Feeling a little Friday-afternoon jaded at work? It’s no wonder. A new book reveals that women are caught on an achievement treadmill, where we’re forced to demonstrate our worth over and over again.
What Works for Women At Work was written by Joan Williams, an American law professor and director of Centre for WorkLife Law at Univestiy of California’s Hastings College of the Law. She wrote the book in conjunction with her daughter, taking a new look at research on women in the workplace, and identifying common themes and experiences.
In particular, women are faced with four specific types of bias: ‘Prove It Again’ (the aforementioned achievement treadmill where women are forced to prove their worth again and again), ‘tightrope’ (walking the perilous path between being ‘too masculine’ and ‘too feminine’), ‘maternal wall’ (fairly self explanatory - women face difficulties when they have kids) and ‘tug of war’ (where women’s coping mechanisms for coping in a male working environment pit them against each other). She offers specific advice on coping with each scenario as well as - depressingly - advice on when to get out.
What surprised Williams was that the ‘prove it again’ bias, where women are expected to constantly demonstrate their worth, doesn’t dissipate as women get older and more experienced. ‘One of the things that I found most sobering is that I assumed that women would have “Prove It Again” problems early in their careers and then that those would dissipate and maybe disappear as they got older. And that didn’t happen. Women have “Prove It Again” problems from the beginning of their careers until the end of their careers.’ In contrast, men are judged by their potential, rather than their achievements.
It’s depressing stuff, but probably rings true for anyone about to clock off from another 50-hour week, with the vague sense that you haven’t done everything on your to-do list. Do you think that bloke across the office who's just taken a three-hour lunch break is fretting over the parlous state of his inbox?
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Picture: Tully K
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.