What’s the Harm in Humility?
Humility is the quality of being humble. Dictionary definitions accentuate humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness. It's also defined as a modest or low view of one's own importance. This translates to low confidence, low value, and low self-esteem.
These definitions aren't flattering. The irony is that humility is a generally accepted, admirable trait for everyone to have. In some situations, such as religion or in service of others, it is laudable. But sometimes we need to own our accomplishments and make them known to other people.
For women, humility can be particularly problematic. Women often downplay their achievements in both work and life through several techniques. Women deflect praise, give disproportionate credit to others, overly internalize negative feedback, judge their performance as worse than it is, and use language that drains power.
Why would women do these sorts of things? Why would we intentionally downplay our accomplishments in the way we behave and present ourselves? The answer lies in two primary drivers.
First, family culture, based on our race or ethnicity, has a very powerful influence on our gender roles and beliefs – and seems to be ubiquitous across most races and ethnicities. I've taught hundreds of students in my "Women and Leadership" course at UC Irvine and Pepperdine business schools. The students represent Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Mexican, Indian, Italian, Guatemalan and Filipino, among other cultures. All these have shared expectations regarding gender roles and the value of girls and women at home and in society.
In many cultures, women are expected to be responsible for things that men are not and are pressured by their parents, grandparents, or other relatives. And there are more pressures put on girls than boys to be humble and look and behave in certain ways. If you want to learn more, I wrote an article in Forbes titled How Culture Impacts Our Value of Women. It has over 35,000 views to date.
Second, socialization, defined as the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society, puts enormous pressure on both men and women to conform to gender roles. For women, we are taught to be humble, value relationships over achievement, and not come across as "too successful".
When it comes to communicating success and failure, we have very different approaches. Men tend to attribute their success to themselves and failure to external factors. Women are just the opposite, attributing success externally and failure to themselves (even if it's not their fault)!
Women must take ownership of their success. If you’re always giving credit to others, it will be hard for your boss or colleagues to attribute success to your skills or leadership ability. Acknowledging the team is great, but it can’t come at the expense of your own self-respect and self-regard.
Studies show that when a man and woman each receive negative feedback, the woman’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. Even when a compliment is given, women tend to deflect praise or minimize their accomplishments. As you might guess, consistently attributing failure or negativity to ourselves wreaks havoc on our confidence.
Even before we even try, we say “I can’t do that”, “I wouldn’t be good at that” or “I’m not ready for that”. Women do this to protect themselves from being disliked or being too successful. These self-imposed limits lead us to inaction, which preserves our inexperience, which reinforces our self-doubt.
Finally, women use a variety of linguistic techniques to invite others into the conversation - but also to soften the tone of their content, sound less authoritarian, and to convey humility and politeness. These include phrasing statements as questions, and using hedges, disclaimers, and tags in their language.
A woman who uses these techniques may be very confident, but she wants to avoid coming across as superior to others. It is true that more words soften a message, but fewer words make it more memorable and gives power.
So, the harm in humility comes at a personal price to women's confidence and power, but also in work that is unpaid, underestimated, undervalued, and unrecognized. This may cause resentment, burnout, lack of motivation and engagement, and your career to stall.
For women, playing small does not serve the world and shrinking so others won’t feel insecure only perpetuates the lack of power. We need more women to take ownership and pride in their achievements - which would empower and liberate so many others.
Until next time, Dr. Shawn
