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Caroline Fowle Instructor: Malcolm Campbell English 1103 September 11, 2013 Topic Proposal: Wheres the Confidence? Introduction/Overview In the past few years, my inbox was almost constantly being inundated with emails inviting me to various conferences, panels, or events to empower young women. There are plenty incentives out there to make the business world, engineering, and politics and government more open or receptive to women. Why? And why arent they working? Theres been a lot of research done to gain some insight into the current gender gap in the professional world. Whats interesting is that there is no single gender gap that seeps into every sector of society. Differences in gender appear in specific regions and in specific fields. For example, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, girls lead in a science exam in most developed countriesor the gap is insignificantexcept in the United States. The exam was taken in 2009 by 470,000 fifteen year old students.

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Visual from the New York Times Its a hot topic and people are very sensitive. No one wants to say that women are naturally less science or math inclined. I cant answer this question, but I want to examine the cultural forces that are at play in the US and the role of confidence in this question. I looked into this topic after your freewriting assignment that began Im good at or Im knowledgeable about I couldnt finish that sentence for myself. I cant look in the mirror and say that Im good at this or that. Its not that Im too competitive and I need to be the best before I consider myself to be good at any level. Ive won academic and musical competitions, and even with a clearly defined award or trophyI would never consider myself to be good or knowledgeable about a subject. The very terms of praise just dont exist for myself. I also thought back on a problem Ive just started correcting for myself. I realized a couple of months ago that before I state my opinion I say Im sorry but. As if whatever I had to say,

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needs to be prefaced by an apology because it could potentially be of no value and waste everyones time. After I noticed myself doing this, I continue to watch it in the classroom. I see young women start with disclaimers before they say what they want to: This might be a stupid comment but or Im sorry. I have a question. Ive seen more girls speak like this than boys. Of course this is anecdotal evidence, but I think good investigations begin with unexplained observations.

Initial Inquiry Question(s) Does confidence play a role in the gender gap in education and the workplace? How has this gap changed (grown or shrunk) in the past decades?

My Interest in this Topic As I already mentioned, your freewriting assignment made me think about ways of quantifying confidence and I wanted to know who has it and what are the effects of not being confident. I felt really bad after realizing I couldnt finish the phrase Im good at I would never be as critical of another person as I am to myself. Promoting self-confidence and self-worth is a common message. Its become a marketing tactic; those Dove commercials are basically saying youll love yourself if you use this product. I think that understanding confidence and the root causes of why so many people dont feel confident is especially relevant at this time because there is so much emphasis on it now. What do I already know? There arent foolproof ways of quantifying confidence but I think that there is a gender gap associated with it. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, conducted a

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famous experiment that demonstrated that certain poses can make you feel and appear more powerful: two minutes in a power pose could create a 20% increase in testosterone levels and a 25% decrease in cortisol (a stress hormone). What do I hope to learn? I hope to learn how many of the programs that are targeting this gender gap include information or emphasize confidence. I want to know how they go about this and how effective they are.

Next Steps I hope I can use this project to meet with librarians because I know that theyd have valuable help. To compensate for the somewhat soft science aspect of this, I hope I can use some hard data. There are statistics about the average income of men and women at different education levels available at the US Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Ive seen several articles in the New York Times that discuss how boys and girls are performing in school.