But how well did the skills and habits I learned through my 18 years of formal education prepare me for a career in the 21st century?
I’ve recently been reading Playing Big: For Women Who Want to Stand Up, Speak Out and Lead by Tara Mohr. There is a chapter where Mohr challenges the dominant interpretation of girls’ and women’s success in the education system. The participation of women in higher education has been steadily rising for decades. At bachelor level, women now make up over 60% of New Zealand tertiary students.
The gender difference is even starker for Māori and Pasifika, where there are two women doing bachelor degrees for every man. Girls achieve more highly at high school also. A total of 48% of girls who left school in 2021 had university entrance compared with 34% of boys.
This has been interpreted as great news for girls and women, bad news for boys and men. And of course, being academically successful at high school and tertiary level is linked to positive life outcomes, but Mohr and others have posed the interesting question: Why has this success in academia not led to greater success and equality for women in the workplace?
Is it partly because the meta skills and habits necessary to succeed in the education system are not the same as those that are needed to become a leader, influencer and entrepreneur?
In Playing Big, Mohr argues there are four ways in which some of the key skills and behaviours promoted and rewarded by our Western education system actively work against people in the wider world of work, particularly women:
1. Adapting to versus challenging and influencing authority.
At school and university, I became adept at working out what each teacher wanted me to say or write and serving that up to them on a plate.
And I was rewarded for it. I only ever had one lecturer who called me out for not offering my own original ideas.
It was about understanding and meeting the requirements of the authority figure; in other words, following the rules. I was never asked to change my teacher’s view on a subject and then rewarded for doing so.
As an adult in the workforce and in self-employment, the rule-following, "don’t rock the boat" paradigm has been hard to escape.
I’ve had to work out which authority figures I need to challenge and which (usually unwritten) rules I need to bend or break for the good of my career and my business.
2. Preparation vs improvisation
A big factor in my academic success was study, study, study. In other words, preparation. It’s how you win at the education game. You practise. You remember. You regurgitate. Teachers don’t suddenly announce tests on topics they’ve never spoken about; that would be considered unfair.
But improvisation is a crucial life skill and any adult knows you can’t always know what you’re going to be faced with on any given day. People who have the confidence to back themselves and play what’s in front of them have a big advantage over us "girly swots".
Incidentally, Boris Johnson famously called his predecessor David Cameron a "girly swot" in a leaked cabinet memo. It was meant as an insult.
Over-preparation is a liability and closely connected to the prison of perfectionism. I’m still trying to break out of that one.
3. Absorbing others’ ideas vs sharing your own
Closely linked to the first point. The formula for success in the education system is largely 1) you gather information from an external source (teacher, book, the internet), 2) internalise this information and 3) spit it out in an essay, test or presentation.
When faced with a challenge in work or business, these years of conditioning leave many adult women looking for the next article, book or degree to give them the answers rather than backing their own skills, knowledge and intuition and bringing that forth.
This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t be humble in terms of understanding our own limitations, but through our rich experiences we have so much knowledge that we sometimes don’t even try to access.
I agree with Mohr in that we need to help young people learn "both sets of skills equally: how to learn information from outside sources and how to draw on one’s own creative ideas, insights, experiences and what one already knows".
4. "Do good work" vs "do good work and make it visible"
Work hard. Keep your head down. Get good grades. It’s the mantra I followed for 18 years and then some.
I’m not sure I even thought about what came after "Get good grades!". We are told that life is a meritocracy but in truth it is a partial meritocracy with a bit of oligarchy (jobs for mates) and a bit of celebrity (those who get noticed, do well).
To succeed in our career and in business it’s not just about doing good work.
It’s about making that good work visible to the people you need to influence and who can influence your success. There’s not a lot of point in being your company’s or your industry’s best-kept secret.
Research popularised by former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg shows that men try to prove themselves in a job interview and initial negotiation, asking for higher pay and a more senior title at that stage, while women ask for less and plan to prove themselves on the job. Not only has this proven to be a faulty plan, it puts women behind before they’ve even started.
Our government, schools and tertiary institutions are constantly reviewing and revising the curriculum (what is taught) to ensure it is relevant to current society.
As a result, we have seen a big increase in technological skills and subjects such as coding and robotics. But are they also aware of the meta skills, behaviours and habits that young people learn and adopt in order to be successful in the education system, and how relevant those are?
No doubt I have probably upset some of the many teachers in my family. I do think there is so much that is fantastic about our education system in Aotearoa.
And it’s absolutely true that teachers work bloody hard. But I have also experienced some of the ways in which success in this system doesn’t always lead to success in the big wide world.
I have had to unlearn some of the things which previously served me well and became a part of my identity. I hadn’t planned to write this article tonight. But I improvised.
- Sarah Cross is director of Kākāpō Consulting.
