Confidence Culture

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.

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.

Perhaps most significantly, confidence programs for women are frequently framed as feminist interventions, positioned as a way of overcoming inequality.

Consumer culture has always been intimately involved with the disciplining of women’s bodies—whether fashion or advertising or magazines exhorting women to shape up, work out, and do better in everything from appearance to parenting to sexual techniques.

The premise underpinning this ideal is that women suffer from an internal “defect,” namely a “confidence gap,” which holds them back in the world of work. Fixing this (supposed) internal barrier in women is constructed as key to their self-transformation and empowerment and to tackling gender inequality in the workplace more broadly.

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.

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.

Whatever the problems or injustices faced by women or girls, the implied “diagnosis” offered is often the same: she lacks confidence, to which the proffered solution is to promote female self-confidence.

Hyperbolic claims about how “bold,” “brave,” “different,” and “radical” current advertising campaigns or fashion spreads are provide evidence of how tightly normative beauty standards are policed, so that even a minute departure or deviation attracts the label “fierce” or “badass,” such as the commentary on the “no-makeup selfie,” which depicts it