Dinner time conversation was an important part of my childhood. My mom would always be moving between the dinner table and the stove filling up people's plates with meatballs and pasta, and dad would be leading discussions. He would tell us stories about growing up in Chicago and quiz us on our knowledge of the presidents. When one kid would pipe up to announce to the family that he or she got an A on social studies test or that he or she was an especially good artist, dad and the other siblings would cut off that kid and shout "braaaaaag"
I reminded my dad of that tradition a few years ago, and he mumbled, "that was a mistake, wasn't it?"
Jeremy S. sent me a link to an excellent rant by Clay Shirky over the weekend. Shirky says that his female graduate students are much worse about self-promotion than his male graduate students. He writes, "not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks." (You should really read the whole post.)
When I look back at my professional life assessing what I've done right and what mistakes that I've made, the biggest error that I've made is not tooting my own horn enough. I've got plenty of self-confidence. In fact, I'm surely arrogant. But I'm quietly arrogant. I assume my excellence speaks for itself. I assume that others will read my papers. I assume that they'll look me up in google scholar and see that my papers are heavily cited. I assume that my prowess in the classroom is discussed and well known. I assume that people will see through those who self-promote, but have nothing to back it up.
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.
I was raised that self-promotion was tacky. It is, but it's really, really important. Most people don't have the time to really evaluate your work. They rely on short-cuts, including your self-promotion and your appearance. Modesty does not get you to the top of the heap.
Is this a gendered thing? Are women worse about self-promotion than men. Well, mostly, but not entirely. I know some women who will chew your ear off with tales of their latest achievements, and I know some guys who quietly work.
Steve's terrible at self-promotion. His yearly evaluations at work are always the same. They tell him that he's excellent at his job in every way, but that he needs to advertise that fact to top management. At least, his firm is honest that advertising one's skills is an important part of his job. Steve is mid-western. Mid-westerns are also terrible at self-promotion.
At this point in my life, it's too late to change. I cringe at the BS. I like to think that, in the end, the phonies will be exposed and that output will count more than packaging. I like to think that self-aggrandizing only gets you so far, and at some point, you'll be asked to produce. (God, the Catholics really screwed up my brain.) But I could be entirely wrong.
UPDATE: Lots of commentary all over the Internet about Shirky's post. Check out BitchPhD. This articles says that all academics are bad at self-promotion and offers advice.
Apt. 11d 
My gut tells me that “tooting your own horn” has consequences for women.
If you stay in the same community, over time, people do learn who’s producive, and who isn’t. It’s in the short-term stints that one needs to raise one’s profile.
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“If you stay in the same community, over time, people do learn who’s productive, and who isn’t. It’s in the short-term stints that one needs to raise one’s profile.”
I think this is somewhat true — that short term makes horn-tooting even more important. But, I think it’s also wrong. The problems are — and Laura’s cite to Steve is an example — is that in larger organizations, most everyone is short term to the upper hierarchy. They notice you during short evaluation periods, or during significant spikes of accomplishment, not when you’re just quietly doing your job very well. In addition, in many other situations, the term to prove oneself is pretty short (grad school, pre-tenure, associates in law firms, . . . ). In many endeavors, the long term that really shows who is the most productive (history’s judgment of presidents, a career of academic work, the ultimate success of your trading strategies, . . . .) is judged over too long a term to be useful for ones promotion. Oh, and finally, the opportunities that can be exploited for some of those long term rewards depend on short term evaluations (grants for example, and fellowships, or opportunities to work on the high profile work in a law firm, . . . ).
In addition to mid-westerners, Asians have a problem with self-promotion, a pretty deep one. Organizations that ignore this (and lots do, I think), end up loosing out on an important group of people.
Unfortunately, I also agree that the solution, for women, isn’t merely to start tooting ones own horn, because it probably does have negative consequences. Asians also have to worry about this issue, because it violates people’s norms for the population, behavior that’s the same as the norm for another population looks extreme and unsavory.
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I’m midwestern as well, and I agree that midwesterners in general look down on self-promotion. I know in my extended family it’s still very hard for women to share good news about their accomplishments, because even the work-arounds that midwesterners have adopted don’t work for women.
At least in my circle, women often taken on the role of “aggrandizer of the male”. Think of a family dinner where a woman announces, “Ask Todd about his new position!” Her husband blushes and shares the news of his promotion. Out comes the bottle of wine and everyone’s very happy for him. He could not make this announcement himself, really. It’s just not done.
