Ballsy. Have you ever considered that word?
I was called it, the other day, by someone who was asking me about the decision to start my own business in lockdown. Ballsy. A word deriving from the idea that to do something brave, one requires balls.
When someone is the opposite of confident, we might even suggest they grow some balls. It’s all tongue in cheek, of course. No harm meant, though the inference is clear. Confidence is a male trait.
Want more proof? I googled alternatives when I started writing this piece. The first thing that came up? Cocky. Balls to that, frankly.
“The problem isn’t that women aren’t confident but that confidence in women is not rewarded in the world,” UPFRONT’s Lauren Currie tells me. The founder of a movement that aims to change what confidence looks like today, Currie is on a mission to help one million women with confidence, visibility and power by 2023. Why? “Because there is a consistent pattern of feeling less than. It is something folks who grow up as women are taught from birth. And it’s something you can unlearn…”
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