“Do not behave like a girl”, we hear it all the time and we know it is nothing positive. Today, this is like some kind of provocation- an insult. Are we still living in the world where women are underestimated? We wish we could say that this statement is completely groundless. Let’s leave statistics to speak instead of us.
When we are talking about empowering women and the general employment rate, women take about 52 percent, but these numbers can lead us to the wrong conclusion. It is not about the representation of women in the working process, but in the structure and quality of working positions. If we look at the names of the list given by the Fortune magazine, we will discover that among these the most influenced people in the business only 4 percent are women. Almost the same situation is in the category of the best- paid people. In fact, only 14 percent of executives are women, which is quite disturbing.
What is conclusion? Women are more than welcome to work, but not to hold the most paid and most competitive positions.
However, we must admit that objective barriers are not always the main cause of this situation. Sometimes, women contribute to this with the wrong attitude and low expectations. They also have to take a more active role in empowering women process.
Because of this, they just have to face with problems and find the strength and motivation to get what they deserve. Of course, it is far easier to say than to do it in a proper way. They must fight with various prejudices if they want to be equal with the male population.
1 Prejudices And Empowering Women
- First of all, most of the women have an unreasonable fear of failure. This attitude definitely must be replaced with more positive posture. The most important thing here is that failures in the workplace are a normal thing and that this would not affect their reputation.
- Family problems are component of our lives. It is the same for both women and men. For some reason, women think that their family matters and potential problems at home will show how they vulnerable are or something like that. Just forget about it.
- Inferiority is another common problem in working women because they are convinced that they cannot compete with men in leadership, creativity and making tough decision. This is another thing that should be forgotten as soon as possible.
The best advice here is to be a woman. There is nothing wrong with that, even if you are a CEO. There is no need to wear pants to show how tough you are. Forget about pretending and be who you really are. This is not a circus; this is your life and your job. If someone has a problem with that, then it is his problem, not yours.
After these small adjustments, you will realize that you have more power than you thought before. Just use it and you will contribute to the empowering women process. You are a woman after all.