Now flip that around and have the *woman* get a big promotion. Her husband is probably happy for her but absolutely clueless as to how difficult it is for her to share this news. Frankly even if he did stand up and make the announcement for her in the classic fashion, with her blushing and accepting congratulations, there would be muttering. (“How does [husband] feel about this new job?” “Is it going to impact the kids?”)
I’ve actually seen this aggrandizing done by women for lots of different people — it doesn’t have to just be the husband. On the one occasion when I had good news that was successfully announced to the family, it was done (very gracefully) by my sister.
Other times no one’s done it for me, and the results have been bad. I remember getting a big promotion last year and being reluctant to tell people. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, and my rational side was saying, Jen you’re being stupid! [Husband] is clearly not going to say anything and it would feel utterly stupid to ask him to do so. Just tell people yourself! But my instincts were right. My girlfriends did best, but even then they weren’t all necessarily happy for me; for some of them it inspired much hand-wringing about their own career progression. Unsurprisingly, the news inspired fits of jealousy on the part of many colleagues, some of whom started openly attacking me in meetings. (“You’re the most senior person here, why don’t you tell us all what to do?”) Even my mother said, “How nice for you,” and then dropped the subject, although later in the same conversation she talked at length about how she never progressed at work because she “put family first”.
When I think about these reactions and how they bothered me, I realize that one of the biggest differences between the average guy and me is that I cared about these responses. Of course some friends take it hard! Of course some colleagues get mad! This is not surprising, really. But for me I so valued the relationships that I was aware of the impact. And frankly my feelings were hurt that no one was simply happy for me, especially since I had worked so hard.
In the end I found that I really took the most solace in the raise. That at least I could spend as I wished without any fear of criticism or ugly commentary.
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A partial solution is to glom onto someone who will toot your horn for you. That’s why it’s vitally important for people who function as “mentors” to play this particular role, especially for the women (and others) in their mentee population.
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But women also get penalized for self-promotion, far more so than men. So it’s tough — we need to promote to get ahead, but when we do, we’ve built a reputation for being bitchy for doing so.
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My daughter won the contest for best poster in a school-wide art contest. When she came home, she was barely able to tell me. A long discussion ensued where she said she felt like she was bragging if she talked about it, but she had worked so hard for it and wanted to win that contest badly.
I wasn’t sure what to say other than that it was incredibly awesome that she won. And then I had her call her grandmother because if you can’t brag to your grandma, who can you brag to?
But sheesh, where did this reluctance to toot her own horn come from? Probably me. I remember constantly being self-deprecating in school about my intelligence, though it was pretty obvious I was one of the smartest in the school (I was the only one who’d skipped a grade).
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Midwesterners are self-effacing, but nearly always right. Somebody has to counter-act the Californians so that the U.S. comes out average on both humility and correctness.
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BTW data shows that, at least within the workplace, the stronger the objective metrics that show contribution, the better women do. The mushier the evaluation process, the more women lose out. This is one reason I’ve always stuck with smaller companies, where one’s individual contribution is more visible.
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I’m tempted to say this is a red herring. I agree that men self-promote more, and I’m even willing to say that some men get further ahead than they otherwise would because they self-promote. But I think other men get downgraded because they seem like “self-aggrandizing jerks.”
I think men and women often use the tools that are easiest for them to use, and if men are more likely to use the “brash self-promotion” model, I don’t think that, overall, it works to their advantage.
Among the (numerous) gender imbalances that still exist today, I do not count the one that Mr. Shirky is writing about — new graduates getting entry level jobs — as among them. New female grads are on about the same footing as male grads — sometimes better because there are more of them.
This argument strikes me as a “proof by anecdote” that doesn’t match up to any actual statistics.
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I disagree, ragtime. I’ve seen men get a bit of an eyeroll for self-promoting, but honestly I have almost never seen them get downgraded for it, and only when their actual performance isn’t good. In general it’s considered perfectly fine–men I know send out newsletters to coworkers about their own damn work. For women, providing anything more than sober documentation of accomplishments when asked is seen as grabby, and is always calculated as being at someone else’s expense, starting sometime in elementary school. “Don’t boast about x, someone will feel bad.” We have to give away lots of credit to other people every time we mention anything we’ve done, too.
It sucks.
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You are all talking about the good parts of Clay Shirky’s rant. That such a smart and nice man as CS thinks that changes in individual behavior will change anything other than individual lives grieves me, and ignores the fact that the risks of such behavior are equal for men and women. (They are not; women page huge penalties for over-doing it.) I’m embarrassed that he thinks it’s okay to say these sorts of things and remain silent about the existence and prominent role of institutional sexism.
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Marya, you took the words out of my mouth and said it probably better!
I was thinking about this as a related issue – the peer pressure among women at times to downgrade their own accomplishments. “Don’t make anyone feel bad”.
