Are women their own worst enemy at work?
This was not a question I raised, but Juliette Reinders Folmer, a marketing communications consultant from the Netherlands chose to make a point by sharing the following with me. Would you agree? Share your comments.
In my view, women are their own worst enemy when it comes to work. Part of that can be traced to ’social programming’ and culture, but you can break through that.
A (female) ex-colleague of mine once worded it like this: “When men interview for a job and are asked whether they qualify and the job is above their level of experience they will say ‘I can’ while women will say ‘I can learn.’ We need to learn to swallow the ‘learn’ bit.”
So, in short: men are just better at selling themselves. Women all too often underplay their own skills and by doing that place themselves in a worse negotiating position on all levels.
