Category Archives: Patriarchy

Artificial Intelligence: A new weapon to colonise the Global South

Leave a reply
3D-printed figures who work at a computer in an anonymous environment. They are anonymized, almost de-humanized.
Max Gruber / Better Images of AI / Clickworker Abyss / CC-BY 4.0

The hype around idyllic tech workplaces that originated in Silicon Valley with tales of great pay, free food and Ping-Pong tables reaches a whole new level when we talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Tech companies that want to remain competitive court data-scientists and AI expert developers with six-figure salaries and perks that go from unlimited holidays, on-site gyms, and nap pods, to subsidising egg-freezing and IVF treatments. I am a director at a software company that develops AI applications so I have seen it firsthand. 

But I also spent 12 years in Venezuela so I am aware that AI workers there have very different stories to tell than their counterparts in the global North. And this North-South disparity in working conditions is repeated across the world and amplified to the point where in the South a large portion of them are gig workers on subsistence rates.

Image annotators

Take, for instance, the self-driven car industry. It seeks to substitute people at the wheel with algorithms that mimic human pattern recognition – yet it relies on intensive human labour.

Self-driven car algorithms need millions of high-quality images labelled by annotators – workers who assess and identify all the elements on each image. And the industry wants these annotated images at the lowest possible cost. Enter: annotators in the Global South. 

Annotators in Venezuela are paid an average of 90 cents an hour with some being paid as low as 11 cents/hour. The situation is similar for their counterparts in North Africa.

The injustice is not only about low pay but also in work conditions. Workers are under constant pressure because the data-labelling platforms have quota systems that remove annotators from projects if they fail to meet targets for the completion of tasks. The algorithms keep annotators bidding for new gigs day and night, because high-paying tasks may only last seconds on their screens before disappearing.

And annotators are not the only tech workers in the Global South making it possible for the Global North to reap the benefits of AI. 

Social media moderators

The impact of fake news on elections and conflicts has put pressure on tech big bosses to moderate social media content better. Their customary response has been to offer reassurances that they are working on improving the AI tools that parse content on their platforms. 

We frequently hear that AI algorithms can be deployed to remove the stream of depictions of violence and other disturbing content on the internet and social media. But algorithms can only do so much – platforms need human moderators to review content flagged by AI tools. So where do those people live and how much are they paid? 

Kenya is the headquarter of Facebook’s content moderation operation for sub-Saharan Africa. Its workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour for watching deeply disturbing content, back-to-back.

Kenya is the headquarters of Facebook’s content moderation operation for sub-Saharan Africa. Its workers are paid as little as $1.50 an hour for watching deeply disturbing content, back-to-back, without the benefit of any “wellness” breaks or the right to unionise. Moreover, they have a 50-second target to make a decision on whether content should be taken down or not. Consistently taking longer to make the call leads to a dismissal.   

Still, moderation is not granted equally around the world. As the Mozilla Internet Health Report 2022 says: “although 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US, only 13% of moderation hours were allocated to labelling and deleting misinformation in other countries in 2020.” And 11 out of the 12 countries leading the ranking of national Facebook audiences are part of the Global South. This is in line with prioritising user engagement over their safety.

Mining disasters

While AI is naturally associated with the virtual world, it is rooted in material objects: datacentres, servers, smartphones, and laptops. And these objects are dependent on materials that need to be taken from the earth with attendant risks to workers’ health, local communities, and the planet.

For example, cobalt is a critical component in every lithium-ion rechargeable battery used  in mobile phones, laptops and electric cars. The Democratic Republic of Congo provides 60% of the world’s cobalt supply which is mined by 40,000 children, according to UNICEF estimates. They are paid $1-2 for working up to 12 hours a day and inhaling toxic cobalt dust. 

Unfortunately, the Global North’s apathy towards tackling child labour in the cobalt supply chain means that electronic and car companies get away with maximising profit at the expense of risks to human rights and harm to miners related to their cobalt supply chain.