I see the opposite with my husband’s friends – they toot their own horn, give each other crap as well, and it’s all good.
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This reminds me of my dad’s saying, “If you are always blowing your own horn, nobody else can.” Left unstated (because it was obvious) was “If you keep talking about applying to colleges your peers haven’t heard of, nobody will want to drink beer with you.”
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I’ve certainly seen men be downgraded for self-promotion, even when it’s not, I think, of an unreasonable sort. I don’t doubt that it happens more with women, but it’s false that it doesn’t happen with men.
There’s also lots of different sorts of self-promotion and not benefits in running them all together. For academics perhaps the most important kind is publicizing your papers to people who might be interested in them. There’s just too much to read, so no one can know of everything that might be interesting. Sending copies of one’s papers, or links to them, is therefore very useful. I’d be shocked if women were down-graded for this practice. I’ve certainly been very pleased when anyone, male or female, has sent me notice of a paper they think I’d be interested in that they’ve written, and I doubt I’m very unusual.
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Sending someone notice of a paper is not the same as, say, describing one’s own work as, say, foundational or seminal (heh heh heh), or writing letters to the editor challenging big scholars with your hot new theory, or writing grant applications explaining how you’re going to set the world on fire, or getting up on your legs at a talk by someone important and challenging a point. These are all behaviors that men are willing to take risks one at a hundred times the rate of women, and why? Because some people may think they’re assholes for it but many others will take them at their own valuation (or, at worst, chuckle and say “Jones is kind of a blowhard sometimes, isn’t he?”) Women can and do get written off permanently as careerist bitches for that kind of thing. Even when they are 100% right.
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One of the complicated things about this whole issue that’s linked to hidden cultures of social class is that there’s a kind of self-promotion by non-promotion that the children of professionals often adopt, a kind of visible humility (this only works if you are in fact in possession of some strong baseline abilities in the skillsets that have social and professional value). As if you’re too cool to self-promote. It’s a tangled maze: by being anti-networking in some visible or declared way, you’re often networking even more effectively. Academia is often a particularly good case of this: someone who is too obvious about self-promotion ends up exposing themselves as a class outsider, as revealing an underlying anxiety.
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Marya, what field are you speaking of? I have never heard anybody, male or female, describe their own work as foundational or seminal. This includes people whose work was foundational.
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TB,
I don’t get a lot of opportunities to see much of academic females in the wild, but my feeling is that academic men tend to be anxious little bunnies who are always getting crushed by paper rejections, getting turned down for jobs, etc. But on the other hand, they keep writing and submitting, despite all the psychic trauma.
Did I get that one right?
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I’d be happier if Mr. Shirky’s piece were buttressed by some statistics. Do female grad students do worse in the job market than their grades and other attributes (other than gender) would predict? I confess I know very little about this market.
When it comes to law school graduates, self-promotion is of no importance. Hiring is based 95% on grades (adjusted for quality of school attended), and most law school exams are graded blind. As long as you don’t throw up on the interviewer, there’s not much you can do to spoil things. Also, not to be rude, but the chance that a law student or junior associate could tout accomplishments that would impress the law firm partners doing the hiring is pretty small.
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MH, I actually have seen that. I once was an outside examiner on a graduate qualifying exam, and one of the three local professors complained that the candidate’s essays didn’t sufficiently address the foundational work that the professor himself had authored. I’m not paraphrasing: that’s what the guy actually said. It was arguably true (that the work was foundational, not that the student had failed to address it, as the candidate’s essays were full of references).
I was recently at a conference where one of the participants over three days missed no opportunities to remind people that he had “invented the field”, and similar phrases.
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Maybe it’s because I went to school in the midwest and most of the important faculty were also midwestern or (even more modestly) Canadian.
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I lied to get my first job in graduate school. It was the kind of lie Shirky mentions, where I said I could something I couldn’t yet, but figured I could learn. Turns out, it was about computers–imagine that! Once I got my foot in the door of that job, I used it as an opportunity to learn more and no longer had to lie about my abilities.
In my most recent full-time job, self-promotion got me into trouble. For what it’s worth, don’t ever self-promote against one of those self-aggrandizing jerks. You will not win. After tooting my horn to this guy, someone well above my pay grade and with some direct responsibility for my work, I pretty much lost any chance of promotion or interesting new projects. The downward spiral began.
So I have first-hand experience of self-promotion gone bad. On the other hand, that same self-promotion has gotten me a few freelance gigs. So, there’s always an upside. For me, the harder thing is promoting myself to strangers. I’m aware that I need to do it to build business, but I find it difficult outside of interview or query situations. Don’t know if that’s gender based or not. It seems to me that in that situation–self-promotion to relative strangers–there’s not as much to lose.
