Terry Prone: Promotion-focused women not as valued as their male counterparts

“I’m just wondering,” they tell you, “how ambitious you are?”

How you answer that one depends on your gender. If you’re a man, you are likely to quite comfortably describe yourself as ambitious — because why on Earth would you be going for this job or this promotion if you were not ambitious?

If you are a woman, the overwhelming likelihood is that this is the point where you begin to faff around. 

I spotted this 40 years ago when — on the one hand — training women for job interviews, and — on the other hand — training HR executives to conduct such interviews.

To be precise about the faffing, here is the form it took four decades back: First thing was a frantic blush, coming up from the interviewee’s toes, bubbling up over their chest, (moral: Never wear a low neckline in a situation which holds a promise of stress), and turning their face fire-brigade red.

Next faff manifestation? Denying and confusing. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly ... the thing is that I wouldn’t like to describe myself in quite those terms…”

For a man, back then the ambition question was a logical extension of their application letter and proffered CV — nothing more than an invitation to quantify how far up the ladder you could prove you had the capacity to climb.

For a woman, the same question was an unconcealed threat. A temptation to prove herself unacceptably driven and, because those two words always dance together, strident.

The man would enhance his prospects by his answer. In sharp contrast, the woman would grievously disincentivise the panel from selecting her.

But that, I hear you say, was all those years ago — nearly half a century, imagine. When we were riding penny-farthing bicycles and had never heard of ultra-processed food. History, like. And this is true.

However, because I still do the same job of preparing men and women for HR interviews, I am on the frontline, device in hand, ready to register the massive changes that have occurred between then and now — of which, there are few.

Shockingly few. Ask the same question in the same way of men and women and the pattern recurs.

Men answer it. Women get mortified by it. Of course, there’s the odd gender-bending exception: The exceptional man who abnegates ambition, the occasional woman who embraces it. I can’t honestly remember an example of the former.

However, the small minority constituting the latter has clearly been trained by TV shows such as The Apprentice — which always seems to have one obnoxious woman who, when asked how far she wants to go, tells the questioner that she wants their job within five years.

This woman never wins the contest, but that lesson gets lost along the way, leaving a residue of aggressively expressed self-confidence as off-putting as it is ineffective.

Over 40 years, much has changed concerning women in the workplace — yet this pattern holds, virtually unchanged.

It seems to derive from two main contributing factors. It’s easy to assume that women would prefer to be liked than corporately successful. That has a lot going for it, as an explanation, when the “oh, I couldn’t say that” instinct kicks in.

That is exacerbated by lack of job interview experience, where the interviewee hasn’t fully grasped that it’s their potential contribution to the company or institution offering the job that matters rather than their general likeability.

Good training allows women to indicate just how ambitious they are and how valuable that ambition can be to their potential employer.

Of course, it is also possible that intuition — that often-undervalued characteristic — comes into play.

That women instinctively know that their chances of getting the job will be undermined by them presenting themselves as on the arrogant side of confident.

Research, recently published in the Journal of Organisational Behaviour, might support their instinctual beliefs in this regard.

The researchers set out to “test the hypothesis that promotion-focused eagerness does not yield the same evaluative benefits in the workplace for women as it does for men”.

In theory, they point out, it should. Being focused on promotion possibilities should, theoretically, put any applicant on the fast track to selection or advancement.

Nevertheless, the researchers wondered if promotion-focused eagerness might “violate the prescriptive gender-stereotypical expectations that people have of women”.

In other words, expectations of women might not incorporate openly expressed ambition and a woman who does precisely that might have to pay a “gender tax” that a promotion-focused man does not pay.

They conducted two experiments during which managers or students evaluated qualified fictional job applicants. It is fair to assume they might have expected a difference between the two groups based on managers being older, more experienced, and — let’s not put a tooth in it — more confirmed in their acknowledged or unacknowledged gender biases.

That may have been what they expected, but it was not what they found. “In both experiments, compared with an identical male applicant, the promotion-focused female applicant was valued less — as evidenced by a lower starting salary offer,” they report.

Younger, less experienced, and hypothetically more open students were not hugely different to the managers. Prejudices start young.

However, setting the students to one side, the researchers moved on to what informs relationships in the workplace after the applicant is appointed. Do managers, faced with an overtly ambitious female colleague, approve of her and her career drive in the way they would approve of the same traits in a fella?

Not so much, as it turned out.

They found that “a male employee’s promotion focus was positively associated with their manager’s evaluations of them, whereas female employees’ promotion focus was not”.

Which is a cool, detached way of pointing to a dire judgement still unselfconsciously made about women by their bosses, colleagues, and so-called friends: “Oh, she’s very ambitious.”

The speaker never clarifies by adding: “She’s motivated, energetic, a problem-solver.”

The “ambitious” description is always negative in tone and purpose. 

The person making the judgement knows they can safely leave it up to the audience to work out the inferences to be drawn: That this woman is so driven, determined, pushy, impatient, aggressive, and power-hungry, she’d leave track marks on your face.

Or, as the researchers interpret: “Promotion-focused women are not valued as positively as their male counterparts.”

Another hill to climb: Be ambitious, girls, just be careful how you present it.