Insights on How Women RiSE By Danielle McDonald
She's Not Stubborn, She's Persistent By Elyse Chess
The session from the WELocal 2023 conference I am writing about is named Insights on How Women RiSE. The speaker of this session was Shivani Sagar, a project manager at Schneider Electric. She talked about ideas and concepts from a top selling book titled How Women RiSE by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. She mostly talked about the many ways women undermine themselves in the workplace. For example, when reflecting on a team project they had worked on with a higher up, women tend to compliment their team members and what they had accomplished, while men have the tendency to compliment their work and how they had contributed personally. This is because “women want to be humble” and they think they seem “too aggressive when they talk about themselves”. Also, when women think they are underqualified for a job, they won’t apply. However, an underqualified man will still apply, and the rest of their team will have to make up for what they lack. Furthermore, women that do the same amount of work as a man will think about how well she’s doing and what she has accomplished, hoping that someone will recognize this, while the man that does the same amount of work as the women will actively talk to others about how he does and what he wants to do in the future. Because of this, their boss would think that the man wants the promotion and not the woman. These are only some of the few common examples on how women tend to undermine themselves in the workplace, which explains why there tends to be more men with higher positions than women.
I recently had the opportunity to attend the Society of Women Engineers' WeLocal Detroit conference. This was my first ever conference experience, and I am very happy to have been able to experience it during my first year with PittSWE. Although I enjoyed and learned a lot from each keynote and session I attended, one stands out as my favorite: a talk by Kate Cicchino entitled "She's Not Stubborn, She's Persistent." During this talk, Kate shared some of her favorite pieces of advice collected from a diverse range of people, ranging from her grandfather to a college professor to Thomas Jefferson. I found this session to be incredibly helpful and am still noticing the many ways in which I can apply Kate's advice to my own life. I learned about speaking up for myself, the importance of hard work (coupled with a healthy work-life balance!), surrounding myself with supportive people, negotiating benefits in the workplace, and more. Of all the advice shared during this session, my favorite would have to be: "Serendipity will dance with you if you're already on the dance floor." I interpret this advice as expressing the importance of "putting myself out there" and taking advantage of all the amazing opportunities I've been offered at Pitt and through SWE. I plan to do just that as I finish my first year of engineering.
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