Self-Doubt As Self-Defense

by Zoë Pollock

Ken Auletta profiles Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook:

At her Phi Beta Kappa induction, there were separate ceremonies for men and women. At hers, a woman gave a speech called “Feeling Like a Fraud.” During the talk, Sandberg looked around the room and saw people nodding. “I thought it was the best speech I’d ever heard,” she recalls. “I felt like that my whole life.” At every stage of her time in school, Sandberg thought, I really fooled them. There was “zero chance,” she concluded, that the men in the other room felt the same. Sandberg says she eventually realized that women, unlike men, encountered tradeoffs between success and likability. The women had internalized self-doubt as a form of self-defense: people don’t like women who boast about their achievements. The solution, she began to think, lay with the women.

Irin Carmon focuses on Sandberg's privilege:

To be lasting and effective, change has to happen on as many levels as possible, and our current organization is such that money and power are prerequisites for certain kinds of progress. (Recent example: Gay marriage didn't pass in New York until conservative billionaires wanted it to.) But it also has to include the notion that a belief in meritocracy only makes sense if the system already pretty much works for you, even if incompletely.

Sandberg's advice from her TED talk above is worth stressing. I know many a neurotic friend already planning to leave their job for their "theoretical future children" years down the line, and the notion you shouldn't "leave before you leave" rings true. Kind of like "be present."