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GETTY IMAGES
Like most
blokes, I’m
too blind
stupid to
finish DIY
Robert
Crampton
W
hat did
many of
us spend
yesterday
doing?
According
to a survey
about our
DIY habits, it’s more a question of
what we spent the Bank Holiday not
doing. Not bleeding radiators, not
putting up shelves, not installing a
new boiler — or rather, starting any
or all of those tasks, but failing to
finish them. Apparently, 44 per cent of
us admit to giving up on even the most
basic DIY project half way through.
Across the nation, it seems, shelves
hang perilously, poorly supported by
not enough brackets. Boilers gently
rust, half in/half out of their
designated niche. Radiators seethe and
bubble and effervesce with excess air.
Bright and breezy on Bank Holiday
morning, we get cracking — then, half
an hour in, go, “Nah, sod it”, and put
the telly on, tools lying where they fall.
I like the sound of Matthew Allen
from Southampton, quoted in reports
of the survey. “I wanted to add
insulation to my house,” he said, “but
I got fed up and left the job half done.”
How’s that for honesty? Up Matthew
goes to his loft all keen and eager, gets
going, gets bored, gets tired — bins it.
And never mind that half the roof is
You can’t
find me on
Facebook
pumping out heat into the night, like
chucking tenners on the fire.
Outstanding.
Men, it will surprise no one, are more
likely than women to leave a job half
done. We do the fun part — the glamour
part, the macho part, the knocking a
hole in a wall part — and then we find
reasons to bail. I do anyway.
Reasons are never hard to come by —
the chief one being incompetence. Yes
indeed, sheer boredom, fatigue and
laziness all have their role, but the main
explanation for giving up is not knowing
what on earth we’re doing. Ignorance.
Stupidity. It’s an iron rule of DIY that
any job is harder — I mean intellectually
harder — than it first appears.
I tried to fit a blind a few years ago.
Shouldn’t have been difficult: was. In
order for the blind to function as a
blind — go up and down — I realised
in fitting it I had to deploy not only
patience and dexterity, but also a
surprising degree of brain power. Brain
power, it turned out, that I lacked. I
just couldn’t bring enough mental
strength to bear on the problem of
which way round the various bits
should be. The blind returned to its
packaging, where it remains to this day.
Two further issues are worth
mentioning as excuses — I mean,
legitimate reasons — for DIY defeat.
One is the hopeless inadequacy of the
contents of the average man’s toolbox.
We all have a toolbox, of sorts, because
we think we ought to. But funnily
enough your dad’s cast-off hammer,
the spanner from your bike and that
set of mini-screwdrivers out of a
Christmas cracker aren’t sufficient for
even the most straightforward job.
The other barrier to seeing a DIY
task through to the bitter end is injury.
Pain. Hurt. Mucking about with sharp
objects we neither fully control nor
understand more often than not
eventually involves blood loss, in my
experience. And once the bleeding
starts, the work stops.
Best not to start at all, on balance.
A new feature
developed by Facebook
tells you when any of
your friends approach
within a half-mile
radius of where you
are. If you’re female
you probably think that
sounds quite useful. If
you’re a man, however,
dedicated to the twin
principles of 1) never
quite being where other
people think you are
and 2) seeing your
friends as little as
possible, this latest
techy wheeze is a
potential nightmare.
Obviously getting an
early warning of the
threat of impending
interaction with another
human being is handy,
but if you know where
they are, they know
where you are.
Specifically, as you text
Tuesday April 22 2014 | the times
Why women
the times | Tuesday April 22 2014
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1GT
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lack confidence — and men don’t
FRONT COVER AND BELOW: STEPHEN VOSS/REDUX/EYEVINE
Flames or
lions? I’ll
go big cat
every time
I can’t help thinking
that the story of the
woman whose car burst
into flames in the lion
enclosure at Longleat is
being blown out of
proportion.
It’s being billed as the
ultimate impossible
choice — burnt to a
crisp versus light snack
for the king of the
jungle — but I can’t see
that she had much of a
dilemma.
Certainly, if it had
been me, I’d have just
got out of the car.
But what, people
might say, about the
lions?
To which I say: Oh
yeah? What about
them? I’ve always
thought lions were
overrated in the
mauling-people-todeath department.
Sharks, tigers, crocs —
they’ve earned their
fearsome reputations.
