How women decide : what's true, what's not, and what strategies spark the best choices / Therese Huston.
A guide to decision-making in professional landscapes, specifically tailored to the needs of women, addresses the psychological and cultural obstacles women face, offering recommendations for handling important choices in accordance with a woman's strengths.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780544416093
- ISBN: 0544416090
- Physical Description: 373 pages ; 24 cm
- Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [307]-359) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Making sense of women's intuition -- The decisiveness dilemma -- Hello, risk-taker -- Women's confidence advantage -- Stress makes her focused, not fragile -- Watching other people make terrible decisions -- Afterword. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Decision making > Sex differences. Decision making > Psychological aspects. Women > Psychology. |
Available copies
- 1 of 2 copies available at Evergreen Indiana.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 2 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jefferson Co PL - Madison Main Branch | 155.333 HUS (Text) | 39391006747115 | Nonfiction | Available | - |
Morgan Co PL - Martinsville Main Library | 155.333 HUS (Text) | 78551000527787 | Non-Fiction | Checked out | 05/16/2024 |
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What Happens When a Woman Makes the Call?
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From every direction lately, women are hearing a call to arms. Women have been told to lean in, ask for what they want, know their value, play big, don their bossypants, and close the confidence gap. These messages galvanize. They embolden women to take their proper seats at the table and they promise power to those who want it. If women work hard and raise their expectations, theyâre told, they will achieve the highest levels of success -- and that means they will be making more of the big decisions.
      But no one has talked about what happens to women when they make these big decisions. Is a womanâs experience issuing a tough call, a decision with serious stakes, any different from a manâs? Thatâs the question that ignited my research and eventually caught fire as this book. Iâve found that when a man faces a hard decision, he only has to think about making a judgment, but when a woman faces a hard decision, she has to think about making a judgment and also navigate being judged.
      Whatâs a smart, self-respecting, and (letâs face it) busy woman to do?
      She needs to know how women decide and how to take the realities of the decision-making landscape into account when planning her own course of action. Iâll share a secret with you: Women approach decisions in ways that are actually stronger than they realize. Men and women approach decisions differently, but not necessarily in the ways people have been led to believe. This isnât a âbiology is destinyâ or a pink brain / blue brain book. Society has been underestimating womenâs abilities to make astute choices for years, and this doubting, this routine questioning of a womanâs judgment, drives many of the gender differences we see.
      Often we donât realize that weâre scrutinizing a womanâs decision more than we would a manâs; it can be hard to notice because there are very few scenarios where all factors other than gender are identical. Sometimes, though, a situation arises where we can see a clear parallel and a clear bias. Take, for example, the moment in February 2013 when Marissa Mayer made headlines for changing Yahooâs work-from-home policy. Yahoo announced that employees could no longer telecommute full-time, and the press lambasted Mayer. Pundits criticized the policy change, saying it would hurt women, and many of us, myself included, raised eyebrows about Mayerâs controversial decision. But how many people heard about it when Best Buyâs CEO, Hubert Joly, made the same decision about a week later? When he ended Best Buyâs generous work-from-home policy, business reporters dutifully picked up the story, but his announcement didnât cause a public outcry the way Mayerâs did. Joly popped up in headlines for his decision briefly in 2013, but as late as 2015, journalists were still talking about Mayerâs decision, analyzing whether she made the right choice. So for making the same judgment call, a male CEO drew some sidelong glances for a few months, but a female CEO drew extensive scrutiny and censure for years.
      At first, we tend to rationalize our reactions. Yahooâs decision must have impinged on more employeesâ schedules because itâs a software company, and programmers can work in their pajamas at home at any hour of the day or night; Best Buy has stores, we reason, and employees need to appear fully clothed and on time. Their telecommuting pool must be tiny. But articles on the story indicated that Mayerâs decision affected only two hundred employees, whereas Jolyâs decision reportedly changed the lives of nearly four thousand corporate employees who often worked from home. Thatâs twenty times more workers touched by the Best Buy decision.
      If the number of affected employees doesnât explain the outcry against Mayer and the complacency around Joly, what does? Had Mayer just taken the helm at Yahoo while Joly was a fixture at Best Buy? No. This is where the parallels become even more unsettling? -- both chiefs had been on the job roughly six months. One likely reason we keep fuming over Mayerâs decision but ignore Jolyâs choice lies in a pattern that many of us unknowingly fall into: weâre quick to question a womanâs decision but inclined to accept a manâs. Men and women donât have to act differently for us to see them differently.
      This tendency has very real consequences. Consider the often-cited observation that businesses are eager to promote men but reluctant to promote women. Why? Your bookshelf may be full of answers to that question, but my research suggests a new one, one many people have overlooked. We trust men to make the hard choices. We are quick to accept a manâs decisions, even the hard, unpleasant ones, as being what must be done. When a woman announces the same difficult decision, we scrutinize it with twice the vigor. We may not mean to, but we doubt the quality of her choices.
      It may be hard to believe that decision-making has a gender component, that someone would give a man a supportive pat on the back but give a woman a raised eyebrow for making the same call. We see ourselves as fair people with the best of intentions. Iâve never met a single person who said, âI love to discriminate.â If we want to understand how gender changes the decision-making process as well as the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we react to menâs and womenâs choices, we need to ask some rigorous questions. Is there any real difference between menâs and womenâs judgment? Might we ever exaggerate the gap? Where has popular culture exposed real disparities in the ways men and women decide, and where has popular culture actually manufactured the differences? In cases where women and men do take different approaches to the same choice, is the way women reach a decision ever an asset rather than a liability?
