Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review, August 22, 2013
There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?
In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.
Stop Blowhard Syndrome, Christina Xu, That’s What Xu Said, February 9, 2015
While there are a few situations that make me feel insecure, I am, for the most part, an excellent judge of what I’m capable of. Expressing a reasonable amount of doubt and concern about a situation that is slightly outside my comfort zone is normal, responsible behavior. Understanding my limits and being willing to acknowledge them is, in fact, one of my strengths. I don’t think it should be pathologized alongside the very real problem of “impostor syndrome”.
In fact, it is the opposite behavior—the belief that you can do anything, including things you are blatantly not qualified for or straight up lying about—should be pathologized. It has many names (Dunning-Krueger, illusory superiority), but I suggest we call it blowhard syndrome as a neat parallel.
How to Succeed in Silicon Valley Without Really Trying, Noam Scheiber, New Republic, September 7, 2014
Every successful startup is in some sense a confidence game. Any founder who told the literal truth about the frenzied ad-hockery of launching a company would scare away customers and investors and quickly be out of business.
Even by the standards of this world, however, Bannon was engaged in some rather brazen frontsmanship. In early June, just a few weeks before he took the stage, Bannon revealed to his co-founders that Amicus owed the IRS roughly half a million dollars because it hadn’t paid payroll taxes for several years. Though Bannon, who as CEO chose to have sole responsibility over the company’s financials, had been alerted to the oversight months earlier, he never disclosed the information to the rest of the company’s leadership. It was not until his two co-founders, Topper Bowers and Ben Lamothe, caught wind of the problem on their own that they finally pried it out of him. “My initial reaction was numbness, shock,” says Bowers, one of a dozen former colleagues who spoke with me. (Bannon himself declined to comment.)
Then, in late June, Bowers and Lamothe learned indirectly from the company’s accountant that the money problems weren’t over, even though Amicus had paid its back taxes. The company was also on the hook for over $90,000 more in tax penalties, and at least $100,000 in outstanding legal fees. They also discovered that the company had additional financial exposure because it had gone months without workers compensation insurance, something New York State requires. Bowers and Lamothe went to confront Bannon about these latest revelations, only to discover that he was in Boston for the day dealing with a lawsuit from a previous co-founder, which also came as news. “At that point I was done,” recalls Lamothe. “That was my breaking point.”
Quiet, Ladies. @Wadhwa Is Speaking Now, Amelia Greenhall, February 3, 2015
Many tech feminists (such as myself) like to mock Vivek Wadhwa as “The Guy Who Gets Paid to Talk About Women in Tech,” but what he does is a serious problem that hurts women in tech in tangible ways. By appointing himself the unwanted spokesman for women in tech he has kept actual, qualified women’s voices from being heard widely in the mainstream media.
