Accepting Your Potential

When Marissa Meyer was appointed CEO of Yahoo back in July 2012, the business world was stunned: a pregnant woman as the new head of a struggling internet company. Would any good become of this change in management? I was amazed at the news: it clearly showed that a woman can climb the corporate ladder and realize her family aspirations.

Beauty and success

Then, a couple of days ago, I read an interesting article covering -in general- the relation between the beauty of CEOs and the success of their companies. The author mentions several different researchers who wrote about similar topics in the last years: generally speaking, if people have a high level of beauty or are more beautiful than the average, the return of their company or their income is higher. Up to now, this is not a specific women-men issue, but what stirred my attention was the example given by the researchers for the CNBC article: Marissa Meyer! Why does it have to be exactly this woman to illustrate the relation between beauty and higher return of the company? Following the example, the research scientists say: "Of course, we don't mean that all the increase in stock price is from her appearance. We just find that there might be some positive correlation between the two". So, why pick exactly this blonde woman as an example? Could it be the fact that her performance has been stunning and now people do not want to believe solely in her abilities but search for different explanations? This might not have been the conscious reason for the researchers Halford and Hsu choosing Marissa Meyer as an example. However, the concept of looking for different explanations for success apart from one's own abilities is a phenomenon also often seen with female managers.

Be proud of yourself!

On the one hand, we tend to search the reason for our success in lucky circumstances or other external influences. On the other hand, we usually attribute the reason for failure to ourselves. We can definitely improve here: next time you give a great presentation, hand in an awesome paper or get that internship you really wanted: it was your personal achievement. Celebrate (just like Marissa Meyer did when she found out about being No.1 on Fortune's "40 under 40" list) and show what you are capable of!

Carolin