Attribution - Are the Wrong People Getting Credit?

I'm embarrassed to say, it happened to me again this week, and I froze.  A project I was the primary developer on about 5 years ago was being praised by my counterpart in another part of my organization for its innovativeness and usefulness.  The only problem is that this counterpart was praising someone else for the work - a male engineer.  I didn't correct the error.  Now, the person being praised indeed deserves a share of the credit - he contributed to the project in very important ways - but it was neither his idea nor primarily his product.  Later, I was promoted, and I'm now that male engineer's supervisor, so on one level I was quite happy to allow the praise to be assigned to my employee, but on another level, I regret that I allowed a male to gain credit for work done by a female.




I created this problem while I was working on the project.  When describing the work, I always said "we" - even when discussing the parts that I was solely responsible for.  And when my coworker described his contributions, he always said "I."  He never claimed credit for work that wasn't his, but one could reasonably come away from that conversation thinking that he deserved half the credit for the parts I described and all of the credit for the parts he described - in effect, that he did more work than I did.

This is a common phenomenon. Women sell themselves short on team projects. Why? Well, a quote from an article titled Why You Need to Brag More (And How to Do It) hits the nail on the head, "I felt like it would be sort of arrogant and boastful to speak up and say, hey, I did this."

I certainly should learn how to brag better, but I have reached a point in my career where I don't need the credit for that project. And yet, after leaving that conversation, I realized that it was not just about whether or not I got credit, but rather, whether women are getting an adequate share of the credit for work they do.

 
Not claiming credit helps fuel the myth in the industry that men are more productive than women. Or that women are on the whole less qualified than men. I'm not going to go back and correct this particular mistake, but I am going to be more mindful in the future, especially when the misattribution involves assigning credit for a woman's work to a man.