And one of the driest places on earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile, holds more than 40% of the world’s supply of lithium ore. Extracting lithium requires enormous quantities of water – some 2,500 litres for each kilo of the metal. As a result, freshwater is less accessible to the local communities, affecting farming and pastoral activities as well as harming the delicate ecosystem.

Guinea pigs

As well as taking advantage of lax protection of human rights and health to pick up cheap labour, tech companies look to the poor data privacy laws in the Global South to enable them to trial their AI products on people there.

Invasive AI applications are tested in Africa, taking advantage of the need for cash across the continent coupled with the low restrictions regarding data privacy. Examples include apps specialised in money lending – so-called Lendtechs. They use questionable methods such as collecting micro-behavioural data points to determine the credit-worthiness of the users in the region. 

Lack of regulation enables lenders to exploit the borrowers’ contacts on their phones to call their family and friends to prompt loan repayment.

Examples of such data points include: the number of selfies, games installed, and videos created and stored on phones, the typing and scrolling speed, or SMS data to build a credit score using proprietary and undisclosed algorithms. Lack of regulation enables lenders to exploit the borrowers’ contacts on their phones to call their family and friends to prompt loan repayment. Reports suggest that loan apps have plunged many Kenyans into deep debt and pushed some into divorce or suicide.

The human rights project NotMy.ai, has mapped 20 AI schemes led by Latin American governments that were seen as likely to stigmatise and criminalise the most vulnerable people. Some of the applications – like predictive policing – have already been banned in some regions of the US and Europe. Numerous such initiatives are linked to Global North software companies.

Among the projects, two are especially creepy. First, the rollout of a tech application across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile that promises to forecast the likelihood of teenage pregnancy.

Among the projects, two are especially creepy. First, the rollout of a tech application across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile that promises to forecast the likelihood of teenage pregnancy based on data such as age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, and whether the subject’s home had hot water in the bathroom. Second, a Minority Report-inspired model deployed in Chile to predict a person’s lifetime possibility of having a criminal career correlated with age, gender, weapons registered, and family members with a criminal record that reports 37% of false positives. 

The future is already there

We in the Global North might naturally consider the Global South to have only a marginal involvement in the use and development of AI. The reality is that the exploitation of the Global South is crucial for the Global North to harness the benefits of AI and even manufacture AI hardware. 

The South provides cheap labour, natural resources, and poorly-regulated access to populations on whom tech firms can test new algorithms and resell failed applications. 

The North-South chasm in digital economies was summed up elegantly in a 2003 Economist piece by novelist William Gibson, who foresaw the World Wide Web in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. “The future is already here,” he declared, adding, “it’s just not evenly distributed.”

In truth, the exploitation and harm that goes with the development of AI demonstrates that it’s not just the future that is with us, out of time; but also the inhumanity of the colonial past.

NOTE: This article was published in The Mint Magazine.

Work with me

Contact me to explore how we can work together

Let’s work together

Why performative inclusion thrives? Because it’s a win-win billionaire industry

2 Replies
Torso of a woman in a blue suit covering her face with a big white square piece of cardboard that has drawn on it a happy face and a flower with the colours of the rainbow.
Collage by Patricia Gestoson from Images by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay and Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash.

I’m back after a hectic and unpredictable summer break. More about it soon.

In the meantime, I want to share with you an article that I published in the economics journal The Mint Magazine about the industrial complex behind diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives and who really gets the benefits. In it, I uncover the economic and strategic interests behind the “fixing women” programs, unconscious bias training, and allyship overload.

The great pretenders

In 2013, the then-chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, published her book: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It was a cultural phenomenon that prompted discussions about women and their professional ambitions as well as the additional barriers they had to surmount to get to the top compared to men. 

The book also reassured organisations that it was not their responsibility if they didn’t have enough women in leadership. It was the women’s fault. They were not leaning in, not putting themselves out for a promotion, they were not confident enough. As a consequence, the “fixing professional women” industry boomed. 

An indicator of this boom is the exponential growth in Google searches for imposter syndrome since 2015. Increasingly, workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence as a means to reach leadership positions. A peek into the publishing industry proves that imposter syndrome has also colonised our bookstores in the last few years.  

