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Why women need to speak up for themselves rather than waiting for others to recognize their worth
I am 40. It took me this many years to learn to stand up for myself. And even now, I am not fully there yet. I still, sometimes, need to remind myself to think of me instead of the other person. My first reaction is still to blame myself if I get in a conflict with someone. I am still too timid to speak up about what I want or things that bother me. And when I catch myself doing that, I wonder why it is so? Why is it easy for men to say Well, he/she is an a-hole when they get in a conflict while women say I must have done or said something to elicit that response from him/her ?
What is it that makes us this way? Our upbringing? Maybe. Our inherent nature? I doubt that. Social conditioning? YES! I cannot remember the number of times I have been told by one particular female relative that, being a woman, it is my supreme duty to a) tolerate everything, b) put others first, c) keep my mouth shut. You subject a woman to years of that sermon, along with taking her independence away by forbidding her from working, making her financially dependent and telling her all the time that she is good only because you are good to her (which implies no matter what she does, her efforts can never be exceptional or applaud-worthy) and what do you get? A broken woman who think she is good for nothing. A woman who takes years to realize that she got the jobs that she got (when she finally went out to work) because she was wanted for her skills and not because the employers were out to do charity.
The good thing is that I finally realized it even though it is still a struggle to accept compliments because somewhere deep down I don t believe I deserve them. I know I am a capable, efficient professional but you ask me to stand up and defend that and I might just refuse. And that has hurt me in a lot of ways.
This made me nervous about asking confidently for a salary that I knew I deserved. I faltered. It made me question myself when it was time for salary, vacation and responsibility negotiations. It made me stay quiet under hostile work conditions. It made me cry in front of people who made me uncomfortable (and I hate this part the most). It set me back, professionally, by at least 2-3 years because I always made excuses for the other party to not give me what I deserved.
Luckily for me, I met a few very strong women at work who taught me how to stand up for myself, how to value myself and how to make others value me. These are strong women I admire greatly. One is a single mom of two, the second is married and has 3 kids and the third one is unmarried with no kids. One is younger than I am, the second is about my age and the third is probably old enough to be an aunt. They are all very different from each other but the one thing they have in common is grit and courage and a truck load of self-confidence. I ll try and put, into words, what these women have taught me by example about being my own advocate (because no one else will if I won t).
I will add more to this post if I remember something else. But these are the lessons I have learned in my short career that I still implement in my professional (and personal) life.
Pic credit: Alban Gonzalez (Used under a CC license)
Cee Kay is a mother of two girls, a networking professional, a cooking enthusiast and a resident of Norwalk, CT (USA), trying to peel herself off of her old doormat mode and transforming herself into read more...
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Children should be taught to aspire to be successful, but success doesn't have to mean an IIT admission only!
Imagine studying for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 whole years for the JEE exam only to find out that there’s only a very, very slim chance of getting into an IIT. It is a fact widely acknowledged that the IIT-JEE is one of the toughest exams not just in India but in the whole world. Apart from IITs, the NITs and IIITs of India also accept the JEE scores for admission. There are said to be a total of 23 IITs, 31 NITs and 25 IIITs across the country.
Now, let’s first get a few facts about the IITs right. First, according to the NIRF rankings of 2023, only 17 IITs rank in the top 50 engineering colleges of India and only a few (around 5) IITs are in the list of the world’s top 100 engineering colleges. Second, the dropout rate of IIT-qualifying students stands at least at 20%, with reasons being cited ranging from academic pressure and unmanageable workload to caste discrimination and high levels of competition within the IIT.
So, it’s quite clear that the journey of making it through IIT is as challenging as the journey of getting into an IIT. Third and most important of all, the acceptance rate or the odds of getting into an IIT are below 3% which is a lot lower than the acceptance rate of highly and very highly ranked US universities. Four, getting into an IIT of one’s choice doesn’t mean one will also get into a branch of one’s preference at that IIT.
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