Dedications

Perhaps, like many industries, there are a combination of factors making it difficult for more women to
find their way to the top. I know my friends who are navigating their way through tenure in universities
often feel the system isn’t always set up to make it easy for female researchers to rise to the top. I’m
sure, just like many other male-dominated industries, there may be things we do as women – for
example, the stories we tell ourselves, the futures we choose to imagine, the challenge of balancing
work and home commitments – that make it hard for us to find sustainable paths to the top. One of the
fastest-growing areas of my business is teaching positive psychology skills to female leaders to help
them create the kind of careers and lives they want, not so they can have it all, but so they can find
ways to consistently flourish on their own terms.
I do think as a field we’re mindful of the need for more leading female researchers. I know Barb
Fredrickson and Jane Dutton, for example, do an incredible job of mentoring and supporting other
women. I also think there are some incredible female researchers emerging in the field and that this
bodes well for all of us.
Where would you like to see positive psychology in the long term, maybe in 15 years’ time?
This one might not be a very popular answer. I’d like to see us made redundant (laughs). I grew up riding
the internet wave, and in my public relations days, my job was describing to journalists what the World
Wide Web was and how anyone would ever make any money off it. Of course, a few years later
everything had become e-business and if you didn’t have an “e” in front of what you were offering then
you were being left behind. But now, if you went to an organisation and said, “I’ve got a great e-business
offering for you,” you’d be laughed out of the room because doing business online is just part of doing
business. I’d like to see positive psychology ride the same wave.
Over the last decade we’ve had to do a lot of explaining about what positive psychology is. Now the
ideas are becoming more mainstream, I find at most dinner parties someone wants to talk to me about
the latest research in human flourishing because it’s being used at their workplace or their kids are
being taught the ideas at school. I think in the coming years positive psychology will simply become part
of the way we think about human development, leadership, performance and psychology in general. It
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