Working overtime for the good of the company or a project, sitting silently at your workplace, carrying more responsibilities than you have to and doing it discreetly, hoping that someone from above recognizes your worth is an attitude in which many women (and also men, although to a lesser extent), recognize each other. If this is your case, if you think that your boss is going to come and give you a medal or give you a tiara in the form of a job or economic promotion, you suffer from tiara syndrome, and of course, you are not alone.
The term tiara syndrome was coined by Carol Frohlinger and Deborah Kolb, founders of Negotiating Women, and refers to the passive attitude that women generally (although not exclusively) take in their jobs, scrupulously fulfilling their duty without making it noticeable. , waiting for a superior to detect them to recognize their good work and crown them with a tiara, hence their name.
“I’m doing the work, I work hard, I’m doing everything in my power and more but I don’t make it very evident and at the same time I hope that superiors recognize my work and value it,” he exemplifies in conversation with La Vanguardia. Laura Ruiz Mitjana, integrative psychologist.
But the work environment is not a fairy tale and it is not good for women’s careers to wait quietly, discreetly and without fanfare for other people to tell them what their work and good work is worth.
Although both syndromes affect our work success, they are different problems. Imposter syndrome is “a type of psychological discomfort of varying intensity in which the person does not feel worthy of their own achievements and fears that others will at some point discover them as a fraud,” as Marta Cabezas explains to La Vanguardia. co-director psychologist at Intro Psicoluciones Madrid. “It is the fear of not being up to par,” Julia Pascual, a psychologist specializing in Brief Strategic Therapy, summarizes for this newspaper.
For its part, the tiara syndrome, far from being a fear of being discovered, is precisely harboring in silence that desire for recognition to come and waiting for it in a discreet background without being seen for that to happen. “In the case of the tiara we want to be recognized but we don’t say it and in the case of impostor syndrome it’s more that we don’t recognize it,” summarizes Laura Ruiz.
Another of the main differences is that, while that of the imposter is not related to any specific gender although it is quite common among women and minorities, that of the tiara is eminently feminine.
Furthermore, that of the tiara occurs eminently on a professional level while that of the impostor can be felt in other areas such as the social or sentimental, although it is at work when it becomes more evident.
Thus, what they have in common is that they represent glass ceilings that many women impose on themselves in the workplace when it comes to showing their worth, since in both cases they affect the possibilities of advancing both economically and professionally.
“I don’t want it to seem like all the weight falls on us,” Ruiz adds, since “it is also a structural and system issue.” “We have to empower ourselves, assert ourselves, bring it to light and not have to wait for someone to recognize it, but for us to recognize it,” he adds.
Although it is within the power of women to realize these self-imposed obstacles to try to remedy them as much as possible, the issue is not so simple, since for centuries society and culture have forced them to being in the shadows, something that is sometimes internalized and is not easy to remove. Although tiara syndrome “can also affect men, the truth is that women historically and socially have been more relegated or tended to be in the background and not want to stand out. That is seen in films like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, which is what they reflect,” explains Ruiz.
And there have been decades of women working piecework without saying a word or waiting to be saved or chosen from the crowd by a prince or knight. They all have in common the passive attitude that the businesswomen who coined the term talked about, because it is not passivity in the face of life, but in the fact of boasting about their achievements or merits to achieve the well-deserved reward or recognition, that is, the tiara that I crowned them. But real life, much less the work environment, is a fairy tale.
“Sexism also weighs a lot, although now it is less and less marked and women increasingly make themselves seen and fight for our work to be recognized, but it is true that I believe that there is a lot of weight and that it has to be made visible and started to work so that this does not happen,” adds Ruiz.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, in her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, provides surprising statistics showing that the majority of women are likely to apply a job or promotion only if they feel they meet 100% of the criteria, while men would probably apply with only 60% of those skills. This means that many women do not consider themselves sufficiently prepared for positions for which they are objectively prepared and their imposter syndrome prevents them from presenting themselves as candidates for better jobs, as they themselves are the ones who build that glass ceiling over their heads.
Sheryl, who has also participated in the famous TED talks talking about the subject, assured that “women systematically underestimate their ability: if you examine men and women and ask them something completely objective such as their average grades, the men are wrong. overestimating and women make mistakes by underestimating. Women do not negotiate for themselves at work, a study on people entering the labor market from university showed that 57% of the boys who entered negotiated their first salary and only 7% of the women. And most importantly, men attributed their success to themselves and women attributed it to external factors.”
“No one gets an important office by sitting on the side of the table and not at the negotiating table and no one gets a promotion if they don’t think they deserve success or if they don’t at least recognize their own success,” he says in the talk.
If the words of Facebook’s COO have shaken you or if you have identified with the description of the tiara and imposter syndromes, you may be suffering from one of them. Psychologist Laura Ruiz tells La Vanguardia some of the signs to pay attention to that can give us a clue to know if we have to do something to alleviate it.
The main thing is to “realize that we are not being explicit, that maybe we are working a lot but we don’t talk about it, we think that someone is going to notice, etc.” It is also perceived in the difficulty of openly explaining what what is being done, to ask for a salary increase or even to apply for a job offer”, symptoms that match perfectly with the data that Sheryl provides.
There are many repercussions that lead to suffering, both imposter syndrome and Tiara syndrome. “To begin with, difficulty in advancing, in getting promoted, in getting a specific job, in being recognized, in finding a space in companies. And in addition to at the work level, it also has effects on mental health; the frustration of not moving forward, the tiredness, the stress and everything that it means on a mental level to accumulate not being recognized, which also affects motivation,” explains Laura Ruiz.
It is necessary to stop waiting for someone to recognize your worth at some point because it rarely happens, hence the importance of giving visibility to the problem and beginning to change dynamics that put a damper on the wheels of women’s work lives.
According to the integrative psychologist consulted by La Vanguardia, “to start you have to realize that your work is important and that you give it value.” In addition, “there is another part of exposing yourself, of breaking through insecurity or shame, showing a more active attitude and if we want to do it, start with the small things like exposing our work with the risk that maybe they won’t like it or we may have done it.” done wrong… in short, break with that passivity,” he concludes.
