Overcoming Stereotypes with a Women’s Network
There are a number of common stereotypes about women that remain today and often represent significant hurdles to women’s professional aspirations. Part of empowering women involves identifying and eradicating these stereotypes. Another part of the strategy that is already happening, if slowly, is for women’s networks to gain more power and influence over important decision-making positions, thus ensuring that fewer decisions are made based on these stereotypes.
For women seeking to start their own businesses, some of the most frustrating and impeding beliefs are that women are primarily emotional and thus less rational, that they are manipulative and prone to personal conflict, or that they are not as suited to leadership roles as to assistant positions. Though fading and being replaced as more and more women find opportunities to demonstrate how blatantly false these beliefs about women are, it is a slow process and for many they remain a painful reality.
These are the kinds of perceptions that lead many already successful women to feel pressured to over-perform, that is, to work even harder and sacrifice even more to excel at every relevant aspect of their professional lives, to further prove that such stereotypes don’t apply to them. Though this does produce outstandingly strong, successful, effective women, the pressure and expectations are entirely unreasonable and more often harmful.
Women already building a career in the workplace face similar stereotypes. In many parts of the country managers continue to hold onto prescriptions of appropriate female behavior that construct them as docile, accepting, soft-spoken, and prone to sacrifice work when the first instance of family trouble pops up. Women who conform to these roles are held back because they are perceived as underperforming while women who break with them are told to act more feminine. Again, these challenges aren’t universally, but they are universally maddening.
While victories won by women’s groups and successful collaboration by women’s networks have played an important role in decreasing the prevalence of these stereotypes, they persist, to the detriment of all. If you have experienced stereotyping and want to try to help do something about it, consider reaching out to others like you through a women’s network.