However, unconfident women alone couldn’t explain the whiteness of executive and board teams. So training in unconscious bias came to the rescue. It was appealing to organisations because again it focused on individuals rather than on the organisation’s processes and culture. Moreover, it exculpated leaders too, who could blame their “primitive” brains for the inequities in the workplace.

Workshops, programmes, and newsletters have been relentlessly targeting women in male-dominated sectors like tech and finance with the promise of giving them confidence.

It was a marketing success. In 2017, McKinsey estimated the annual spending in the US on unconscious bias training at $8 billion. This despite researchers reporting in 2001 that training initiatives focused on changing employees’ attitudes and behaviours that reflected more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion rarely led to the desired long-term changes.

Ironically, as most organisations made those trainings optional, the typical attendees were employees bearing the brunt of unconscious biases – women and people from underrepresented groups – which reinforced the obvious conclusion: unconscious bias training was a lovely ticking box for organisations because it was quantifiable in terms of money spent and number of events but let key stakeholders get out of jail free.

Unfortunately, it didn’t result in the effective diversity and inclusion game-changer that we were led to believe it would deliver. This was not a surprise since it rested on the premise that learning about unconscious bias and its impact on decision making was enough to solve it, while ignoring that by design, most of our mental processes are unconscious. Even Dr Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on heuristics and biases, has been vocal about his inability to keep his unconscious bias in check. 

Diversity training needed a revamp and the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought a revival of the word “allyship”. In 2021, Dictionary.com named it the word of the year.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees .

In the Global North, “allyship” and “allies’ are words that bring memories of the World Wars, being on the right side, and sacrifice. In the workplace, it has become an all-encompassing term for framing the interactions between a person in a position of privilege and a targeted person or group. From simply becoming aware of oppressive actions on less privileged groups, to deploying institutional change to tackle the discrimination of protected categories, all can be considered an act of allyship.

This “allyship continuum” is very attractive to organisations and leaders. First, it reinforces the lack of accountability at the senior level by equally distributing the responsibility of building inclusive organisations among all employees . Second, it’s self-congratulatory. Under a premise that we could summarise as “every little helps”, it enables us to embody the identity of an ally with minimal effort. Finally, it reiterates the belief that diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) are under-represented group problems that allies can help to mitigate from the margins.

And allyship training excels at marketing. Some of its promises are building empathy, addressing biases when they arise, and even helping those suffering the burden of discrimination to stop complaining about microaggressions and instead listen without getting defensive – a big relief to human resource departments.

But overpromising is not the only problem. Our obsession with rebranding all DEI strategies as allyship also waters down powerful initiatives by drowning them in a sea of sameness. For example, recently, the Mayor of London office announced that it is investing £1 million in an allyship training package available to every secondary school in London to educate and empower young Londoners to take a stand and help prevent violence against women and girls. The package – a teacher’s toolkit titled, Ending gender-based violence and abuse in young people’s relationships – doesn’t contain the words ally, allies, or allyship. Still, the mayor’s press office felt the need to rebrand it as allyship training. 

Regarding effectiveness, the key problem is that reported measures of success are typically based on people’s perceptions of themselves – or others. Research shows that men are worse allies than they think. For example, 77% of executive and c-suite males think that most men within their organisation are “active allies” or “public advocates” for gender equity but only 45% of women at that level agree. This gap in perception increases at lower management levels.

Is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless?

Would replacing allyship with a different word boost the commitment of employees and organisations to make workplaces more equitable? Suggestions abound: advocate, champion, co-conspirator, co-liberator – the list goes on. Moreover, is tackling imposter syndrome, reducing unconscious bias, or promoting allyship useless? I posit that they are mostly a distraction from tackling systemic inequalities at work and the responsibility of leaders to drive those changes. 

