How do you climb to the top of the business world? Often what’s holding women back from career success is that they don’t brand themselves as well as men do and use the female mindset to their advantage – without playing copycat to their male counterparts.
In spite of the feminist movement insisting that women and men are equal, research on differences between the sexes suggests otherwise. In a study of nursery school children, it showed that boys are fifty times more likely than girls to use competition and physical means, while girls use talking and taking turns. Instead of trying to play the game like men do as women in the late 70s and 80s frequently did, women today should leverage their natural gender-based advantages at work and capitalise on the female brain. Just as we each have individual strengths based on who we are as individuals, we also have gender-based strengths as women, strengths that are increasingly in demand. Kaputa writes, “As the western world moves further away from basic manufacturing work and as machines replace people, cooperation, verbal skills, organisation, and teamwork are more valued. Increasingly skills and temperaments considered more female than male are what help make one successful in the twenty-first century.”Women need to be confident and take charge of their female-brand advantage if they want to get ahead at work.
Successful women know how to leverage their female mindset, emotional intelligence and their assets, which include; exceptional empathy, uncanny intuition, strong verbal and communication skill s, the ability to build deep personal relationships, and more. The problem for many women is that they are backwards in coming; forward, we stop ourselves from volunteering ideas in a brainstorming session, we don’t ask for a salary increase or promotion, or we downplay our talents and accomplishments and are reluctant to assert ourselves. The bookis about what happens when we take charge of our personal brand, tune into our wiring and capitalise on our differences instead of leaving our career and business success to chance. It’s about not leaving our gender-based advantages at the door, it’s about using the remarkable female brain and bringing our assets to the table. It’s time for women to brand. Catherine Kaputa brand expert who worked on the iconic I Love NY campaign and uthor of the successful You Are a Brand and Breakthrough Branding, also from Nicholas Brealey Publishing
