In the 1950s doctors were puzzled by a strange malady that seemed to have settled on housewives — random aches and pains, headaches, nausea and general feelings of hopelessness. Tranquillisers, psychotherapy and antidepressants were prescribed, with mixed success. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that the true cause of the syndrome was identified: being a 1950s housewife. Staying at home all day dusting, it turned out, was rather depressing.
Seventy years later we are scratching our heads over another psychological problem plaguing women: low self-esteem. Sociology journals fairly burst with studies showing that perfectly qualified female employees don’t push themselves forward for jobs and promotions, they apologise too much and they play down their skills.
In the mid 2010s, two bestselling books — Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman — identified a lack of confidence as the fundamental limit on women’s progress at work. “Women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves,” as Sandberg put it.
A cottage industry sprang up to treat it — assertiveness courses, “lean in circles” and “confidence makeovers” — and their messages were adopted by many large corporations as part of their “diversity strategies”. Women’s magazines ran “confidence issues” or heralded “confidence revolutions” and women found themselves being sprayed with vaguely defiant inspirational quotes from every direction (“believe in yourself or no one else will”, “rewrite the rules”, or even “dance like no one is watching”).
For a while there was an evidence-free fad called “power posing”: the idea was that, before asking for a pay rise, you should nip to the loo and practise a Wonder Woman-like stance in the mirror to “reclaim space”. More recently, attention has turned to ridding women of self-deprecating verbal tics, such as the phrase “no worries if not”. There has been a spate of articles with headlines such as “Kamala Harris didn’t become vice-president elect by saying ‘no worries if not’” in which women agonise over their inability to kick the habit. Last week on the Huffington Post website a psychologist advised trying “positive affirmations” in order to “resist [the] temptation” to say it.
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There’s a similar campaign to get women to stop saying sorry. A Forbes article, “How women can stop apologising and take their power back”, advises making a log and writing down each time you say the word “sorry”.
You may be wondering why so many of these well-meaning initiatives sound like nonsense. It’s because they are. Anyone who has tried power-posing or telling themselves, per L’Oréal, that they are “worth it” knows that the effect lasts perhaps the length of a blow-dry. Among psychologists, meanwhile, the 1970s craze for improving the world’s self-esteem is at last starting to burn out. The coming orthodoxy is instead that our self-esteem is horribly dependent on the esteem of others. Humans, like other animals, have evolved to scrupulously monitor where they stand in a particular group and to behave accordingly.
If you are low in the pecking order you feel an accompanying low self-esteem, which is a cue to start acting in a people-pleasing manner. (If, instead, you mistakenly start swaggering around and telling the top dogs what to do, you risk being quickly put in your place.) Framed in this way, confidence is not a “flame to be nurtured”, “the most beautiful thing a woman can wear”, or similar: it is a useful signal telling you exactly how you are valued in a particular group, on a particular day, and what to do next.
Within all that there may be a clue to why women find it so hard to drop self-deprecating phrases from emails. Research shows that far from being rewarded for acting more confidently, women are often swiftly punished for it.
One Harvard study showed that when women initiate negotiations for higher pay, they are penalised more often than men. Another showed that when driven-seeming women applied for jobs they were discriminated against unless they compensated for it by appearing extra nice.
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Fully adapting to the workplace, for women, does not seem to be a process of acquiring self-esteem so much as losing it. Half of new female employees aspire to top management but within five years, just 16 per cent do (men suffer a much smaller fall in confidence over the same period). Bolshy young women quickly adjust their ideas.
Could it be that women’s under-confident behaviour is not the result of some self-defeating inner “crisis”, but of steely calculation: better to risk seeming too nice than too cocky? Humans are infinitely adaptable, if the rewards are there. If being blunt in emails worked, women would be blunt in emails.
Rather than suffering from some group delusion, could it be that women are accurately reading the signals coming their way: that they are undervalued at work? Could it be that it is not female employees, but their employers that need to change?
If so, the option of packing women off to “assertiveness courses” may be doing more harm than good. Like the trend for wellness courses of which it is a part, it’s a cheap substitute for real action and shifts blame from workplaces t o the workers themselves, who are clearly just not trying hard enough. And of course when women are informed that they suffer from chronically low self-confidence, they tend to find it rather undermining.
Alice Thomson is away