For example, whilst we throw money into addressing underrepresentation or making privileged employees feel good, the UK gender pay gap has increased by 3.8% from 2021 – black African, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women earn, respectively, 26%, 28%, and 31% less than men and disabled employees earn a sixth less than non-disabled workers. And organisations dodge responsibility for the fact that 50% of women who take a tech role drop it by the age of 35 or that 20% of British businesses get away with lacking policies to support LGBT staff.

How do we move away from sympathy for the hardships of under-represented groups to embedding equity in organisations? How can we escape the trap of DEI-washing?

Organisations need to shift from the comfort of snapshot statistics such as annual diversity audits, to measure the progression of women and underrepresented groups through the ranks.

For example, asking themselves how they can attract brilliant women in their 20s and keep them until they retire, and realising that’s much more than thinking about maternity leave. It involves mapping the journey of employees such as a neurodiverse, female software engineer until she becomes chief technical officer, or a black, nonbinary person joining as a junior sales manager and reaching vice president level. This will uncover blockers to accessing opportunities and career progression within the organisation and provide insights into the initiatives needed to overcome them. 

Individuals are not off the hook either. It’s paramount we teach people how to transgress boundaries such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, or disability to achieve the collective gift of freedom. Building inclusive and equitable workplaces is a practice, not a certificate.

As Aboriginal elder, activist and educator, Lilla Watson, said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” 

QUIZ: Patriarchy and You

How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

We believe that we make choices based on logic and objective criteria.The reality is that the patriarchal rules embedded in our socialisation often decide for us.

This 3-minute quiz will tell you how much patriarchy impacts your life and career choices.

QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

Three takes on rethinking unpaid care for a better tomorrow

Leave a reply
A woman with a sad expression looking at a $5 banknote on a table in front of her.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many people told me that finally, we’d be able to cross out all the entrenched gender inequities in the workplace. Women leaving the workforce because of incompatibility with their caregiving duties, the gender pay gap, the lack of women in leadership positions…

The name of the magic bullet? Flexible and remote working.

My answer? That flexibility was not enough, as I demonstrated in the report I co-authored on the effect of COVID-19 on the unpaid work of professional women.

As I anticipated three years ago, hybrid working hasn’t delivered on its promise to bridge the chasm between caregiving and a thriving career.

Let’s run three thought experiments to put our current systems to the test. Are they serving us well? 

[Economics thought experiment #1] Childcare vs Caring for the neighbour’s children

Amy and John are neighbours. They know each other’s family and each has one baby and one toddler.

Experiment A

Given the high costs of caregiving, Amy and John decided to put their careers on hold for 3 years and instead care for their own children full-time.

During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers they are unemployed. That includes

  • Their family and friends.
  • The International Labor Organisation (ILO), which considers persons employed as those “who worked for at least one hour for pay or profit in the short reference period.”

Experiment B

During three years, from Monday to Friday

  • Amy goes to John’s house and cares for John’s children for £1.
  • Conversely, John goes to Amy’s house and cares for Amy’s children for £1.

During those three years, everybody around Amy and John considers that they ARE employed. That includes

  • Their family and friends.
  • The International Labor Organisation (ILO).

Same results if we swap childcare with eldercare.

If a person provides unpaid care to her family, we refer to it as a “staying-at-home parent”. However, if they perform the same tasks for a salary, then they become “domestic workers”.

[Economics thought experiment #2] Maternity leave vs Gap year

Two people decide to take a year off.

  • Person #1 takes a year of maternity leave.
  • Person #2 takes a gap year to travel the world.

How are they perceived before they leave?

  • Person #1 is not committed to their career.
  • Person #2 wants to expand their horizons.

And when they are back to work?

  • Person #1 is considered in the #MommyTrack after a year of “inactivity”.
  • Person #2 has acquired valuable transferable leadership skills throughout a year of “life-changing experiences”.
QUIZ: How much is patriarchy ruling your life and career?

