Successful Women, Are There Any?

 On Saturday I went on a night out with my friends and whilst in the taxi, our driver made a comment saying that there are not ‘many’ successful women. This got me thinking.

Now I can easily list several successful women, but why should I have to? Regardless of privilege, power, or even wealth, all women are successful. Why should we have to ‘achieve’ things to regard ourselves as successful? Success should be looked at from a different perspective, success can come in all shapes and sizes. For example, writing this blog post for me is a success.

What may have been a simple statement by a taxi driver got me thinking. Women have always had to ‘prove’ themselves, and for what? Approval by men? Approval of society?

You don’t need to become successful to feel like you have a place, I know it’s easier said than done – today’s society is a toxic one.

Cambridge dictionary defined success as:

achieving the results wanted or hoped for. Some examples given are:

-        a successful operation

-        My second attempt at making bread was a little more successful.

-        This year's harvest was one of the most successful since the record crop of 1985.

During some research, I found a magazine called ‘successful women’. Okay this does celebrate women which is amazing, but it also allows women who aren’t in the ‘spotlight’ to compare themselves, self-doubt creeps in and can easily take over any mindset. Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes stated that over five years they have worked in ‘individual psychotherapy, theme-centered international groups, and college classes with over 150 highly successful women’. These women have earned PhDs, they are respected professionals, and they are students who have been recognised for academic excellence. However, ‘they consider themselves to be impostors’ and believe they are ‘not intelligent’ and ‘students often fantasize that they were mistakenly admitted to graduate school because of an error by the admissions committee’. (You can read the rest of the paper below, also check out Pauline Rose Clance’s ‘Impostor Phenomenon’ here)

To conclude, we are all successful in our own right. Let us celebrate women’s success, whether that’s a new Hollywood film or taking the bins out. Success is success at the end of the day and we should take pride in that.

Reading list:

Definition of successful: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/successful

Herminia Ibarra, Robin J. Ely, and Deborah M. Kolb. Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers https://hbr.org/2013/09/women-rising-the-unseen-barriers (2013)

Pauline Rose Clance, and Suzanne Imes. The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention https://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women.pdf

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