December 3, 2024
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September 4, 2024
By Jennifer Prosek
Observations from Managing Partner Jen Prosek in the Leading in Volatile Times Newsletter.
I recently did a podcast where I told the story of my career, including my decision to go to Columbia Business School. I was a young 20-something running a small PR agency and wanted to deepen my understanding of finance and business. But that was just part of it. What I really wanted was to acquire a credential that would convince my mostly male clients and prospects to take me seriously. I’m glad to report it worked (thank you CBS!).
Business school was a steep learning curve for me. I was an English literature major, and the first three weeks of school were called “math camp.”
Math camp was intended to get everyone up to a similar level of competence so we could all hack the math we would need for statistics, financial modeling, accounting, and the like. You could imagine how stressed out I was trying to catch up with my peers, who were largely engineers, analysts, accountants, and investment bankers.
On the podcast, I told the story of being in the women’s bathroom at the start of math camp and telling a classmate how stressed I was. I told her I had high anxiety, and that I thought it was so hard.
I suppose I was looking for some empathy or friendship. What I got was precisely the opposite. She literally flipped her hair, said “This is so easy,” and left the bathroom. It was full-on Regina George. I was mortified and felt very small.
Oddly enough, she later became one of my best friends. But I still refer to that incident as “the encounter with the math mean girl who became my friend.”
My interactions with women in business are so very different now. Some say that women in my generation did not support one another when we were starting out. I’m not sure if that was true, but I can say that the women I interact with now are extremely supportive to me and to one another.
Some of that comes from success – once you’ve gotten to a certain point in your career, you see that business isn’t a zero-sum game. But I think it’s more than just that. Since the rise of the #Time’sUp and #MeToo movements, there’s been an unwritten rule among women to help one another out, support one another, and recognize the difficulties we’ve had making our careers along the way.
I regularly convene female CEOs and founders, and it is one of the most gratifying things I do. I’m often surprised at how many successful women don’t have deep connections with their female peers and long for it. When given the opportunity, these women enthusiastically come together. Over the past few years, we have developed a support system that has grown beyond my expectations.
I work primarily in the financial services and tech industries, so there are some supreme “math mean girls” among my client base. Yet, over the past decade, they’ve been nothing but supportive, kind, and fun-loving.
I’m so happy for my 16-year-old daughter that women no longer compete so harshly with one another. I hope that in her generation this won’t even be a subject for discussion.
Follow Jen’s Leading in Volatile Times Newsletter on LinkedIn.
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