[Economics thought experiment #3] Two-child benefit cap vs No cap

In the UK, child tax credits are capped to two children for children born after 6 April 2017. In practice

  • In practice, if your children are born before 6 April 2017, you get paid £545 (basic amount), and then up to £3,235 for each child. 
  • If one or more of your children were born on or after 6 April 2017, you could get £3,235 for up to 2 children. 
  • You’ll only get the £545 (basic amount) if at least one of your children was born before 6 April 2017.

What’s the rationale behind capping this outrageous sum of money for 2 children? Apparently, this should encourage parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours. 

Counterevidence #1 — “It has affected an estimated 1.5 million children, and research has shown that the policy has impoverished families rather than increasing employment. As many as one in four children in some of England and Wales’s poorest constituencies are in families left at least £3,000 poorer by the policy. It also found that in the most ethnically diverse communities, 14% of children were hit by the cap”.

Counterevidence #2 — China was often vilified for its one-child policy, which taxed families that dared to have more than one child.

The policy was enforced at the provincial level through contraception, abortion, and fines that were imposed based on the income of the family and other factors. Population and Family Planning Commissions existed at every level of government to raise awareness and carry out registration and inspection work.

The fine was a so-called “social maintenance fee”, the punishment for families with more than one child. According to the policy, families who violated the law created a burden on society. Therefore, social maintenance fees were to be used for the operation of the government.

Wikipedia

Counterevidence #3 — “Abolishing the two-child limit would cost £1.3bn a year but lift 250,000 children out of poverty and a further 850,000 children out of deep poverty, say campaigners. Joseph Howes, chair of the End Child Poverty Coalition, said: “It is the most cost-effective way that this, or any future, government has of reducing the number of children living in poverty.””

The defense rests.

PS. We’re halfway into 2023. How do you feel about your goals?

Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

Book a free strategy session

Patriarchy and pain: A match made in heaven

Leave a reply
A rose stem with many thorns and a rose in the background.
Image by Cornell Frühauf from Pixabay.

How many times have we heard “No pain, no gain”? And variations such as “There is no free meal in the universe”? Or “Work is paid because, otherwise, you won’t do it”?

Patriarchy, many religions, and fathers of capitalism such as Adam Smith have inculcated in us that we’re here to suffer, that we’re inherently lazy, and that if we didn’t have pain, we would work.

When we believe we’re lazy without pain

I discovered how much the culture of pain had negatively impacted my life when I stumbled upon the words of the author Marian Keyes

“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. […] horrible things damage you. They don’t make you better, or wiser and stronger. Most of the time they hobble you a bit.”

Marian Keyes

I realised that, indeed, bad things hadn’t made me stronger. Moreover, I also became aware that none of those “lessons” had made me a better person, employee, or friend. We have created a mythology around “pain” that doesn’t serve us well as human beings. Instead, it entrenches the powers of oppression. When we believe we deserve pain:

  • We don’t ask for help: I coach, mentor, and sponsor women. Countless times, my suggestion of making a warm introduction to somebody that could help them — or suggesting that they reach out to somebody that could open doors for them — has been met with pushback such as “I don’t want to bother” or “I should be able to figure it out this by myself”.
  • We’re forced to look for “silver linings”: In Venezuela, we have a saying that conveys a similar meaning to silver linings — “When God closes a door, somewhere else opens a window”.

Fired from your job? In an abusive relationship? Lost a family member? Patriarchy doesn’t want us to dwell on it — it wants us to “suck it up” and continue producing as working bees. If you’re in pain because of tragedy around you, you’re simply not making enough effort to “find the silver lining”.

  • We believe that we deserve pain when we don’t conform to the stereotype. Recently, the UN published the Gender Social Norms Index 2023. 25% of respondents thought it is justified for a man to beat his wife. Society is also biased against women’s pain. We either neglect it — “It’s in your head”, we’re told — or we identify it as a mark of “sainthood” — when we worship “natural” births and shame women that opt for alternatives such as C-sections or pain relief.

The reality is that pain becomes handy to keep a tight rein on low-power groups. It indoctrinates us in the belief that being mistreated at work, gaslighted by our doctors, or deprived of control over our bodies is unchangeable — that we deserve it. We’re here to suffer, after all.

