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For Working Women, Focus On Beauty Erodes Self Confidence

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In a guest post last month, “'Princeton Mom' Gives Dumb Advice On Marrying Smart,” Lisa Endlich Heffernan rebutted the argument that smart girls who don’t find husbands in college are destined for spinsterhood. Here she examines how our culture's demand for beauty affects women at work. Heffernan is the author of three books, including Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success. She blogs about parenting teens and young adults at Grown and Flown. You can follow her on Twitter.

Beauty Is The Beast

By Lisa Endlich Heffernan

Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto, Lean In: Women, Work, And The Will To Lead, published last year, encouraged women to step into leadership positions. She reminded us that, besieged by negative messages and stereotypes, we lacked self-assurance and that we needed to raise our hands, pull up our chairs and speak out. Now another must-read book adds to our understanding of what’s holding us back. The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, delves into the many reasons -- psychological, genetic, athletic and social -- that women lack the confidence of men.

Both authors argue that a deficit of confidence is hindering women’s advancement in every professional endeavor and that the problem is chronic in leadership positions. Sandberg postulates that barriers develop from the earliest age as we internalize messages gleaned from our parents, teachers and peers. Kay and Shipman show how testosterone, competitive sports, less perfectionism and ruminating, and not being quite so “good” as young children gives men confidence when they face the world of work. As women we focus on doing our best, which ironically is not enough.  Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence.

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All the authors are accomplished, beautiful women. But Sandberg never mentions and Kay and Shipman only briefly touch upon the way our relentless focus on our appearance and our inevitable failure to attain the standards of beauty we see around us, erodes confidence, increases self-doubt and consumes our energies. Neither book mentions that in order to rise confidently to leadership positions, we demand more of women. They must devote more of their resources in hours, money and effort to improving their appearance. It is an additional hurdle women face in a path already strewn with roadblocks.

These books do not elaborate on the damage to our confidence -- and therefore our professional success and leadership potential -- that results from our assault on our own images. Inevitably, it becomes much harder to take on the world, to aspire to lead when the first battle we fight every morning is in the mirror.

Kay and Shipman cite perfectionism as a detriment to confidence, but there is no place women battle perfectionism more than with their own appearance. From the time we are young girls we are given the message that every aspect of our bodies or our faces can be improved. Our lust for an image that we cannot obtain renders us less powerful, and certainly less confident.

The problem of being called “bossy” pales in comparison to the daily ritual of berating ourselves for not being taller, thinner, more curvy (or less curvy), while wishing for lighter, thicker, straighter, fuller or more manageable hair. These self-inflicted wounds take their toll.

Research shows that looks are more important for a women's advancement than a man’s – no surprises here. But unlike with so many disadvantages women have experienced in the workplace, burdens that we have felt impeded our progress, instead of railing against the uneven playing field, we just take it up a notch. We just work harder to attain an ever-elusive level of physical beauty. The burdens of grooming fall the hardest on those with the greatest power and visibility. Hillary Clinton could make headlines by negotiating treaties or wearing a scrunchie in her hair.

It starts young, too. As Kay and Shipman point out, girls gain approval for being good, perfect, pretty and very early on it sets them on the course to continue looking for this type of reinforcement. Such praise and their confidence grow intertwined. Phrases like, “you are so good,” and “look how pretty you are,” inspire girls and later trap women.

Anyone who has watched a group of young boys knows that one of the ways they get approval is to be daring, to show almost ridiculous bravado. These are skills that will allow them to succeed in the adult world. We rarely comment on young boys’ appearances. When they are dirty and unkempt, we don’t send them a negative message; we just send them to the shower.

Sandberg gives much attention to the damaging stereotyping that holds girls back. But the message we give our girls with regards to their physical appearance takes direct aim at their confidence. As boys turn into men, their bodies take on all the characteristics we consider desirable in males, including size and strength. Yet, as girls make the same transition, their bodies gain weight and hair and their hips become more defined. These are changes they will spend a lifetime fighting against.

No part of the female body is acceptable in its natural state. Over the course of the past two decades beauty products and procedures have colonized every inch of a woman’s body. Once it was enough to wash your hair, shave your legs and underarms, and dab on a touch of eye make-up. Blow dryers and highlights; wax and lasers; makeup for every millimeter of our faces and nail salons on every corner of our cities; were still decades away. No one thought of syringes and surgery as ways to look younger and thinner.

