The Skills. Mishal Husain
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Название: The Skills
Автор: Mishal Husain
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала
isbn: 9780008220648
isbn:
How true this rang for me, both in terms of the age group and the feelings. I had grown up with a stay-at-home mother but found myself making my way in the world with a different set of circumstances – wonderful opportunities and possibilities, but also being pulled in disparate directions. I could not fully model myself on the example of motherhood that I had experienced as a child and concepts of excellence, perfection or guilt were more likely to hinder than help.
Where women and girls feel daunted by barriers, real or perceived, openness can be a powerful tool. In a 2013 study, researchers in the United States set out to test several theories on interventions that might encourage girls to consider careers in the physical sciences. They looked at single-sex education, exposure to a female physics teacher, bringing female scientists in to the school as speakers and class discussions on both the work of women scientists and the lack of women working in the field. That final intervention was the only one found by the researchers to have a significant positive effect. ‘Explicit personal discussions regarding issues that women face in pursuing the physical sciences may help female students realize that feelings of inadequacy or discomfort they might have stem from external norms and pressures rather than from their capabilities, interests, or values,’ they said.19
In other words, we need to talk about this, and we need to do so in a way that is not hinged on celebrating a few particularly successful women who then appear exceptional, or ‘superwomen’. When Helen Fraser was leading a network of girls’ schools she spoke about the pressures she witnessed, first on girls to have the perfect appearance, school record and friendships, and then ‘on young women in their twenties, who as they start to build a career, form a relationship and find a place to live, are told that they need to start having children fast, or their fertility will be gone’. Against that backdrop, she worried about the impact of an ‘inner critic’, holding girls and women back if they thought that what they had to say wasn’t good enough, interesting enough or valuable enough. ‘If the female half of the population are routinely censoring themselves,’ she said, ‘their great ideas aren’t getting aired or implemented and the world is a poorer place.’20
I think back to my own childhood and the frequent question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and wonder if, today, a better question to a girl might be ‘What is your ambition for when you grow up?’ It stakes a claim to a word so often used negatively for women. With only sons of my own, I have no real-world experience of looking close up at girls as well as boys at the age when the effect of stereotyping sets in. But in my sons I see a self-belief that I don’t remember experiencing at a comparable age. Moments after one first managed to ride a bike on his own for a few wobbly metres, he asked if he might do the Tour de France one day; another, on being told that Sadiq Khan, also from a British Pakistani background, had been elected mayor of London, said: ‘I think I’ll go for prime minister.’ Without really knowing the word ambition, they appeared to set their sights high as a matter of course. Life will teach them in time what else is required, but it’s not a bad base from which to set out.
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