From shoulds to letting be easy

How does patriarchy enforce “Pain makes you stronger” or “No pain, no gain”? Through “shoulds”.

  • You should work until the work is finished.
  • You should be a perfect mother.
  • You shouldn’t let your personal life interfere with your professional career.
  • You should go to work even if you experience period pain.
  • You should prioritise motherhood.
  • You should…

What if we’d change a culture of systemic oppression that reinforces “shoulds” for a regenerative alternative of “letting be easy”?

  • We shouldn’t have “exponential growth” but make it easy to distribute the wealth we already have.
  • We shouldn’t have to conform to inflexible work norms but make it easy for employees to work in the way that suits them better.
  • We shouldn’t police women about what they can do with their bodies but make it easy for them to manage their sexual and reproductive health as they see fit.

BACK TO YOU: What “should” can you drop this week?

Tired of being patronised about your career?

Sign here to receive the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead“.

PS. If you’re already subscribed to this blog and want the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”, get in touch and I’ll send it to you!

10 Promotion secrets revealed: The poison of well-meaning advice

Leave a reply
Suprised woman.
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay.

I’ve been a mentor for many years and I’ve had the privilege of receiving advice from fantastic mentors. 

But I’ve had also tons of bad career advice. Advice that has derailed my professional progression, robbed me of opportunities to stretch myself, and fostered patriarchal thinking.

The problem is that because it comes from well-meaning people around us, we’re conditioned by patriarchy to think others know better than us, and we’re trained to want to be liked — to “do as we’re told” — damaging our career in the process.

Here are my top 10 pieces of bad career advice and what to do instead so you save yourself time, energy, and frustration.

[Bad career advice #1] Women don’t help other women

This is patriarchal advice at its best. Are you really saying that 4 billion human beings won’t help their own group?

Yes, there have been some women that have hindered my progression or didn’t help me when it could have made a massive difference for me….

BUT

I’ve found many other women that have supported my career progression, made warm introductions, amplified my work, and highlighted my achievements and skills in rooms where I was not present. They have been my mentors, coaches, and sponsors.

What to do instead? If you’re a woman, connect two other women in your network that would benefit from knowing each other.

[Bad career advice #2] If you do a great job, you’ll be promoted

I have bad news for you: doing an impactful job that deserves a promotion is not enough to get promoted. That’s a sad truth that I’ve confirmed over and over throughout my career and from people that I’ve mentored, coached, and sponsored. It’s also well-documented in leadership books and articles.

There are multiple reasons for that. Some of them are:

  • Others may not be aware of your work.
  • They may be aware but don’t understand what it takes to deliver those results.
  • They may know about your work but don’t remember it at the promotion time.
  • Maybe only your manager knows about your achievements.
  • You deliver great value on key initiatives that are perceived as “one-offs”. That is, the value doesn’t fit the “typical” checkboxes for promotion.
  • Your work has reset the baseline of what people expect from you: You consistently deliver fantastic work so, by doing so in each project, you’re perceived as not doing anything “extraordinary” worth of a promotion.
  • You are perceived as a “commodity” worker: The business believes you won’t leave.

And there are many more.

What to do instead? Two actions you can start implementing right now to visibilise your great work:

1.- Record your wins — For example, create a “win folder” in your inbox to record your achievements, including those that appear “small”. That especially includes positive feedback from customers and colleagues. This information will be invaluable at the annual assessment time.

2.- Socialize your wins — Make your manager aware of your achievements… and everybody else that can support your promotion or may raise an objection about it. That includes your peers and especially other senior leaders in the organisation.

[Bad career advice #3] If you minimize your work, you’ll be more likeable and get promoted

Since I was little, I was taught by society to minimize and diminish myself and my contributions at each opportunity.

If they’d say “You’re intelligent”, the answer was “I work hard”.

To a professor telling me “Great work, Patricia”, I’d reply, “It was easy”.

Even to somebody praising how well a dress looked on me, I’d learned to reply “Really? It was not that expensive”.

