Welcome to the second instalment of The Ambition Recession. We’re looking at ambition - from Aotearoa and Australia to the wider world - touching culture, politics, economics, history, and philosophy along the way.
In this series so far:
Women in politics are up against it
This past weekend, I spent two days with hundreds of women in politics. Women who put themselves in the public eye to serve their community. They juggle jobs, volunteering, caring responsibilities and families, then take a deep breath to sit at the Council table and cop it from naysayers and newspapers.
These women are passionate and dedicated to their jobs. They are not complainers. But when I asked, they shared some of their biggest issues with me. These align with what I hear from female politicians everywhere:
They face significant public backlash and in-house friction
They are swamped by their workloads, inboxes and reading requirements.
They receive abuse, including death threats - and their home addresses are matters of public record.
They have guilt and fear about not doing all their competing responsibilities justice
They struggle with “imposter syndrome” (Am I really good enough to be here? Shouldn’t someone more qualified or better than me take this seat? Do I really have anything valuable to add?).
In this piece, I’ll tell you what I told them, and share a few key slides from my keynote.
Perspective in public service
I kicked off as I often do for politicians: exploring the prospect of long-term legacy leadership in a political system hamstrung by reactivity, short-term budgeting and election cycles.
We talked about perspective - its importance and difficulty, and how to channel a diverse and long-term outlook to that conquers short-term reactivity. Then, we dug into the traps that make it difficult to maintain perspective in public service.
Perspective traps
In local government, direct community connection and tangible issues make it difficult to maintain perspective. There are three perspective traps detailed in Local Legends:
Present/urgent trap - There’s always an urgent problem to solve, often from someone you know.
Pragmatic trap - It’s tempting to quickly “solve this one yourself” rather than go through the proper process.
Public opinion trap - A few noisy voices dominate public conversation, which can hijack decision-making.
Women play on hard mode
For women, each trap is even trappier.
Women are flattened by the present/urgent trap because we juggle a heavier mental, emotional and domestic load than men, and are expected to be more responsive and obliging.
We fall into the pragmatic trap easily because in our personal lives we are so often the “default person.”
The public opinion trap is doubly difficult - because women are socialised to be agreeable, and media coverage is disproportionately personalised and aggressive to female politicians.
Then, I unveiled a fourth trap, especially for the women in the room - but, of course, for women everywhere.
The patriarchy tax
Politicians lead in a system designed by and for men. Rules written when women couldn’t vote, open a bank account, or wear trousers to work, still shape how institutions run and decisions are made.
At the conference, I called it the patriarchy trap - but there’s no avoiding it, so it’s really a tax.
Here’s how the patriarchy tax shows up in public leadership:
Age
Appearance
Assurance
Ambition.
Age
Women’s competence is assessed by their age - which is never the right one.
For women under 35, youthful eagerness is seen as incompetence. The same behaviour in men is coded as impressive ambition. Women are sexually objectified, valued more for their appearance than their contribution, and condescended to on the daily. Under 35 is too young. For women over 45, experience, earned wisdom and boundaries, (traits seen as leadership in men), are proof of a difficult personality or emerging irrelevance. Over 45 is too old.
Appearance
Women are judged on their appearance, so they invest time in it.
The average Australian woman spends $1300 per year more on beauty than men, adding up to a small fortune over a lifetime, but the real cost is lost time and distraction. Women spend around two and a half hours more than men each week on personal grooming tasks: 130 hours a year. Three full work weeks and change. Time spent painting, plucking and tweaking, that could be spent leading, earning, or contributing.
But women’s investment in their appearance is not frivolous vanity. The way we look is used as a proxy for our value and competence. There are social, professional, political and financial consequences for skipping the mirror, so women wear the time, money, and opportunity costs of appearance expectations.
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Assurance
Women are held to higher standards of professional performance, so we underestimate their competence.
The comparative over-confidence of men provides professional and political advantages. Because they overestimate their abilities, men are more likely to put their ideas forward, speak up, call out decisions they think are wrong, and sustain failure or criticism.
Women do not inherently lack confidence and certainly do not lack competence, but we are held to higher professional standards than men. Research in the US and UK over three decades found our performance is judged more harshly than men - 49% stricter in the US, 38% in the UK.
In Council, that means women are less likely to speak up or offer an opinion unless they’ve done all their reading, understood the different arguments, and got their head around the technicalities - which leaves a vacuum, filled by men’s voices.
Ambition
Ambition in women is seen as undesirable and often publicly shamed.
Women in politics face a double bind. Studies show female candidates face a dual penalty: if they act warmly, they are seen as likeable but incompetent; if they act assertively, they are seen as competent but cold.
This is thanks to a phenomenon known as Role Congruity Theory - broad, often unconscious discomfort with people who publicly break stereotypical gender norms. Women are damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
Women are uniquely suited for public leadership
The very things that make it difficult for women in public leadership make them excellent at it.
Women have exceptional strategic advantages as a public leader.
On average, they:
Ask more questions, of more people, leading to a better-informed and more nuanced understanding of complex issues.
Gravitate to facilitative leadership, building alliances and defaulting to collaboration over competition.
Build and maintain strong relationships, with emotional and personal connections which sustain over time.
Are more likely to admit when they don’t understand something and seek clarification.
Are well-prepared, read their papers thoroughly and often do research on their own accord.
The same confidence/competence gap and social conditioning that creates added difficulty for women in politics happen to underpin leadership traits that lead to high-quality public decisions.
Women’s political ambition is not an indulgence, it’s a public good.
The #1 way to fight the patriarchy tax
For paid subscribers, keep reading to enjoy the instantly actionable advice I offered to hundreds of women in politics last weekend, to push back on the patriarchy tax. This advice applies to all women, in all industries and is also valuable insight for men.
I’ve then got advice specifically for men to improve gender equity in their lives and workplaces. If you want to do your bit, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is.
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