How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
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How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
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Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#2> “You only got that internship because you’re a woman,” P. said. I was floored. [...]
> “Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern.
Yes - but what if you had been in one of those programs? That is the problem with explicitly preferring some group over another, not based on their skill level, when the people you select want to only be selected for their skill and nothing else.
I'm not saying that sexism in the industry isn't a problem, but the solution is more difficult than "just hire more women"
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#3Say, "You so deserve that promotion/scholarship/interview offer."
I read something recently that suggested using language like "You really earnt that [whatever]" when complimenting people. That is, you define the merit in terms of the person's effort which, hopefully, the recipient of the compliment is less able to deny. We often deserve nice things, but when we think we earnt them it's a more concrete achievement that's harder to wave away with impostor syndrome.
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#4> “You only got that internship because you’re a woman,” P. said. I was floored. [...] > “Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern. Yes - but what if you had been in one of those programs? That is the problem with explicitly preferring some group over another, not b…
you're right - it is more difficult than that. which is why i am little surprised that you said "that is the problem...". it is a problem. there are also other problems and other advantages. as you said - it's complicated (and i'd hate for you to be misunderstood as claiming to draw some simple conclusion from it).
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#5> “You only got that internship because you’re a woman,” P. said. I was floored. [...] > “Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern. Yes - but what if you had been in one of those programs? That is the problem with explicitly preferring some group over another, not b…
> I'm not saying that sexism in the industry isn't a problem, but the solution is more difficult than "just hire more women"
This is true, but one of the biggest steps you can take toward fixing the various forms of explicit and implicit sexism in the industry is to hire more women. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary. Moreover, the existence of such programs can be beneficial in the short term, as well. They really only skew significantly problematic if they are willing to compromise on standards in order to meet the goal of hiring more from underrepresented groups but we have no reason to think they are.
That is, think of it another way: the programs exist to provide more opportunities than would otherwise exist but getting in doesn't imply you only got in because you were of a given demographic. You're still being selected for your skill above all else.
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#6Say, "You so deserve that promotion/scholarship/interview offer." I read something recently that suggested using language like "You really earnt that [whatever]" when complimenting people. That is, you define the merit in terms of the person's effort which, hopefully, the recipient of the compliment is less able to deny. We often deserve nice things, but when we think we earnt them it's a more concrete achievement th…
Good suggestion. I never really liked using 'deserve' for this anyway.
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#7Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated basis of being a female cs major. Policies of reverse discrimination are definitely not limited to the special programs with women in their name.
Note that the former never was able to pass interviews, but it was only enough to get a foot in the door. It goes without saying that I have worked with many extremely capable women that no one would question they deserve everything they have, but it is easy and to see why some insecure college students have some backlash at having explicit discrimination against them (usually for the first time ever), since they are not being able to see how the less explicit but very real institional discrimination against women.
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#8A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors.
For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns.
I replied that, if that were their goal, they would most likely have to lower the bar as compared to a male intern, or else pay the female interns more, give them more perks, or purposefully interview fewer qualified male interns.
My argument was that if Microsoft's hiring bar was the top 1%, most likely only 10% of that candidate pool is female. So, one must either drop the bar for females, interview more females in that pool than males, or somehow double the chance that a female in that 10% of 1% accepted your internship offer. However, in those days almost nobody rejected Microsoft offers, so that last route seemed difficult.
The only way to maintain equality of pay and skill without purposefully rejecting male applicants is to spend a huge amount of effort finding more female applicants than male applicants in that 1% and persuading them to apply. But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them.
The HR representative got very angry, but couldn't articulate why.
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#9Deeper thoughts aside, what kind of good friend says that to someone?
Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome
#10A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…
Okay, first, can we drop the overuse of female/male? It makes us sound like we're talking about specimens in a bio lab rather than people and introduces issues wrt the nonequivalence of female and woman or male and man.
That said, to a large extent you are correct but you are framing it poorly. One of the major steps of breaking the gender gap is to spend more resources on, not just finding women, but also encouraging women. The net result may be in paying disproportionate amount of attention to the group of women compared to the group of men but it should not imply either of the more obvious ways to interpret "pay less attention to males". That is, it shouldn't involve ignoring men or spending less time with any individual nor should it mean reducing any focus on finding good people regardless of gender. It should involve adding focus on the women, which is substantively different despite the ability to describe it with the same words. It's also not necessarily feasible for everyone but it certainly is for Microsoft, especially with the sort of focus they put on trying to bridge the gender gap.