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This reminds me of what my first boss told me: “After a year of working for me, every male employee I’ve had has asked for a raise. And no woman ever has.” The women figured their raises would come (sooner or later) as a result of, a reward for their good work.
This thread also reminds me of Deborah Tannen’s book, You Just Don’t Understand, whose argument (at least in part) ran along these lines: Men use their public sphere speech to establish where they fall in a hierarchy, to establish and/or negotiate their social standing. Women use their public sphere speech to establish support, closeness and community, which is based on being alike. So tooting your own horn runs counter to the ways in which women are socialized to use language. Perhaps this also holds true for the Coastal/Midwestern binary?!
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MH, I used to be in English and saw some of it there, and now I’m in software tech where it’s not unheard of. In less flagrant cases it’s phrased more like “If you’d read my work, you couldn’t have made that argument.”
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“If you’d read my work, you couldn’t have made that argument.”
The only reasonable response to that is “If’d you’d write more clearly, I’ll start reading your work.” (But I don’t know what happens in English Departments.)
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“When it comes to law school graduates, self-promotion is of no importance. ”
I’m guessing that’s true when you’re applying for a Big Law job from a Big Law University. Grades + the school rankings will suffice, and, as you say, I think that most law exams are, effectively, graded “blind.”
But, when it comes to opportunities that follow, after you’ve been hired, I suspect effective self-promotion plays a significant role. Folks are treating self-promotion as though it has to be uncorrelated (or negatively correlated) with actual ability. But, it doesn’t, and if it’s not, the odds are the person who promotes herself effectively does better than the equally qualified person who doesn’t. My suspicion is that they do better than the less qualified person, too, on some absolute merit scale, but I don’t know how much of an effect this is.
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Here’s a story. I teach a required class which closes within 14 hours of the opening of registration. 2/3rds of the class are women; 4/5ths of the requests I get to be allowed in after its closed are men (I get 50 or so of these emails every semester. This discussion makes me want to analyse them in future, because impressionistically the men explain why they need to be added, while the women tend to ask what the waitlist procedure is). One day last semester I got an email specifying exactly why the (male) student in question should be admitted and exactly what I should teach which would be most useful to him.
Later that day I met a (female) student I know very well — somebody who has revealed to me intimate details of her life and discussed with me issues that she hasn’t even discussed with her parents. I’m counselling her about what classes to take. After a while it become clear that she might do well to take a different class from me that is also closed. I ask if she’d be interested and she says “Oh, that was top of my wish list, but it closed before I could register”. It hadn’t occurred to her to even ask me, someone whom she has a much closer relationship with than any other faculty member, to be added to the class.
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There’s something here about men simply feeling they’re more “special”, isn’t there? Is anyone else hearing that?
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Oh yes.
As with so many things, it’s going to be interesting to see how/if this changes in the coming decade as the gender education gap really impacts worklife.
I still hear male students talk about how affirmative action harms beneficiaries by putting them in situations where they will fail. Both they, and the female students, are quite unaware of the extent of affirmative action for men in college admissions.
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“Both they, and the female students, are quite unaware of the extent of affirmative action for men in college admissions.” But don’t you love to point that out to them?
Like your student, harry, I would never have dreamed of asking a professor to change the rules for me.
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I remember when I was an undergrad, getting into a class involved going to a special room at a certain time and letting a staffer carry a form behind a curtain. It was alleged that there was a computer behind the curtain, but I never saw behind it. Then, some fifteen to twenty minutes later, a staffer would shout your name and you’d get a sheet with what classes you got. (If you were Asian, you had to be on your toes because they never even came close on the name.)
(I was in an honors program and we got to register first, so I never had any problems.)
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A) This reminds me of Annette Lareau’s research on “concerted cultivation” of middle-class kids, and how parents of some children (perhaps sons more than daughters?) actively teach their kids to stretch the boundaries of the system.
B) OK, I know I’m Midwestern, but I can’t be the only kid whose mom overtly punished me if I ever asked for special treatment. So then, not only did you get an extra ear-chewing about missing the deadline, but you also lost out on dessert that night. (And got a speech about the sinfulness of raising yourself up above others who were more timely.)
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I know I’m Midwestern, but I can’t be the only kid whose mom overtly punished me if I ever asked for special treatment.
No, I was also punished for that. My father was important enough locally for my parents to be concerned about special treatment.
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Like your student, harry, I would never have dreamed of asking a professor to change the rules for me.
