The UW Student Leadership Program hosted a “Keys to Confidence” conference Monday night at Grainger Hall to address how confidence and leadership affect women’s lives and careers.

“Our mission is really a lot of personal development incorporated with activism all going toward leadership,” said Marissa Lucchesi, chair of the Leadership and Social Justice Committee, the program branch hosting the conference.

“This itself is a form of activism,” Lucchesi said. “We’re educating people, we’re getting people to challenge themselves, we’re showing people that there are discrepancies in the world.”

“Confidence building is a process like leadership building is,” said Paula Tran, a UW-Madison senior and event coordinator. “We don’t become leaders, we don’t become confident overnight.”

Dean of Students Lori Berquam used interactive exercises to engage students in confidence building activities. After the activities, event coordinators had students fill out a “Leadership Practices Inventory.”

“The authors of the Leadership Practices Inventory did a lot of research and found that there are five practices that are most common for leaders, and those are that the leaders challenge, inspire, enable, model and encourage,” Tran said.

Professor Georgia Duerst-Lahti of Beloit College spoke about gender expectations and the effects those roles and tendencies have on women’s opportunities for leadership positions and some ways women can be successful despite these obstacles.

“Men and women, on average, start out college with the same level of confidence, but, by the time they are done, women’s confidence comes in much lower than men’s,” she said.

According to Duerst-Lahti, part of the problem is the perception of women in the work force. She said the lack of women in top positions and number of women who leave the career track to pursue the “mommy track” have resulted in a lack of leadership role models for women and the perpetuation of the notion that to be successful, one has to work long hours and cannot have time for family relationships.

Duerst-Lahti gave steps women can take to become successful in the work force, including making themselves stand out within their field, “developing a thick skin” and taking responsibility for personal development.