And this pattern of diminishing my contributions and work continued through my early career. I felt the “right” answer to somebody acknowledging I had done great work was something like “It’s nothing”, “Anyone could have done it…”, or “Thanks but…”.

I also learn to caveat my comments with “I’m not an expert”, even if I was, because I internalised that otherwise I won’t be liked.

What’s the problem with that? I’ll answer with another question: How are you going to build a case for your promotion if you keep minimizing your contribution during the year? You cannot spend 365 days deflecting every praise on your work and then pitch during the annual and mid-year reviews that you’ve done outstanding work.

What to do instead? When somebody compliments your work, simply reply “Thank you” or, even better, stress what was the most difficult part. E.g. “Thanks. It entailed non-negligible strategic thinking/collaboration among teams/risk-taking. I’m glad to hear the project/initiative/presentation met your high standards “.

[Bad career advice #4] Everybody knows you want to be promoted

Nope. The world doesn’t turn around you!

During my academic years, the path was very clear. I was studying Chemical Engineering to get a diploma in Engineering. The same with my Master, and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. I didn’t need to spell out my goals. They were clear to everybody and that made it easy for people to support me, mentor me, and coach me.

Then, during my post-doc, the goal was much more fluid. It was like being in limbo. People assumed I wanted to be a professor at university — that’s what everybody wanted in the lab but I was not sure anymore… And then I knew that I wanted to work for a commercial company. Still, because I didn’t tell anybody, none knew, and obviously they didn’t think to recommend me if a commercial opportunity came along.

I did get a position to work for a company in France after my post-doc but it was all on my own. I had to look for open positions and apply to them. No warm introductions or help to prepare the interviews. Still, my post-doc advisor was very supportive once I asked for a recommendation to finalise my hiring at that company… I wish I’d communicated to him my intentions earlier.

I learned my lesson. Since then, I’ve been transparent with my managers about my career goals and where I see the next step for me. This kind of conversation helped me to understand the gaps between my perception and theirs about my career ambitions.

What to do instead? Spell out exactly what you want. Do you want to be promoted? Do you believe you deserve it? Say it. Explicitly. Don’t simply say “I want to be promoted” but “I have now the skills, achievements, and experience to be promoted to Sr. Support Engineer”, “Operations Sr Manager” or “Principal Software Engineer”.

And if you haven’t started to discuss it with your manager, don’t leave it to the annual review. Bring it to your next 1:1 meeting!

[Bad career advice #5] If you go after a promotion, you may let other people down

At one point when I was looking for a job early in my career, I reached out to quite a lot of organisations with my CV. One of them replied that they wanted to hire me. The position was not starting until several months later but I was over the moon.
 
About a month later I got the previous message, I was contacted by another of the organisations to which I’d applied. They were also interested in my CV. What’s more, they were even a better opportunity than the one I had accepted.
 
I was torn. I didn’t want to let the first organisation down but it was such a good opportunity…
 
 I reached out to my only mentor at the time and she told me I should be cautious. I didn’t want to be known as somebody that was untrustworthy… Long story short, I declined the second offer.
 
 In the very long run, all went well with my first option but I regret that my decision was based on “not letting others down” and not on “this is the best choice for me”.
 
What to do instead? Every time your brain goes into the “I may be letting others down” rabbit hole, question if you’re letting yourself down instead. Also, I invite you to examine the long-term effect of your decision. In my story, the decision was life-changing for me — it affected my career path — whereas for my employers it would have been an inconvenience but definitely, it wouldn’t have changed the organisation.
 

Get the other 5 pieces of bad advice — and what to do instead — when you join my newsletter where I share fresh thinking about inclusion, tech, professional success & systemic change through a feminist lens. Sign here to receive the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”.

PS. If you’re already subscribed to this blog and want the guide “10 Pieces of Bad Career Advice and What to Do Instead”, get in touch and I’ll send it to you!

Unmasking patriarchal productive procrastination: Empower your professional path

1 Reply
Woman in a library carrying a stack of books.
Photo by cottonbro studio.

This week, I had amazing coaching conversations with my clients about their professional careers. 

