FB Reminder: I am away on vacation right now. This post has been scheduled ahead of time.
I won’t be moderating comments until end of August 2009. Thanks for your patience!
Ran across an interesting article by Lotta Alsén, that talks about why women need to make more money to change the world.
Read the entire article here.
Fact:
Women work 2/3 of the world’s hours and own 1 percent of the [world's] wealth
She states that these are the 5 Top Reasons why women don’t make enough money (concluded from working with hundreds of women business owners here in the U.S. and in Europe):
- Women haven’t learned how to think big enough.
- Women haven’t learned how to systemize, and thereby leverage, their business.
- Women haven’t learned how to embrace the “deal”, and the art of selling.
- Women haven’t learned how to support one another in the actual growth process, meaning helping each other to increase their sales, their gross and their net profits.
- Women demand too much perfection from themselves. Instead of “just do it” they wait for the perfect moment, when they’ve learned enough, when their business plan is strong enough, and when they are “ready”, which means never.
While I agree in general that these are vague phrases that stop women from following their dreams — it stops men too.
I am not entirely sold 100% on the reasons she has listed above, because I think it stems from a deeper level, starting from our upbringing in specified gender roles as children, which means we have to start a change when kids are the most impressionable.
I partly agree with some of her phrases, and let me explain why:
Women haven’t learned how to think big enough
I think this “haven’t learned how to think big enough” phrase is too vague and I don’t think this is necessarily true. I think men and women alike, think big.
The problem is not pie in the sky ideas — it’s the execution.
It’s the feasibility of getting the resources such as investment capital as well as maybe an engineer or programmer to help you execute such a vision.
And it’s the sheer WORK of living on the edge for a dream that may not even come to fruition. I am definitely a person that errs more on the side of taking risks such as quitting my job without a single contract lined up.. but many women I know, are more concerned with stability.
Where are they going to live? Eat? Get money to pay the bills?
Men don’t necessarily think on a bigger scale more than women, they just tend take bigger risks in greater amounts of time.
And sometimes, they lose their shirt in the process.
Women haven’t learned how to systemize, and thereby leverage their business
First off, systemize is not actually an English word.
As a minor pet peeve of mine, I hate it when businesses make up “business English” and try to short cut a longer phrase that is more appropriate and clear to the reader.
Second, systemize (I Googled it), means to arrange according to a system or reduce to a system
So what she’s trying to say, is that women haven’t learned how to come up with logical business procedures to make their business more efficient and productive, which in a way, I think has merit.
Again, I feel as though this can be argued, although I am very biased, being a woman in IT who has to deals with systems and procedures all the time.
To come up with a proper business procedure for running your store or business for example, you need to have a sense of logic and rationality on your side.
These skills can be a natural thing for some people (not me) or it can be learned from your environment — childhood, schooling or work (this is where I slot in)..
I am not sure that even MEN have logic and rationality.
But what I feel men have as an advantage over women, is the added pressure to do very well in science and math, typically considered “male” subjects.
I feel as though that is the reason why women haven’t learned how to ’systemize’. They consider it to be a male skill, as learned from childhood.
To learn logic in programs, or rationality in math, is something many girls shy away from, even if they have a natural ability to do so.
I mean, how could a cute little pig-tailed girl love something so “difficult”?
As a kid in school, I loved math but didn’t like science much.
I couldn’t get enough of it, but it wasn’t in the cards as a career for me. I was lucky to have parents who believed their children (male or female) should do great in math as a basis for building knowledge, so they weren’t constrained by the idea that girls should stick to English, History and other girlier subjects.
My parents also encouraged my geekier habits and let me stay on the computer A LOT. As a result, I learned how to program and grew a deep love for technology in general, but not sticking to just the programming side — I wanted to learn how it could fit into business, which is where I eventually ended up, 15 years later.
Women haven’t learned how to embrace the “deal” and the art of selling
I partly agree with this statement. Men typically relish the idea of competition and fighting with someone else to close the deal.
They get an aggressive rush of adrenaline at winning a deal, and I gotta tell you, this is also the reason why many women fall short in negotiations for their own salary and worth.
What’s the real thorn in the side of women, is that they aren’t expected to be aggressive.
I cannot tell you the number of times where I asserted myself in a business meeting, or for a negotiation and was tough on the other side to get what I wanted…. only to later be called a bitch.
