8 Critical Choices for Women’s Success
Linda Austin, M.D.
2000
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Austin's carefully researched and thoughtful approach is designed to help women stop taking setbacks and stalled careers in the workplace personally, and begin to understand what causes us to react in ways that undermine our ability to feel and express our ambitions. She makes a sensitive exploration of all these issues. Every chapter will be eye-opening for the woman who has been in the workplace trying live a coherent life and also deal with the many challenging aspects of that environment. This would be a great book to work through with a group of women who want to address these issues in their own careers.

Instead of nurturing ambition and pursuing greatness, women shy away from stepping outside the boundary of ingrained behavior patterns - patterns that compel us to "cooperate but not initiate; produce but not invent; participate but not lead; reflect but not create."

Austin  identifies eight distinct psychological issues, united by the feminine drive to affiliate with others, as daily choices women make that radically affect our professional success. These behaviors include:

1) Channeling motivation and turning it into real action
2) Learning to take risks and embracing confidence and optimisim in the boardroom
3) Moving from problem-fixing to problem-finding
4) Focusing intellectual development in order to develop true expertise
5) Learning to compete in hierarchies
6) Focusing on purposeful self-evaluation and avoiding self-blame
7) Mastering the Art of dealing with difficult people and accepting that negative feelings from others come with the category of "doing business"
8) Harnessing women's greatest strength - the capacity for connection - as a powerful tool of achievement.

Here is Austin describing the development of her research and conclusions: 

I began to pay more attention to the ways my women patients struggled, at work and at home, with their conflicted feelings about ambition. I watched closely the mixed-sex groups of first- and second-year medical students I taught, observing how the young males and females barely out of college learned, studied, and led each other in group activities. I listened to how my women resi­dents in psychotherapy supervision approached their patients. I observed my academic peers as they struggled for promotion and tenure, and I analyzed the behavior of some great women leaders whom I knew personally. I was fortunate during this period to participate in a year-long fellowship at MCP Hahnemann University, the Hildegard von Amerin­gen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine for Women, which allowed me to meet for several week-long retreats with thirty-five upper-level women academicians who were also passionately interested in these same issues. Most of these women had met the challenge of achieving academic success while raising their families, and I learned much from our intense and revealing discussions.

Since the field of medicine represents only a small fraction of ambitious women, however, I moved outside to other professions as well. I inter-viewed scores of women in a variety of fields. As an invited speaker for women legislators, therapists, lawyers, and businesswomen, I had the opportunity to try out my ideas before hundreds of women and hear their experiences and ideas as well. I conducted focus groups in different parts of the United States and Canada, particularly targeting highly successful women to learn how they had succeeded.

And finally, I read everything I could find about women as leaders, visionaries, and achievers—particularly scientific articles from areas removed from standard psychology fare. I looked at the scientific literature to answer the most interesting questions: How much of feminine behavior is nature? How much is cultural? Are certain behaviors universal? Are they affected by hormones that ebb and flow throughout the life cycle, or by genes exerting stable influences over many years? To answer these questions, I not only looked at psychobiological and neurohormonal studies, I studied the fascinating literature on female primate behavior, for the millions of years of primate brain development is a far more powerful determinant of our behavior than the mere two hundred thousand years of human evolution. My goal was to answer the question: If there are innate, biologically determined behavioral and psychological differences between males and females, how can we women make optimal use of our distinctly feminine psychology in the service of achieving our goals?

BRAVERY

As I studied women of ambition and achievement, I identified eight psy­chological issues that most determined their ability to achieve. These were: a powerful motivation driven by a sense of meaning; the capacity for risk-taking; the ability to focus intelligence; the ability to find and define great problems to work on; a willingness to compete in hierarchies as well as individually; the ability to tolerate and learn from failure; signif ­icant skill with difficult people; and the development of autonomy and power. This book is organized around these topics, and each chapter defines the psychological choices women face with each of them.

One force, however, united all eight issues, and powerfully influenced how women shaped their careers. That force was the feminine drive to affiliate with others, a drive numerous scholars have described as the most gender-specific aspect of women's psychology. Throughout human history, this female drive has been narrowly focused to promote the welfare of the family and, to a lesser degree, one's immediate community. Women of achievement, however, while profoundly motivated by affiliative needs, channel this energy in nontraditional, often very bold direc­tions. From the need to connect, support, and protect others, these women draw the motivation to achieve, the desire to take risks, and the vision to find unique problems. Freeing the affiliative drive from traditional constraints and channeling it into the service of achievement requires real bravery, however, for it compels a woman to confront her deepest wishes about how her life should be defined.

While courage is surely an important trait for the achieving man, women must be even more psychologically brave than their male counterparts to succeed. After all, it is so clearly within the scope of expected male behavior to take independent, autonomous action. The bolder a man of achievement is, the more he is actually conforming to his gender stereotype: his social position becomes safer than ever, and he thoroughly gratifies the expectations of his parents, family, and society.

For a woman, boldness puts her distinctly at odds with the role that society expects of her. She leaves the safety of conformity to group expectations for a solitary adventure that is hers alone. Bravery leads her to a final step of the process that psychologists call "separation-individuation," the forging of a unique, authentic, self-determined sense of identity.  (pp.xvi-xviii)

This is from an Amazon.com review:

… Austin doesn't try to say that a woman has to fit into the same career mold as a man, nor define achievement the same way, either. In that sense, this book breaks the mold of many books about women's achievement. Austin's goal is not to give tips about how to fit into a man's world. Instead, she gives a map and compass that a woman can use to navigate her own path. A truly empowering book, it convinced me that many of my personal attributes that had sabotaged me in the workplace were, in fact, assets which I could uniquely appreciate and exploit to forge my own, creative career solutions. I think the ideal target audience for this book is a woman who is gifted, educated, and who really wants to achieve but who doesn't quite know how to overcome the special obstacles that women typically must confront.  

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