A recurrent theme came up: The “evermore education” career trap — using courses, certifications, and programs as barriers to their own career progression.

This is part of what I call productive procrastination.

Productive procrastination

The Cambridge Dictionary defines procrastination as

“the act of delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring”

We associate procrastination with either doing what we call “nothing” — resting — or embarking on pleasurable tasks — watching TV, gaming, gardening— instead of doing the work we have decided we should be doing.

However, for my clients, a recurrent blocker in their career progress has not been bingeing on Netflix instead of searching for a job. It’s been doing something that on the surface appears to be aligned with their professional goal but that it’s procrastination in disguise.  

“Not All Speed Is Movement”

Toni Cade Bambara

I’m talking about the neverending cycle of “taking another course”, “reading another book”, and“mastering another tool” before applying for a new job, asking for a promotion, or launching a business.

In summary, you convince yourself that before any meaningful step towards progressing in your career, you must learn something that it’s going to take you a considerable amount of time AND that until you complete that step you cannot pursue your career goals.

Why you love productive procrastination

The reason productive procrastination is so efficient is that — unlike bingeing on Netflix — it makes us feel good. How?

  1. It gives us permission not to risk rejection; that is, not to engage with the person that actually can help us in our career progression: manager, recruiter, or sponsor.
  2. It allows us to delay our career progression “rationally” — instead of exploring the reasons why we’re resistant to have conversations about our career with key stakeholders, that 3-month course or 6-month program gives us the perfect alibi to “delay” those uncomfortable discussions for another 3 or 6 months.
  3. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — as we learn more, we discover other areas/topics/skills in which we’re not an expert. That enables our brain to come up with yet another“learning milestone” that we “absolutely need to master” before going back to our job search.
  4. We’re sure to please most of our friends, mentors, and loved ones. When we share with our network of supporters thoughts like “I learned today that it’s good I do course X before I launch my business” or “I’m going to pursue program Y towards my career change”, we — consciously or unconsciously — already know they are going to tell us things like “Great idea”, “I’m pleased you’re taking action”, “Sounds like the right next step”. You feel good, they feel good, and nothing changes.

Why do I say that productive procrastination is a patriarchal strategy?

Because whilst you are “happily busy” learning and perfecting, those with more privilege than you are 

  • Sending half-cooked CVs to recruiters.
  • Asking for warm introductions to hiring managers.
  • Launching a website with some typos.
  • Negotiating a pay rise.
  • Discussing their promotion with their managers.
  • Running a survey among their targeted customer group to get feedback on a business idea.

Moreover, productive procrastination reinforces the feeling of “not enoughness” that patriarchal structures feed to women and people from underrepresented groups since we’re born.

How else do you explain that in spite that there are more women than men with university degrees in Oceania, the Americas, and Europe, most leadership positions in those regions are in the hands of men?

How do you detect you’re a victim of productive procrastination?

Some clues that you’ve become a productive procrastinator

  • Overcomplicating — You keep adding courses/workshops/certificates to your to-do list of things you have decided you absolutely need to finish before starting to take action.
  • Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, website, or business idea, you tell yourself that you’ll need a ton of work to create/develop/improve them and you keep refining the draft versions for weeks, months, or years. 
  • Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Do you note a pattern of embarking on back-to-back certifications, even if you continue to promise yourself that this will be the last one?

How you get unstuck from productive procrastination

And here are some strategies to unhook you from productive procrastination:

  • Overcomplicating — what’s the minimum education or piece of work you need to start interacting with stakeholders in your career?
  • Endless polishing — When you look at your CV, what overwhelming evidence do you have that more polishing is needed before you send it?
  • Neverending sense of “not being enough” — Decide in advance what’s the minimum you need to “learn” and what’s the deadline. And then stick to it. 

BACK TO YOU: What’s one way you’ll stop productively procrastinating to block your career progression this week?

PS. I can help you to unblock your career 

Book a strategy session with me to explore how coaching can help you to become your own version of success.

Book a free strategy session