Lions, though, they
never seem actually to
do much mauling,
beyond the occasional
baby wildebeest, and
they often cock that
up. I reckon they’re
not nearly as hard as
they make out. I’d
back myself against one
any day.
to blow out your pal,
he’s now going to know
you aren’t stuck at work
or visiting your mum
or nursing a minor
DIY-related wound in
A&E; you’re lying on
your sofa watching
Die Hard for the
seventh time. Tricky.
Good job I’m not on
Facebook — I might
have to start socialising
with my friends.
A new book about
the confidence
gender divide
has become a hot
topic in America.
Barbara McMahon
meets its authors
I
n a Washington DC restaurant
recently, a 6ft tall, silver-haired
woman, radiating style in a
tweed dress and casually tied silk
scarf, made her way to a table at
the back of the room.
Heads swivelled as
diners recognised
Christine Lagarde, the
head of the
International
Monetary Fund
and one of the
most powerful
women in the
world. The former
French finance
minister had found
time in her busy
schedule to meet the
journalists Katty Kay and
Claire Shipman, who were
researching whether men are
naturally more self-confident than
women. They regarded Lagarde, the
head of the organisation that fosters
global growth and economic stability in
its 188 member countries, as a role
model. Having reached such a giddy
height on the world stage, she appeared
the epitome of female self-assurance.
In a fascinating anecdote in their
newly published book The Confidence
Code, Kay and Shipman recount how,
over a meal of grilled trout and wilted
spinach, the 58-year-old Lagarde
recalled many moments of self-doubt
as she worked her way up the career
ladder, such as being nervous about
giving presentations and having to
summon up the courage to raise her
hand in meetings. Even now, Lagarde
confided to the authors, she still
worries about being caught off-guard
and over-prepares for every meeting, a
practice she has in common with the
German chancellor Angela Merkel.
“We assume, somehow, that we don’t
have the level of expertise to
be able to grasp the whole
thing,” Lagarde said, a
comment that the
authors note in
their book is not
an admission
many men would
volunteer. “Of
course it is part
of the confidence
issue, to be overly
prepared and to be
rehearsed, and to
make sure that you
are going to get it all
and not make a mistake.”
She joked that it was all very
time-consuming.
More than ever before the world is
shifting in a female direction, the
authors point out. Women outnumber
men when it comes to higher education,
they make up half the workforce and
they are closing the gap in middle
management. Studies show that
companies that employ large numbers
of women outperform their competitors
on every measure of profitability. Even
so, men are still promoted faster and
they earn more. Women remain
woefully under-represented at executive
level. According to Kay and Shipman,
the reason for a lot of this is women’s
lack of self-confidence. Men have
moments of self-doubt, of course, but
they do not agonise over their abilities
or their failings as deeply or as often as
women and they do not let their doubts
stop them as often.
Kay and Shipman wrote the book,
they tell me, because after 20 years of
covering politics in Washington they
recognised that even high-achieving
women are short on confidence. “You
would think these very strong and
influential women would be brimming
with self-assurance, but we kept coming
across phrases that suggested quite the
opposite,” Kay says. “Women would say
to us: ‘I’m not sure I really deserve the
promotion that I’ve been given’ or ‘I’m
just lucky because I was in the right
place at the right time to get this job’ or
‘I’m not sure if I’m the best person to
handle this new account’. We thought it
was strange because we never hear
men talking like this.”
The authors of the 2009 best-seller
Womenomics, which looked at the
many positive changes unfolding for
women, both admit they are guilty as
the next woman about over-thinking
things. Kay, 49, is the lead presenter
for BBC World News America and a
Claire Shipman and
Katty Kay. Left: Kay on
Meet the Press. Below:
Shipman with her
husband Jay Carney
The Confidence Code by
Katty Kay and Claire
Shipman is published
by HarperCollins
on May 8, £18.99
How
confident
are you?
Take the test
Tablet editions and
thetimes.co.uk/life
regular guest on American news
shows such as Meet the Press. She lives
in the capital with her husband, Tom
Carver, the writer and former BBC
foreign correspondent, and four
children. Shipman, 51, is a
correspondent for ABC News and
Good Morning America, covering
politics, international
affairs and women’s
issues. She also
lives in Washington,
with her husband
Jay Carney, the
chief press
secretary to President Obama, and
their two children. They have stellar
careers and interesting lives and yet
each of them says they struggle with
the female curse of perfectionism. “I
was on Fox News last night to talk
about our book, and the interview
went really well, but I said one thing
that wasn’t the smartest — 18 hours
later I’m still thinking about it and I
can guarantee that I’ll still be thinking
about it tomorrow,” Kay sighs.