Now, with the beauty arms race at full tilt, not an inch of our bodies goes untouched. Tacitly we understand that nothing about our bodies or faces is good enough. To face the world we must alter our appearance. As one successful female litigator explained to me, “The clothing, make-up and hair make me feel more confident and at the same time, like I am a fake. No one I engage with professionally knows what I look like -- they just see a mask. It is inauthentic and ultimately does not make you feel better.”

The insidious dangers of wanting to be perfect can lead to, “myopic and isolating self-righteousness” in the workplace, Kay and Shipman write. They explain, “If perfect is the standard, you are never going to get there, you have set your bar way too high.”

But nowhere is this futile search for perfect more apparent than in our relationship with the bathroom mirror. How often do we fiddle and fuss with our hair, redo our make-up and then change our outfits yet again? We can never look like the perfect images we see in the media and carry in our mind’s eye.

Where does that leave our confidence? The phrase “bad hair day” resonates with women because we instinctively know that subtle changes in our hair or general appearance can affect our feelings about ourselves and our outlook.

Our efforts at beauty are not wasted. Research by Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, showed that for both genders, “Grooming rituals can be temporary confidence boosters, and studies suggest that the confidence they inspire is itself attractive.” For women, wearing make-up had a significant impact. “Seen very quickly (250 milliseconds), women wearing make-up looked more attractive, likeable, competent and trustworthy to our viewers than those who went without it,” she writes.

The reasons for a woman to worry about her weight, the aspect of appearance that concerns women the most, are also backed up by the research of professors Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable. They found that thin women outearn their heavier counterparts and that the women who fared the worst were those who gained weight while at their job.

Few women escape these pressures. We can talk about the many ways in which women might gain confidence, but for the overwhelming majority of women, their view of themselves is deeply affected by their appearance, and dissatisfaction is deep. “To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our worst,” Etcoff explains in Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. “In our mind’s eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or our mental agility usually do not.”

In her book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode found that, “90% of women consider looks important to their self image.” More alarming, however was the fact that, “Over half of young women reported that they would prefer to be hit by a truck than be fat. Two thirds would prefer to be mean or stupid.”

Other studies amply support her findings. One found that 80% of American women are dissatisfied with their appearance. Another showed that 60% of adult women have negative thoughts about themselves weekly, compared to 36% of men. Perhaps the most frightening statistic is that an astounding 78% of teen girls are plagued by self-criticism and 72% worry about their image everyday. And the problem begins very young, with 51% of 9 and 10 year-old girls admitting that feel better about themselves if they are on a diet.

Lest this appear to be a problem of the young, among more senior women in midlife, the ones who could be stepping into top leadership positions, an even bleaker picture emerges. A mere 12% of women over 50 were satisfied with their bodies. In order to "feel better about themselves," 78% of them said they spent almost an hour a day trying to improve their appearance. That adds up to two full weeks a year of primping.

Television journalist Tracey Spicer gave an uproariously funny TEDx talk, “The Lady Stripped Bare,” about the days and weeks and months of our lives spent on beauty rituals. Her presentation, in which she refers to herself as a “vain fool,” is amusing, both because she is so utterly engaging and because she surprised her audience by stripping off her make-up and clothing to show the world the time and effort it takes every morning to create her disguise.

As women we measure our self-esteem in millimeters. A dress that is a touch too low cut can leave us feeling exposed, on view all day. A hemline that is an inch too high can leave us tugging at our dress, crossing and re-crossing our legs and sitting down in an oh-so-gingerly fashion. Men just sit down. The effect of the combination of covering our faces and baring our bodies is to leave us feeling both exposed and disguised.

Sure, we are strained for time, money and energy. We feel pulled by the fact that we do more housework and childcare. We object to the fact that we earn less and we are chronically exhausted trying to advance in a corporate world that seems designed by and for men. But the solutions most commonly offered – to demand more of our partners, bosses and government; improve our confidence; and fight the biases and stereotypes that hold us back – do not factor in the burden of beauty.

Kay and Shipman recognize our tough relationship with the mirror. “At every age, physical appearance plays a disproportionate role in the building of a woman's self-confidence,” they write. “We are much quicker to criticize our appearance than men are to criticize theirs.” As we strive to break down the barriers to reaching true equality and leadership potential, we must also wrestle the tremendous forces that beauty exerts and the powerful pull it has in holding us back.