How sad for the victorious Spanish football team that the 2023 Women’s World Cup will mainly be remembered for ‘the kiss’. I will remember it as yet another example of Prove-It-Again! That is, despite the incident being witnessed by literally millions of people around the globe, captain Jenni Hermoso is still having to prove that Rubiales’ (president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation) kiss was not consensual.
The Prove-It-Again! phenomenon has been robustly researched by former lawyer and Lean In contributor Joan C. Williams (Williaims and Dempsey, 2014). In a nutshell, it describes the pattern of women having to continually prove themselves throughout their careers, when men typically progress on the promise of their (as-yet-unproven) potential.
According to Williams’ research, the key ways in which Prove-It-Again! shows up in organisations are:
- Men are judged on their potential; women are judged on their achievements;
- Men’s successes are attributed to skill, while women’s are attributed to luck (if at all);
- Conversely, when a women makes a mistake she lacks skill; when a man makes a mistake, he’s unlucky;
- Objective requirements are applied strictly to women and leniently to men.
How it shows up
From my own coaching of women in the workplace, I know that Prove-It-Again! pops up time and time again. One client was promoted but not given the corresponding pay rise until she had proven herself in the role (unlike her male colleague whose salary increased accordingly when he got the new job). Another was experiencing harassment and discrimination but absolutely didn’t want to report it because she didn’t think she would be believed without proof. She may have had a point: there were 52,210 rapes reported in England and Wales in 2020 and only 843 of them resulted in a charge (and fewer still in a conviction).
A former colleague (also a Julia) loves telling the tale of when her friendly IT team mistakenly added an ‘n’ to the end of her name when they set up her new e-mail signature. She didn’t spot it at first and went several weeks enjoying a level of respect and responsiveness to her messages that she had never experienced before! Believe me, I have been sorely tempted.
Williams herself shares the story of the Professor of Neurobiology who transitioned from being a woman to a man. At a conference he overheard a colleague say “Ben gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s”.
How does it happen?
To be clear, expecting women to Prove-It-Again! is something we are all guilty of, men and women alike. It’s a social bias borne of severe lack of exposure to, and therefore trust in, women’s strengths and abilities in the workplace. Put simply, it’s risky to promote a woman into an important and / or exposed position because if she doesn’t succeed it will be remembered. A man may fail in the same position, but not nearly so memorably.
If you’re the sponsor of that position, it’s safer to promote a (mediocre) untested man than a talented untested woman. That’s why women are told “We think you’re great but we just need you to gain more experience” (Prove-It-Again!) while a similarly-lacking-in-experience man gets the role.
Prove-It-Again! patterns are insidious. As a manager, here are some of the ways you may be unconsciously asking women in your team to prove it again:
- Downgrading a role when giving it to a woman, e.g. a Director position, vacated by a man, becomes a GM role when a woman takes over – this happens a lot
- Withholding part of a compensation package until they’ve ‘shown what they can do in the role’;
- Consistently asking female team members to support their proposals with excessive evidence, to justify your taking a risk on them. (This creates more work, automatically putting women at a disadvantage.)
- Requiring women to justify and back up points they make in meetings, rather than running with it to see where it takes you. (This deters women from making suggestions and contributing ideas.)
- Letting your fear of taking a risk on a woman stop you from championing her or her ideas with your wider network.
What can we do about it?
A tried-and-tested way to check whether you may be demonstrating unconscious bias is to ‘Flip It to Test It’. If you can imagine routinely doing any of the above with your male colleagues and employees, then fine. If not, you – and the system – needs to change. (Incidentally, as we were talking about football earlier, 20 of the 32 Women’s World Cup teams were coached by a man. Flip that to test it: can you imagine any men’s national football team being coached by a woman?)
Another way that Prove-It-Again! patterns can disadvantage women is in the way women adapt their own behaviour to counterbalance them. Women are so used to being asked to justify and prove themselves and their ideas, they can over-compensate, over-explain and over-complicate (‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’). Paradoxically, this can give the impression that they lack confidence in themselves and their suggestions, setting off the “I may be taking a risk here” alarm bells in the sponsor.
So what can we do about this? Unfortunately this is a supertanker not a speedboat, but we do need to start somewhere to turn it around. If you’re a manager or a sponsor (male or female), make ‘Flip It to Test It’ a reflex action in all of your interactions with female team members.
Banish “Are you sure?” from your vocabulary when speaking to women… and particularly girls. Thanks to the way society interacts with women and girls, many of them are ravaged by self-doubt anyway – they don’t need your unfounded worries to add to that burden.
If you’re a woman in the workplace experiencing Prove-It-Again! patterns (it’s fairly like you will be), educate your colleagues that the patterns exist and point them out when they happen. Avoid the tendency to over-explain; state your point of view clearly and succinctly (but have the evidence to hand for when you will inevitably be asked for it).
Keep being brilliant and believing in yourself. As Williams points out in her book, one of the most effective ways for women to succeed in an inequitable workplace is for them to keep on proving themselves. Maybe one day they can also hope to be promoted, paid and appreciated for their potential as well as their performance.
What next?
If you are interested in learning more, visit www.jpleadershipcoaching.co.uk or call Julia for a no obligation chat on 07967 497779.
References
Williams, J. and Dempsey, R. (2014). What Works for Women at Work, New York University Press, New York