Often enough when I’m teaching I set out the rules in the syllabus and then, if people ask, make all sorts of exceptions, if they are reasonable. If anything I’ve been asked by female students for exceptions just as much or more than male students. In part this is because male students, in my experience, are less likely to bother to talk to the professor.
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I kind of agree with Matt. I find female students are very willing to ask for exceptions and male students tend not too. There are exceptions, of course.
This term, I dropped a student for attendance issues (we have an attendance policy) and she stalked me for about a week trying to get back into the class. Freaked me the hey out.
I remember when I was an undergrad we had “Grand Course Exchange” where we could add and drop classes. I avoided it, but for the life of me I can’t remember how I dropped and added classes because we didn’t have personal computers in the Dark Ages (1983).
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If anything I’ve been asked by female students for exceptions just as much or more than male students. In part this is because male students, in my experience, are less likely to bother to talk to the professor.
This has also been my experience, so I agree with Matt here. Though it might be worth trying to tease out the differences between “self-promotion” (“Look at this fantastic work that I’ve done!”) and “asking for exceptions” (“Consider these special/unique/difficult needs that I have!”). Obviously you could easily, and stereotypically, label the former as male aggressive/aggrandizing behavior and the latter as female pleasing/whining behavior, but I suspect there’s more to it than that.
Personally, I’m into self-deprecation. I fit in very well in Korea, in that sense (Missionary: “Thank you that delightful meal, Mrs. Kim.” Mrs. Kim: “I’m sorry; it’s embarrassing that I fed you such miserable food.”). The blogsophere has turned me into a complete link-whore, I know, but I’m not sure that’s so much self-promotion as just annoying people until they look your way out of exhaustion.
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I’d like all of you to do analysis — on the demographics of students who ask for exceptions. Maybe for your next course? Is there a difference between asking for a variance to be registered (i.e. you’re not already in the course, and your registration is part of a queue, that impacts others)? v asking for an extension on homework (which you think of as not affecting anyone else)? Asking for extra help (i.e. admitting that you need the help)?
It could be that the differing perceptions here depend on the kind of exception being asked for. Could also depend on the demographics of the student population (community college v state university-like v ivy-like).
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I’d like all of you to do analysis —
More work with a budget of $0. That’s a trend lately.
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Ok, hey, the data is worth, oh, about five bucks to me. Russel, Harry, Wendy, Matt — I’ll send you five bucks (each!). Or, I can donate the money to needy people of your choice.
:-). Mostly joking, but, yes, I realize that my demand for data was probably not going to be very effective. It was more of a rhetorical demand.
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Well, my courses have generally been under-subscribed, so no one has to ask to take them (more likely is me suggesting to students that they take them!) so I can’t contribute to that debate. With me the issue has generally be things like extra room on a paper, a bit more time for plausible reasons, meeting outside of office hours for plausible reasons, etc. (The only time I was really shocked with a student demand was from a female student, but I don’t think I’d generalize from it- I’d just handed back papers and told people that I’d not discuss them that day, that I’d taken a lot of time to write many comments and I wanted them to go home and read the comments and think about them before coming to talk to me about the papers. One woman then waited in the hall and demanded to talk to me about the paper.) What I’ve seen with male students that I’ve found less with female ones is just an unwillingness to come talk to me about their problems in the class or why they can’t get their work done at all. But again, I don’t want to draw any conclusions from this other than that in my experience female students are also willing to ask for exceptions and the like.
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My most recent teaching experiences involve all female students, so I can’t contribute to that conversation/data.
I consider myself pretty shy and self-effacing and have had others comment on this quality as well, but I’ve had both experiences of asking for special permission from faculty–getting into an overfilled class, extensions–and not. When my parents announced their divorce and I was devastated, I didn’t think to ask for more time on my work. I figured this was my problem, I should deal with it. It took a professor’s phone call on a Saturday(!) to clue me in that maybe I deserved a break.
I also hung with “the boys” through most of high school and college. I was continually annoyed by some of their self-aggrandizing behavior, but I think some of it rubbed off on me eventually.
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Ok, hey, the data is worth, oh, about five bucks to me.
I just went for an afternoon sugar rush and at the checkout I saw that Glamour had a cover story on “101 things you didn’t know about guys.” I’m just going to assume the answer is in there, so the $5 bucks will probably answer your question.
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MH, go ahead and tell us you wrote that story! This thread is all about self-promotion.
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I only even noticed the story because it was right next to the prominent-self parts of the cover model.
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Because my brain is not on today, an on-topic left wing cartoon.
http://www.leftycartoons.com/bitch-if-you-do-broke-if-you-dont/
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