Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
F.Career for women is an obstacle course. The objective difficulties are known: the permanent ostracism towards those still of childbearing age, the delay accumulated by those who went to maternity leave, the negative prejudice about leadership qualities, and we could continue.
More rarely, we focus on the subjective barriers that hinder career development.
Chatting with the personnel manager of a large company, I learned that there are strategies women rarely apply when interviewing for a higher role.
“Those who are brave and come to talk to me first of all are far fewer than men,” explains the recruiter. By this meaning that the first to think that they do not deserve advancement are women.
“It is a question of lack of awareness of one’s abilities, it is true. But on the other hand it is also a matter of honesty: many women think that they will not have the time and opportunity to carry out a more complex task“.
Times and ways of working are therefore still an objective obstacle, because they are modeled on an availability and flexibility that are typically masculine. Or at least they still respond to a family model in which the woman takes care of the house by herself.
However, there are other situations in which female workers who have the courage to aspire to something better boycott themselves. “When I ask them why I should promote them – explains my interlocutor – they give me a picture of the things they know how to do and what they already do”.
And is this a mistake? “Of course, what I would like to hear is what they would be able to do in the position they aspire to. For example, if they aim for a coordinating role, they should tell me about their skills as leaders, motivators, organizers ”.
But then there are these qualities? In a survey I worked on together with Ipsos-EY recently, it emerged that it is precisely women themselves who do not recognize themselves as leadership qualitieswhich instead they attribute to men by a large margin.
It is therefore also within ourselves that we must dig to find that leader we (do not) believe we are.
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