FEAR OF SUCCESS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

When Ms. Freedberg interviewed me about the fear of success findings at Harvard and Radcliffe, she made it clear (1) that she did not fear success and therefore there must be something wrong with the findings, and (2) that the findings could be interpreted as being damaging to women and therefore should not have been released for publication. I'm afraid these opinions rather garbled the account of what the survey findings were and what I think they mean.

The "fear of Success" measure is not "loose" and "inexact." It was very carefully derived by comparing the thoughts of women who back off from competition with men as compared with the thoughts of those who do not. People who score high in these thoughts--whether men or women--seem to be afraid of asserting themselves or winning in competition for fear of the negative consequences that may follow from winning. In fact research has shown that women who fear success in this sense do not follow careers even though they may have ample opportunity to do so--such as a PhD. and no husband or children to hinder them. Many women in our society have learned that being smarter than a man, outwitting or challenging him is not appreciated by large numbers of the male sex. Many men are simply not interested in women who are smarter, cleverer, more assertive than they are. So many women have learned to back off from competition with men so as not to appear smarter: they fear success--being smarter than men--because it means the threat of rejection.

As freshmen, Radcliffe women are not particularly high in the fear of success, but they score significantly higher as seniors. Apparently something happens here that makes them less self-confident than when they came in. The same trend does not occur at other schools where women decrease in fear of success from freshman to senior year. So there is something wrong about the climate at Harvard and Radcliffe.

This is why I thought the findings should be made public--to raise questions in everyone's mind about what aspects of this environment are increasing the fear of success in women, while at the same time decreasing it slightly in men at Harvard. I suggested to the Crimson reporters that many factors may be responsible: Harvard has administratively been a male college for a long time where financial and other awards have gone primarily to men. This is in the process of being changed. But male faculty and male students, also often unconsciously, perpetuate the notion that women either shouldn't or can't compete successfully. A rather subtle form this prejudice takes is the loud insistence by undergraduate men that women must be evenly distributed among the Houses. The message gets through rather clearly to many women that they are being valued on the basis of their beauty and their bodies rather than their brains, since it is hardly likely that the men want them so much because they are smarter. So there is a lot of pressure at Radcliffe as there is elsewhere in America for women to accept themselves as being valued in other ways than by being competitive, assertive and smarter than men.

That's what I think the findings mean. It is the responsibility of all of us to take steps to change the climate that makes Radcliffe women more likely on the average to back off from assertiveness as seniors than as freshmen. David C. McClelland   Professor of Psychology