Confidence Culture

For Hollis, these long hours are temporary, self-chosen, goal-oriented, and have a tangible result. For the vast majority of other women caught up in long-hours cultures at work, overwork and its attendant exhaustion are simply a routine feature of their lives—and there is not a best-selling book at the end of it to help sweeten the pill.

Confidence is offered as a one-size-fits-all solution, disavowing significant differences between and among women and contexts. The problem of low self-esteem is described in strikingly similar terms whether referring to a woman with a body designated as plus-size, a senior professional woman in the corporate workplace, an unemployed single mother,

which have historically propelled feminism. The appeal of the changes that women are encouraged to make in transforming themselves into confident subjects is that they are (supposedly) small, quick, easy, and, crucially, not disruptive.

Instead of questioning the neoliberal order that created the struggle and pain borne by its subjects—having to work seventeen hours a day, being in precarious employment, being constantly sleep deprived, et cetera—this mode of apprehending and being in the world encourages acceptance of the existing order as the only possible order, or the best of

While we concur with this emphasis on neoliberalism’s operation across social life—what Wendy Brown calls its “stealth revolution” across the entire demos—we depart from accounts that regard the self called forth by neoliberalism as purely rational and calculating.53 To this we want to add an understanding of its dynamics at an affective or emotion

Our critique, then, proposes not to “take down” confidence as an idea or ideal but rather to look at what the confidence cult does: how it operates performatively, what it brings into being and renders visible, and what it obscures or makes unintelligible.

There appears to be a curious turn from the “self-made woman” of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the millennial Wonder Woman (Amy Cuddy), who was encouraged to airbrush her insecurities and reframe them as confidence and resilience, to celebrating a female subject who foregrounds her pain and vulnerability as a vital asset for success at work.

Body confidence—or lack of it—has emerged also as a central public health concern in the last two decades, increasingly shown to be connected to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and poor physical and mental health more broadly.

as Brown puts it, embracing vulnerability is about being seen. In other words, it is a performance. However, rather than demonstrating uninhibited vulnerability, good employees and leaders need to embrace a strategic and controlled performance of vulnerability.