The five common mistakes women
make, the authors say, are thinking too
much, carrying criticism around for too
long, staying in our comfort zones,
failing to voice our opinions and to take
risks because they carry the possibility
of failure. There is ample data to back
this up, they claim. In the book they
quote a 2003 study by the Cornell
University psychologist David Dunning
and Washington State University
psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger which
looked at the relationship between
female confidence and competence.
Men and women were given the same
tests involving mathematics or scientific
questions and were asked to rate their
own skills before the tests. The women
rated themselves more negatively while
the men assessed themselves as being
better than they really were. The actual
scores on the tests were almost
identical, with women getting 7.5 out of
10 questions correct and men 7.9. But
the perception of abilities between the
sexes was markedly different.
British-born Kay saw an experiment
that has been carried out for the past
seven years at Manchester Business
School by Professor Marilyn Davidson.
Each year she asks her students what
they expect to earn, and deserve to
earn, five years after graduation. Males
expect to earn much more and believe
they deserve to earn more than their
female counterparts. On average, the
male students think that they deserve to
earn £52,000 a year while the women
think a salary of about £41,000 is fair.
Another study, by Hewlett Packard,
found that women will not seek
promotion unless they feel they have
close to 100 per cent of the required
qualifications, while men think they
need to have only 60 per cent. “The
men aren’t necessarily fraudulent; they
have something that Ernesto Reuben,
a professor at Columbia Business
School, calls honest overconfidence,”
Kay says. “They just say to
themselves that they can learn the
rest of what they need on the job.
“I think that’s an attitude many
women would benefit from,” she
continues. “Study after study
shows that men who might be
under-qualified and unprepared
don’t think twice about leaning in,
while women feel confident only when
they are perfect, or practically perfect.”
What are the origins of this
confidence gap? The authors say that
male and female brains do display
differences in structure and chemistry.
Says Shipman: “There’s a part of the
brain called the anterior cingulate
cortex which helps recognise errors
and weigh options. It’s been named the
‘worrywart centre’ and its bigger in
women, so that could be why women
have more of a propensity to
ruminate, to be cautious and to scan
for threats. All of that kind of thinking
inhibits easy, confident action.”
There are also hormonal influences.
“The main hormonal driver for women
is, of course, oestrogen,” the women
write. “By supporting the part of the
brain involved in social skills and
observations, oestrogen seems to
encourage bonding and connection
while discouraging conflict and risktaking — tendencies that might hinder
confidence in some contexts.” Men also
have the advantage of testosterone.
“Testosterone probably gives men more
of a natural confidence boost because it
increases risk-taking,” Shipman says.
As an experiment for the book, both
women underwent genetic testing.
Waiting for the results, Kay says, was
like waiting to find out if she had
passed her A levels. When the results
came back both women had tested
positive for the three genes more likely
to make them worriers than warriors.
Other factors are at play. School is
where many girls are first rewarded for
being good, instead of noisy and
rambunctious, the authors say. In the
workplace, women who are assertive
are often labelled bitchy and
dislikeable — by both sexes.
Confidence is not a fixed
psychological state, the pair say.
“Natural-born worriers can overcome
Even Christine
Lagarde admits
to nerves and
self-doubt
the confidence cards they’re dealt at
birth because our brains can change
over the course of our lives in response
to shifting thought patterns and
behaviour,” Kay says. “Neuroscientists
call this brain plasticity, but we call it
hope, because it means that we can
create more confident pathways in our
brains with better habits.”
“One of the most useful definitions
of confidence that we came across is
that confidence is the stuff that turns
things into action,” interjects Shipman.
“It’s a belief in one’s ability to succeed,
and that belief stimulates action.”
My husband and I decided to
compare our relative levels of
confidence using their online test (you
can do the same at Times online, and
on digital editions of the paper). He
was assessed as having higher than
average confidence while I was
assessed as having average confidence.
The gender disparities are obviously
clear in our household. As far as we
could tell, the difference in the results
was because my husband didn’t think
there was anything wrong in
expressing his opinion often and
loudly, while I preferred to take a
neutral stance in most situations.
“Confidence can accumulate
through hard work, through success
and even through failure. I think what
we have hit on is this sense that
women are not getting as far, in their
professional lives and their personal
lives, than they might do if they were
not holding themselves back with all
this worrying and self-criticism and
running around in circles with
negative thoughts. We have to stop
being our own worst critics.”