Insights on How Women RiSE

By Danielle McDonald

The session from the WELocal 2023 conference I am writing about is named Insights on How Women RiSE The speaker of this session was Shivani Sagar, a project manager at Schneider Electric. She talked about ideas and concepts from a top selling book titled How Women RiSE by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. She mostly talked about the many ways women undermine themselves in the workplace. For example, when reflecting on a team project they had worked on with a higher up, women tend to compliment their team members and what they had accomplished, while men have the tendency to compliment their work and how they had contributed personally. This is because “women want to be humble” and they think they seem “too aggressive when they talk about themselves”. Also, when women think they are underqualified for a job, they won’t apply. However, an underqualified man will still apply, and the rest of their team will have to make up for what they lack. Furthermore, women that do the same amount of work as a man will think about how well she’s doing and what she has accomplished, hoping that someone will recognize this, while the man that does the same amount of work as the women will actively talk to others about how he does and what he wants to do in the future. Because of this, their boss would think that the man wants the promotion and not the woman. These are only some of the few common examples on how women tend to undermine themselves in the workplace, which explains why there tends to be more men with higher positions than women.