      Most important, if we do find that there are differences in how menâs and womenâs decisions are received, what can we do about it? How do we become more aware of our favoritism and catch ourselves in the act? Partly, we need to educate ourselves about our hidden biases around decision-making. Both men and women must take stock and strategize, because no one person can do this alone. Certainly, reading this book can and should help improve the decisions you make regardless of your gender, but if we want to see more women take meaningful seats at the table, we ought to change how we, as a culture, talk about womenâs judgment. We need to make some structural changes, and these changes will improve not just the lives of women but the decisions being made for our world. If you gain only one insight from this book, I hope itâs this: Having a greater number of women in the room when a crucial decision is being made is not only better for women, itâs better for the decision. And thatâs better for everyone.
Â
Â
From every direction lately, women are hearing a call to arms. Women have been told to lean in, ask for what they want, know their value, play big, don their bossypants, and close the confidence gap. These messages galvanize. They embolden women to take their proper seats at the table and they promise power to those who want it. If women work hard and raise their expectations, theyâre told, they will achieve the highest levels of success -- and that means they will be making more of the big decisions.
      But no one has talked about what happens to women when they make these big decisions. Is a womanâs experience issuing a tough call, a decision with serious stakes, any different from a manâs? Thatâs the question that ignited my research and eventually caught fire as this book. Iâve found that when a man faces a hard decision, he only has to think about making a judgment, but when a woman faces a hard decision, she has to think about making a judgment and also navigate being judged.
      Whatâs a smart, self-respecting, and (letâs face it) busy woman to do?
      She needs to know how women decide and how to take the realities of the decision-making landscape into account when planning her own course of action. Iâll share a secret with you: Women approach decisions in ways that are actually stronger than they realize. Men and women approach decisions differently, but not necessarily in the ways people have been led to believe. This isnât a âbiology is destinyâ or a pink brain / blue brain book. Society has been underestimating womenâs abilities to make astute choices for years, and this doubting, this routine questioning of a womanâs judgment, drives many of the gender differences we see.
      Often we donât realize that weâre scrutinizing a womanâs decision more than we would a manâs; it can be hard to notice because there are very few scenarios where all factors other than gender are identical. Sometimes, though, a situation arises where we can see a clear parallel and a clear bias. Take, for example, the moment in February 2013 when Marissa Mayer made headlines for changing Yahooâs work-from-home policy. Yahoo announced that employees could no longer telecommute full-time, and the press lambasted Mayer. Pundits criticized the policy change, saying it would hurt women, and many of us, myself included, raised eyebrows about Mayerâs controversial decision. But how many people heard about it when Best Buyâs CEO, Hubert Joly, made the same decision about a week later? When he ended Best Buyâs generous work-from-home policy, business reporters dutifully picked up the story, but his announcement didnât cause a public outcry the way Mayerâs did. Joly popped up in headlines for his decision briefly in 2013, but as late as 2015, journalists were still talking about Mayerâs decision, analyzing whether she made the right choice. So for making the same judgment call, a male CEO drew some sidelong glances for a few months, but a female CEO drew extensive scrutiny and censure for years.
      At first, we tend to rationalize our reactions. Yahooâs decision must have impinged on more employeesâ schedules because itâs a software company, and programmers can work in their pajamas at home at any hour of the day or night; Best Buy has stores, we reason, and employees need to appear fully clothed and on time. Their telecommuting pool must be tiny. But articles on the story indicated that Mayerâs decision affected only two hundred employees, whereas Jolyâs decision reportedly changed the lives of nearly four thousand corporate employees who often worked from home. Thatâs twenty times more workers touched by the Best Buy decision.
      If the number of affected employees doesnât explain the outcry against Mayer and the complacency around Joly, what does? Had Mayer just taken the helm at Yahoo while Joly was a fixture at Best Buy? No. This is where the parallels become even more unsettling? -- both chiefs had been on the job roughly six months. One likely reason we keep fuming over Mayerâs decision but ignore Jolyâs choice lies in a pattern that many of us unknowingly fall into: weâre quick to question a womanâs decision but inclined to accept a manâs. Men and women donât have to act differently for us to see them differently.
      This tendency has very real consequences. Consider the often-cited observation that businesses are eager to promote men but reluctant to promote women. Why? Your bookshelf may be full of answers to that question, but my research suggests a new one, one many people have overlooked. We trust men to make the hard choices. We are quick to accept a manâs decisions, even the hard, unpleasant ones, as being what must be done. When a woman announces the same difficult decision, we scrutinize it with twice the vigor. We may not mean to, but we doubt the quality of her choices.
      It may be hard to believe that decision-making has a gender component, that someone would give a man a supportive pat on the back but give a woman a raised eyebrow for making the same call. We see ourselves as fair people with the best of intentions. Iâve never met a single person who said, âI love to discriminate.â If we want to understand how gender changes the decision-making process as well as the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we react to menâs and womenâs choices, we need to ask some rigorous questions. Is there any real difference between menâs and womenâs judgment? Might we ever exaggerate the gap? Where has popular culture exposed real disparities in the ways men and women decide, and where has popular culture actually manufactured the differences? In cases where women and men do take different approaches to the same choice, is the way women reach a decision ever an asset rather than a liability?
      Most important, if we do find that there are differences in how menâs and womenâs decisions are received, what can we do about it? How do we become more aware of our favoritism and catch ourselves in the act? Partly, we need to educate ourselves about our hidden biases around decision-making. Both men and women must take stock and strategize, because no one person can do this alone. Certainly, reading this book can and should help improve the decisions you make regardless of your gender, but if we want to see more women take meaningful seats at the table, we ought to change how we, as a culture, talk about womenâs judgment. We need to make some structural changes, and these changes will improve not just the lives of women but the decisions being made for our world. If you gain only one insight from this book, I hope itâs this: Having a greater number of women in the room when a crucial decision is being made is not only better for women, itâs better for the decision. And thatâs better for everyone.