Thick skin is overrated, and impostor syndrome isn’t always a bad thing. These are among my counterintuitive takeaways from conversations with some of the highest-earning women in America .
It’s practically gospel that you need a thick skin to succeed in business, especially if you belong to an underrepresented group. Ditto for the notion that self-doubt holds you back.
Yet women who make at least $775,000 a year are less likely than others to describe themselves as tough or thick-skinned. They are also less likely to view themselves as unique or even unusual, according to a study by Emily Riley , a digital marketing executive and a former research director and analyst for advisory firms.
She picked that income threshold because federal data puts the top 1% of annual earnings in the U.S. around that level. Her research indicates just one in 20 people who make this much is a woman.
Riley, who founded her own communications firm, Riley Strategic, is also in this group of top earners. This is partly why she pursued the research: She wanted to figure out what characterizes the few with the fattest paychecks. So, she surveyed 145 women in the 1%, along with 347 other women who are not in that stratosphere but still have six-figure incomes.
A lot of her findings were what you’d expect. The highest-earning women are uncommonly competitive. They negotiate salaries more often than most. A majority earned degrees from top-ranked universities, and they consider themselves lifelong learners.
Other discoveries were more surprising. Women in the top 1% of earners are more likely than others to be married and have multiple children. This runs counter to the idea that reaching the top at work comes at the expense of family life. It makes sense, though, when you consider that financial stress is sometimes a reason couples separate or stop having children.
Nearly a quarter of women in the 1% are first-generation Americans, and about one-fifth experienced times in their childhoods when the main breadwinners in their homes were unemployed. These are significantly higher than the rates among women earning lower six-figure salaries, suggesting instability at an early age can light a fire.
“The number-one reason that women get into the 1% is drive,” Riley says. “They just stick with it. That doesn’t mean they keep working on Wall Street until midnight every night, but they find a different way.”
Thinner skin, stronger motivation
Notably, stick-to-itiveness isn’t the same as thick skin. Nancy Marzouk felt she didn’t get the respect she deserved as a sales executive in previous jobs, and she didn’t shrug it off.
“I would go into board meetings, and I would feel destroyed afterward,” she says. “I remember coming home one day and my husband was, like, ‘I don’t understand. You’re a supersmart woman. Why is this getting to you?’ And I was, like, ‘It’s getting to me because I want to take my career further, but I don’t feel like I can.’”
This was 15 or so years ago, when Marzouk was in her late 30s and already earning about $800,000 a year.
Roughly 99% of us are thinking: I’d like to be disrespected to the tune of $800,000 a year.
But these 1-percenters are wired differently. They’re like elite athletes who use slights to fuel their pursuits of even greater achievements, instead of just brushing aside discouraging remarks.
Marzouk, now 52, climbed as high as chief revenue officer and could have just let frustrations roll off her back and into her bank account. But that would have eaten away at her, she says. She founded her own company, MediaWallah, and has run it for more than a decade.
Upside of impostor syndrome
It takes gumption to walk away from a lucrative job and grit to build a startup, but don’t mistake those qualities for self-assuredness.
“Even though I was very successful as an executive, I didn’t have confidence,” Marzouk says.
It is striking how few of the women in Riley’s survey believe they possess some kind of special talent. Only around a third of these top earners said they consider themselves unique or unusual.
This may be because feeling preternaturally gifted can lead to complacency. When you think you need to show over and over so that you belong at the top, you don’t let up.
“I definitely don’t think, nor did I ever think, ‘I am irreplaceable,’” says Lisa Davis , whose book, “The Only Woman in the Room,” chronicles her career as an executive at companies including Intel and Blue Shield of California. “For women, we’re proving our value many times because we’re looking to get that seat at the table. So taking that for granted and thinking, ‘I’m irreplaceable’? That never would enter my mind.”
A question I asked every 1-percenter, including some women who declined to be named in this column, is: At what age did you feel financially secure? Davis, 63, told me she didn’t have that sense until her 50s. The answers were consistently older than I expected for people with long records of hefty earnings.
It’s another example of pushing beyond a level of accomplishment where many of us would start to feel comfortable and satisfied.
This doesn’t mean it’s good to be perpetually insecure or take everything personally. Full-blown impostor syndrome can be crippling, and we miss opportunities to grow if we see every criticism as an affront.
But women who have cracked the top 1% of income show a patch of thin skin and a dose of self-doubt can be motivational assets.
Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com
