MAKING AN IMPACT
BBC World News anchor Katty Kay to keynote Chattanooga Women’s Leadership event
This year’s IMPACT event organized by the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Institute will feature keynote speaker and British journalist Katty Kay, who has written several books about the “confidence gap” between men and women.
Kay, lead anchor for BBC World News America, is the co-author of three New York Times bestsellers, including “The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance — What Women Should Know,” “The Confidence Code for Girls: Taking Risks, Messing Up and Becoming your Amazingly Imperfect, Totally Powerful Self” and “Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success.”
In a phone interview with the Times Free Press Wednesday, Kay discussed what she hopes women in Chattanooga will take away from her keynote on Feb. 21, at the Chattanooga Convention Center.
She said there seems to be a misnomer about what confidence really means.
“Confidence is not about swagger and bravado and being the person who speaks the loudest in the room,” she said. “Confidence is the stuff that turns [thoughts] into action.”
Kay said her research with Claire Shipman, the co-author of the three books and internationally recognized broadcast journalist, and dozens of scientists and neuroscientists have suggested that women have many valuable skills that can also be confidence “killers.”
“A big part of it is perfectionism, and women are more prone to perfectionism than men are,” she said. “That’s a real killer of confidence. Taking risks is what overcomes this.”
In their books, Kay and Shipman encourage women and girls to get out of their comfort zone, ask for that pay raise and speak up in that meeting or class. Initial research and anecdotes seem to show that there are regions in the world where some women show more confidence than others, according to Kay.
University of Illinois Chicago researcher and author William “Buddy” Scarborough introduced research on gender disparities in Chattanooga last year. When it comes to women in management positions, only 36 percent of women hold managerial roles in Chattanooga compared to 40 percent of women nationally. In Nashville, 43 percent hold management positions; Memphis, 40 percent; Birmingham, Alabama, 42 percent; and Atlanta, 40 percent.
“After reading Katty Kay’s books, I am convinced we can do more to match confidence with competence for women in Chattanooga,” said Gina Dhanani, Impact’s event chair. “She is going to help us better understand just how to do that here at home.”
CWLI has hosted many notable speakers at IMPACT in the last six years, including American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut Mae Jemison; journalists Mika Brzezinski and Connie Chung; Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Fleiss and more.
CWLI created the event after noticing the lack of females being recruited to Chattanooga to talk about leadership from the female perspective.
“We know that when women thrive, everyone thrives,” said Kim Shumpert, CWLI’s executive director. “It’s possible that our community is missing out on an important economic engine by not engaging a high quality female workforce to the fullest potential. By inviting Katty Kay, we want to open a conversation for our area that we intend to explore for the remainder of the year.”