The Confidence Code

Dedication

For our daughters,

Maya, Poppy, and Della,

and our sons,

Felix, Jude, and Hugo

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

1  It’s Not Enough to Be Good

2  Do More, Think Less

3  Wired for Confidence

4  “Dumb Ugly Bitches” and Other Reasons Women Have Less Confidence

5  The New Nurture

6  Failing Fast and Other Confidence-Boosting Habits

7  Now, Pass It On

8  The Science and the Art

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Authors

Also By Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

There is a quality that sets some people apart. It is hard to define but easy to recognize. With it, you can take on the world; without it, you live stuck at the starting block of your potential.

There’s no question that twenty-eight-year-old Susan had plenty of it. Like many of us, though, she was terrified of public speaking. Susan had a lot to say—she just didn’t like the spotlight. She confessed to friends that she spent many sleepless nights worrying about upcoming performances, fearful of being ridiculed. Her early speaking efforts weren’t great. But she kept at it. Armed with a sheaf of notes and protected by her sensible dresses, she fought her nerves and delivered her controversial message over and over, often to extremely skeptical male audiences. She knew she had to conquer her fear to do her job well. And she did, becoming a very persuasive public speaker indeed.

Susan B. Anthony, the voice of women’s suffrage for the United States, worked for fifty years to win women the right to vote. She died in 1906, fourteen years too soon to see what she’d accomplished, but she was never deterred—either by her vulnerabilities, or by the fact that victory was always just out of reach.

Just making the trip to school every day, as a girl in modern-day Pakistan, requires that same quality. And then to imagine, as a twelve-year-old, that you can challenge the Taliban by calling for education reform, blogging to the world as schools are blown up around you, absolutely demands it. And it calls for a huge dose of something remarkable to keep going, to keep fighting for a cause, after being pulled off a bus, shot in the head by extremists, and left for dead at fourteen. Malala Yousafzai has courage, to be sure. When the Taliban announced they intended to kill her she barely seemed to blink, saying: “I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.”

But she’s harnessing something else, too, something that fuels her defiance and charts her steady movement forward. Malala nurtures an extraordinary, almost unimaginable belief that she can succeed, even when the odds are stacked, boulderlike, against her.

A century apart, these two women are united by a common faith—a sense that they can achieve what they set out to do. What they share is confidence. It’s potent, essential even, and for women, it’s in alarmingly short supply.

The elusive nature of confidence has intrigued us for years, ever since we started writing
Womenomics
in 2008. We were busy detailing the positive changes unfolding for women: remarkable data about our value to the bottom line of companies, and the power that gives us to balance our lives and still succeed. But as we talked to women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn’t quite identify, a force clearly holding us back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn’t really deserve the big promotion she’d just got? What did it mean when the fast-rising engineer, who’d been a pioneering woman in her industry for decades, told us offhandedly that she wasn’t sure she was really the best choice to run her firm’s new big project?

In two decades of covering American politics, we have interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people who you’d assume would brim with confidence. On closer inspection, however, with our new focus, we were surprised to realize the full extent to which the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt. Woman after woman, from lawmakers to CEOs, expressed to us some version of the same inexplicable feeling that they don’t fully own their right to rule the top. Too many of the fantastically capable women we met and spoke with seemed to lack a certain boldness, a firm faith in their abilities. And for some powerful women, we discovered, the very subject is uncomfortable, because it might reveal what they believe to be an embarrassing weakness. If
they
are feeling all that, only imagine what it is like for the rest of us.

You know those uneasy sensations: the fear that if you speak out you will sound either stupid or self-aggrandizing; the sense that your success is unexpected and undeserved; the anxiety you have about leaving your comfort zone to try something exciting and hard and possibly risky.

We have often felt the same kind of hesitation ourselves. Comparing notes about confidence levels at the end of a dinner a few years ago, as well as we knew each other, was a revelation. Katty went to a top university, got a good degree, speaks several languages, and yet she has spent her life convinced she just isn’t intelligent enough to compete for the most prestigious jobs in journalism. Claire found
that
implausible, laughable really, and yet realized that she too, for years, routinely deferred to the alpha-male journalists around her, assuming that because they were so much louder, so much more certain, that they just knew more. She almost unconsciously believed that they had a right to talk more on television. Were they really just more self-assured?

The questions kept coming. Had we merely stumbled across a few anecdotes here and there, or are women really less confident than men? And what is confidence, anyway? What does it let us do? How critical is it to our well-being? To success? Are we born with it? Can we get more of it? Are we creating it or thwarting it in our kids? Finding answers to these questions was clearly our next project.

We covered more territory than we initially envisioned, because each interview and each answer convinced us that confidence is not only an essential life ingredient, but also unexpectedly complex. We met with scientists who study the way confidence manifests itself in lab rats and monkeys. We talked to neurologists who suggested that it is rooted in our DNA, and psychologists who told us it is the product of the choices we make. We talked to coaches, of performance and sports, who told us it comes from hard work and practice. We tracked down women who clearly have it, and women who don’t so much, to get their take. And we talked to men—bosses, friends, and spouses. Much of what we found is relevant for both sexes; our genetic blueprints aren’t wildly different when it comes to confidence. But there is a particular crisis for women.

