a cosmic flat one every day.

When I don't feel confident, one tactic I've learned is that it sometimes helps to fake it. I discovered this when I was an aerobics instructor in the 1980s (which meant a silver leotard, leg warmers, and a s.h.i.+ny headband, all of which went perfectly with my big hair). Influenced by the gospel of Jane Fonda, aerobics also meant smiling solidly for a full hour. Some days, the smile came naturally. Other days, I was in a lousy mood and had to fake it. Yet after an hour of forced smiling, I often felt cheerful.

Many of us have experienced being angry with someone and then having to pretend everything's great in public. My husband, Dave, and I have our moments, and just when we are getting into it, it will be time to go to a friend's house for dinner. We put on our ”everything's great” smiles, and amazingly, after a few hours, it often is.

Research backs up this ”fake it till you feel it” strategy. One study found that when people a.s.sumed a high-power pose (for example, taking up s.p.a.ce by spreading their limbs) for just two minutes, their dominance hormone levels (testosterone) went up and their stress hormone levels (cortisol) went down. As a result, they felt more powerful and in charge and showed a greater tolerance for risk. A simple change in posture led to a significant change in att.i.tude.12

I would not suggest that anyone move beyond feeling confident into arrogance or boastfulness. No one likes that in men or women. But feeling confident-or pretending that you feel confident-is necessary to reach for opportunities. It's a cliche, but opportunities are rarely offered; they're seized. During the six and a half years I worked at Google, I hired a team of four thousand employees. I did not know all of them personally, but I knew the top hundred or so. What I noticed over the years was that for the most part, the men reached for opportunities much more quickly than the women. When we announced the opening of a new office or the launch of a new project, the men were banging down my door to explain why they should lead the charge. Men were also more likely to chase a growth opportunity even before a new opening was announced. They were impatient about their own development and believed that they were capable of doing more. And they were often right-just like my brother. The women, however, were more cautious about changing roles and seeking out new challenges. I often found myself trying to persuade them to work in new areas. I have had countless conversations where women responded to this encouragement by saying, ”I'm just not sure I'd be good at that.” Or ”That sounds exciting, but I've never done anything like it before.” Or ”I still have a lot to learn in my current role.” I rarely, if ever, heard these kinds of comments from men.

Given how fast the world moves today, grabbing opportunities is more important than ever. Few managers have the time to carefully consider all the applicants for a job, much less convince more reticent people to apply. And increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.

When I first joined Facebook, I was working with a team to answer the critical question of how best to grow our business. The conversations were getting heated, with many people arguing their own positions strongly. We ended the week without consensus. Dan Rose, leader of our deal team, spent the weekend gathering market data that allowed us to reframe the conversation in a.n.a.lytics. His effort broke the logjam. I then expanded Dan's responsibilities to include product marketing. Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer, was asked by The Huffington Post, ”What's the most important lesson you've learned from a mistake you've made in the past?” She responded, ”I said no to a lot of opportunities when I was just starting out because I thought, 'That's not what my degree is in' or 'I don't know about that domain.' In retrospect, at a certain point it's your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”13

Virginia Rometty, IBM's first female CEO, told the audience at the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that early in her career, she was offered a ”big job.” She worried that she lacked the proper experience and told the recruiter that she needed to think about it. That night, she discussed the offer with her husband, who pointed out, ”Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?”

”What it taught me was you have to be very confident,” Ginni said. ”Even though you're so self-critical inside about what it is you may or may not know. And that, to me, leads to taking risks.”14

I continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how we fail to notice and correct for this gap. And that ”we” includes me. A few years ago, I gave a talk on gender issues to a few hundred employees at Facebook. After my speech, I took questions for as long as time permitted. Later that afternoon, I came back to my desk, where a young woman was waiting to talk to me. ”I learned something today,” she said. ”What?” I asked, feeling good, as I figured she was about to tell me how my words had touched her. Instead, she said, ”I learned to keep my hand up.” She explained that toward the end of my talk, I had said that I would take only two more questions. I did so, and then she put her hand down, along with all of the other women. But several men kept their hands up. And since hands were still waving in the air, I took more questions-only from the men. Instead of my words touching her, her words. .h.i.t me like a ton of bricks. Even though I was giving a speech on gender issues, I had been blind to one myself.

If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need inst.i.tutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.

When I first started working for Larry Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank, he was married to a tax attorney, Vicki. He was very supportive of Vicki's career and used to urge her to ”bill like a boy.” His view was that the men considered any time they spent thinking about an issue-even time in the shower-as billable hours. His wife and her female colleagues, however, would decide that they were not at their best on a given day and discount hours they spent at their desks to be fair to the client. Which lawyers were more valuable to that firm? To make his point, Larry told them the story of a renowned Harvard Law School professor who was asked by a judge to itemize a bill. The professor responded that he could not because he was so often thinking about two things at once.