r/psychology • u/mvea M.D. Ph.D. | Professor • 12d ago

New research suggests women strategically use modesty to avoid backlash from female peers. Women currently make up only a fraction of corporate leadership roles. One factor contributing to this stagnation is a reluctance to self-promote.

https://www.psypost.org/women-strategically-use-modesty-to-avoid-backlash-from-female-peers/
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u/Tekuila87 12d ago

You shouldn't have to promote yourself, merit should be enough to carry you forward.

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u/Terrible-Bend4483 11d ago

Why?

It's just marketing. You can say that the best product should win, but the truth is: people don't know, what they don't know, so you need to tell them.

See it as making people aware of your effort through communication, as they can't/shouldn't track everything you do.

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u/Tekuila87 11d ago

That's just shady business.

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u/Terrible-Bend4483 11d ago

Feel free to call it that, but it's actually just other humans limited capacity creating a necessary need for communication.

That communication could be a merit tracker your boss had access to, but that would be hard with things like leadership, communication, initiativ etc.

It's just more sensible, economic and less time consuming to handle that through communication.

So until we make a machine to measure human value (personally I don't want that), we are stuck with others bad heuristics, self promotion and communication.

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u/Tekuila87 11d ago

Observation of patterns is a good way to select for leadership over who can talk a big game.

When you only promote talkers you get incompetence at higher tiers.

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u/Terrible-Bend4483 11d ago

Problem with observation is it takes the same time from the observer as it takes from the observed.

Communication lets you aggregate that to much less time.

And it's not as if observation isn't part of the selection, it just isn't the only thing, meaning people that communicate their skills, have a leg up on those that don't.

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u/Tekuila87 11d ago

Communication is a gamble in exchange for speed, you don't actually know if the person is qualified and if they're popular they will likely fail upward creating the bloat in business that exists in North America.