For years, we women have kept our heads down and played by the rules. We have made undeniable progress. Yet we still haven’t reached the heights we know we are capable of scaling. Some misguided bigots suggest women aren’t competent. (Personally, we haven’t found many incompetent women.) Others say children change our priorities, and, yes, there is some truth in this claim. Our maternal instincts do indeed create a complicated emotional tug between our home and work lives that, at least for now, just doesn’t exist as fiercely for most men. Many commentators point to cultural and institutional barriers aligned against us. There’s truth in that, too, but all of these reasons are missing something more profound—our lack of self-belief.

We see it everywhere: Bright women with ideas to contribute who don’t raise their hands in meetings. Passionate women who would make excellent leaders, but don’t feel comfortable asking for votes or raising campaign money. Conscientious mothers who’d rather someone else become president of the PTA while they work behind the scenes. Why is it that women sound less sure of ourselves when we know we are right than men sound when they think they could be wrong?

Our complicated relationship with confidence is more pronounced in the workplace, in our public pursuits. But it can spill over to our home lives, undermining the very areas in which we have traditionally felt surer of ourselves. Think about it. You’d love to give a thoughtful toast at your best friend’s birthday party, but even the prospect of speaking in front of thirty people makes you start to sweat—so you mutter a few words, keep it very short, and nurse a dissatisfied feeling that you haven’t done her justice. You always wished you’d run for class president in college, but asking other people to vote for you, well, it just seemed so arrogant. Your brother-in-law is so annoying with his sexist views, but you’re worried that if you stand up to him in front of everyone you’ll come across as strident, and, anyway, he always seems so on top of his facts.

Imagine all the things over the years you wish you had said or done or tried—but didn’t because something held you back. Chances are, that something was a lack of confidence. Without it we are mired in unfulfilled desires, running excuses around in our heads, until we are paralyzed. It can be exhausting, frustrating, and depressing. Whether you work or you don’t, whether you want the top job or the part-time job—wouldn’t it just be great to slough off the anxiety and the fretting about all the things you’d love to try but don’t trust yourself to do?

In the most basic terms, what we need to do is start acting and risking and failing, and stop mumbling and apologizing and prevaricating. It isn’t that women don’t have the ability to succeed; it’s that we don’t seem to believe we
can
succeed, and that stops us from even trying. Women are so keen to get everything just right that we are terrified of getting something wrong. But, if we don’t take risks, we’ll never reach the next level.

The thoroughly accomplished twenty-first-century woman should spend less time worrying about whether she’s competent enough and more time focused on self-belief and action. Competence she has plenty of.

The
Economist
magazine recently called female economic empowerment the most profound social change of our times. Women in the United States now get more college and graduate degrees than men do. We run some of the greatest companies. There are seventeen female heads of state around the world. We control more than 80 percent of U.S. consumer spending and, by 2018, wives will outearn husbands in the United States. Now comprising half of the workforce, women are closing the gap in middle management. Our competence and ability to excel have never been more obvious. Those who follow society’s shifting values with a precision lens see a world moving in a female direction.

And yet.

At the top, our numbers are still small and barely increasing. On all levels, our talents are not being fully realized. We believe we’re stalling because, all too often, women don’t see, can’t even envision, what’s possible.

“When a man, imagining his future career, looks in the mirror, he sees a senator staring back. A woman would never be so presumptuous.” That disarmingly simple observation from Marie Wilson, a veteran of women’s political movements, was in many ways the launchpad for this exploration. It rang so true to us because it perfectly encapsulates both our reticence and our insecurity. And we’d add to it. Even when we
are
senators or CEOs or top performers of some sort, we don’t recognize ourselves and our triumphs in the mirror. Women who have reached admirable heights have not always erased the nagging feeling that they might be unmasked as incompetent pretenders. And rather than diminishing with success, that feeling often grows the higher we climb.

A year before her book
Lean In
was published, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told us “there are still days I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.” Likewise the two of us spent years attributing our own success to luck, or, like Blanche DuBois, to the kindness of strangers. And we weren’t being deliberately self-deprecating—we actually
believed
it. After all, how could we possibly have deserved to get to where we’d gotten?

Often women’s self-assurance dwindles in more prosaic patterns. Peggy McIntosh, a sociologist at Wellesley College who has written extensively on what is aptly called the fraud syndrome, vividly remembers a conference she attended: “Seventeen women in a row spoke during the plenary session, and all seventeen started their remarks with some sort of apology or disclaimer. ‘I just have one point to make,’ or ‘I’ve never thought about this very much’ or ‘I really don’t know whether this is accurate.’ And it was a women’s
leadership
conference!”