People simply expect women (especially young women who are attractive) to be gentle and sweet.
And when someone shows up with a different attitude, more like a man’s, they say something insulting like: WHOA pull back in the claws!
Frustrating.
I mean, can people imagine Alice in Wonderland to the right here, negotiating a high powered deal?
Not really. And that’s a sticking point.
It makes women NOT want to sell or negotiate, because we worry a lot about our self image. It’s true. We worry about the size of our thighs, whether our noses are too big, our breasts too small or our butts too jiggly.
Then on top of that, we want to seem nice and friendly to everyone we work with! And if we don’t smile effusively or are friendly to the brink of ass kissing, we get labeled as a bitch. Rather than as a professional woman who is trying to do her job.
Men don’t seem to care about that stuff (not including metrosexuals).
All they have set fixed in their mind is: Who cares what they think about me? What am I going to get out of this at the end? If I get the deal and lots of cash, then I’ve won even if they call me a fat, ugly bastard.
Women haven’t learned how to support one another
This is one that I do agree with her 100%. A lot women do this backstabbing thing.
Case in point: I once had a woman project manager who was hired from outside the company to handle a huge project with a few women consultants (including me).
When we went to a big meeting with all the executives in another city, the PM pulled aside one of the other women consultants and told her: In this company, we expect you to dress appropriately. That means no jewellery whatsoever. Please remove the necklace you’re wearing while you are meeting with executives, it is unprofessional.
The woman complied thinking it was a big deal in the company.
I didn’t see the big deal (and I told the woman consultant that), because her necklace wasn’t jingly, huge or shiny. It wasn’t distracting. It was just a necklace. I wore something similar and didn’t get called out for it the way this woman did.
But later on after being told the story, we noticed the woman PM wearing the most annoying pair of earrings with a necklace!!!!
It was jingling, jangling everywhere she walked or when she moved her head, and the dangling earrings were shiny, so they distracted people as the talked to her.
Can we say, hypocrite? But why would a woman PM single out a woman consultant?
I couldn’t figure it out. All I could think was: maybe she wanted to be more attractive on the project with jewellery, and by making all the other women drab, she’d stand out?
Or just because she was jealous?
How petty.
Anyway, she set the rule for the whole project, and she should follow her own rule as well.
The woman consultant got back to our home city to work, and she came into work wearing 3 necklaces and a pair of earrings with 3 bangles as a subtle “F*ck you” to the woman PM.
This is where we screw ourselves over.
Women demand too much perfection from themselves, always waiting for the perfect time instead of just doing it, which means they never get around to doing it.
This is another one that I do agree with, but many men do this as well.
A lot of women just need to DO IT and to stop making up excuses not to do it.
But women are (I daresay) under more pressure to be less of a career-minded person and more home-based. Everyone wants women to work and be a career tigress… but not at the expense of their children.
Yet if the husband is more career-minded at the expense of his children, people are more accepting of it!
My brother is a huge, huge huge workaholic who travels 99% of the year. He has never spent more than a couple of hours a week with his kids, and my whole family doesn’t like it, but thinks it’s fine.
Yet when I tell them about a friend who wants to focus on her career and have the kids learn how to fend for themselves at home, or foist some responsibility off on the husband instead (who is too happy to do it), my parents recoiled.
All my parents could think was: But they are HER CHILDREN.
And all I could think was: But they’re HIS TOO.
I don’t think it’s so much that women demand perfection from themselves, as they are doing it out of being pressured by family & society to BE perfect.
The perfect, working mother who brings home the bacon, fries it, feeds the kids with it, washes them, puts them to bed and reads them a story every night.
They aren’t expected to split any duties with the husband evenly (such as the husband cooking the bacon and feeding the kids with it), because they’re the MOM.
And they’re expected to do it all and love every single stinkin’ minute of it because they’re so totally obsessed about their children that they can’t be bothered to even feed themselves.
Lack of ambition? Pressure to be perfect?
Socialization from a young age?
TWO FB GIVEAWAYS THIS MONTH!
- Taking the cake for Lifetime of F*ckage Achivement
- Looking into a hypothetical Stay-At-Home-Mom’s Pay
- The Idiot’s Kids are in for a hell of a time!
- Fabulously Unrealistic
- Why the hell do guys have to pay for everything? :)
