Please note, due to unforeseen circumstances this event has now moved from Wednesday 1st March to Wednesday 8th March.
The Bayes Global Women’s Leadership Programme is pleased to welcome Professor Shani Orgad (LSE) and Professor Rosalind
Gill (City) to discuss their best-selling book Confidence Culture (Duke, 2022). The event will be moderated by GWLP MBA Scholar Clarice Metzger.
The book argues that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks hold women back rather than entrenched social injustices. Calls on women to embrace confidence may (temporarily) help women feel good (“you go girl!”) but end up blaming women for inequality whose roots are in systemic and structural arrangements.
Confidence culture, they argue, has become the new common-sense - taken for granted in workplaces, the welfare system, and even international development initiatives. So much so that whenever the issue of gender inequality is discussed, the idea that it is caused by women’s confidence deficit is never far behind; trailing a stream of confidence-boosting workshops and leadership programmes that fail to address institutional sexism, racism, or disablism, let alone the crises in care or cost of living.
The book has been discussed in the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, El Pais, and Die Zeit among many other media. In this talk, Shani and Rosalind present their critique of the confidence cult, and argue for a feminism that goes beyond its individualising and neoliberal terms.
Photo Credit: Suzie Howell
More about the authors
Rosalind Gill
Rosalind Gill is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries, and Co-Director Gender and Sexualities Research Centre, at City, University of London.
Her research interests are cultural and creative labour, gender and media, media and intimate life, the dynamics of discrimination and inequality and discursive, visual and psychosocial methods.
She studied Sociology and Psychology at Exeter University, and completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991. With an interdisciplinary background, she has worked across a number of disciplines including Sociology, Gender Studies and Media and Communications. Her career has included posts at Goldsmiths and King's College London, and she worked for ten years in the LSE's interdisciplinary Gender Institute. She joined City, University of London in October 2013.
Shani Orgad
Shani Orgad is Professor of Media and Communications at LSE.
Professor Orgad’s research interests include gender, feminism, and media representations, inequality and contemporary culture, representations of suffering and migration, new media, narrative and media, media and everyday life, media and globalisation, and ethnographic research methods.
Professor Orgad gained a bachelor’s degree in Media and Communications with Sociology and Anthropology from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, following which she obtained a Master's and PhD in Media and Communications at LSE.
Professor Orgad has won numerous teaching awards including a 2019 LSE Teaching Excellence Prize, a 2018 LSE Excellence in Education Award, as well as the LSE Innovator Award.
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