Let’s start at the beginning. When you have a résumé that consists of proficient French and a familiarity with Excel, and a job that is mostly printing and collating, it can be hard to know how to make an impression. Yes, you have to show up on time, do your job, and do it well. Your boss doesn’t care that you have a fancy degree and see yourself as a strategist; she sees you as a one-person Kinko’s. Those first few years are challenging: you have to show rather than tell your boss that you’re capable of more than your job entails, but you never want to seem ungrateful for the opportunities you’re being offered. You want to make an impression but you know that meetings aren’t open-mic nights.
As times goes on, as deadlines are adhered to, assignments meet or exceed standards, and dozens of coffees are procured, you can feel yourself gaining some standing in the office. You’re no longer the new kid. In meetings, you sit at the main table instead of the chairs by the wall. You offer your insights and feedback. Once you have workplace accomplishments, you tout them.
If you are a woman, as you rise professionally, somewhere between the entry level and the middle, there is often a moment, or a series of moments, when you are made aware that something about the way you comport yourself is a problem. The actual word “problem” is rarely used, but when you cut through all the BS, that’s what it is. A problem.
Laura is in her mid-thirties and has worked in politics for all of her professional life.1 She is beloved by every team she has ever led. Interns cry at their end-of-the-summer going-away parties because she has become their de facto family. She’s got a big smile and she’s quick to laugh at others’ jokes. She always makes sure that her colleagues feel brought in and included in her decision-making process. She minimizes conflict, including negotiating the situation around the office leftovers thief. She is earnest and sincere, and because of that, no one ever worries that she has a secret agenda.
She’s also incredibly effective. She is consistently the most competent and highest-producing member of her team. To be honest, she basically runs the place; she just doesn’t have the title.
But as much as everyone appreciates Laura, no one really thinks of her as a number one. When her manager leaves, opening up a senior position that she could step into, she is told that while everyone loves her, she lacks . . . something. Results? No, she delivers. The hours? She puts them in. It’s just that she’s not enough . . . of something.
She doesn’t command enough respect. She doesn’t take up enough oxygen. She isn’t seen as authoritative. Part of this is about Laura’s self-presentation. She speaks as though she is simultaneously apologizing for speaking. Colleagues, even those who root for her—and who doesn’t?—admit that she talks a little too fast and her voice is a little too high. She is told to take credit, to speak up more in meetings, to literally take up more physical space.
Part of this perception of Laura is also a legitimate reflection of her priorities. Although she is very ambitious, strives to contribute and lead, and yearns to be recognized for her contributions, she believes the work matters more than anything else. Her ambition remains contained in a vision board in her studio apartment; it need not be a thing she talks about with others. In other words, she’d rather gouge her eyes out than have someone suggest that she’s acting like a show pony, but that means she perpetually gives the impression of being a workhorse.
Laura is told that she’s not tough enough, but how is toughness being measured? By who speaks the loudest and uses the most expletives? She may not be brash, but that is only one measure of strength. Laura has clawed her way from her working-class midwestern town to the highest levels of government. She worked through her father’s sudden death, never missing a beat. By some measures, Laura may be the toughest person you know. But she’s not seen as strong and commanding.
She doesn’t struggle with being likeable; she struggles with being perceived as a leader. This has real implications for Laura: she’s passed over for promotions; she watches jobs she wants go to people of equivalent age and experience; and she’s offered deputy-level jobs when her résumé proves that she has already performed at the director level. She even receives job offers that would require her to work under someone she has previously managed.
Laura has been taught to work hard, to keep her head down, and to be kind to others. That is who she is and it has gotten her pretty far. But in her mid-thirties, ready to make the jump to the next level, she is suddenly realizing that her likeability is not enough to hurdle over the perception that she “doesn’t have it.”
She’s not alone. I spoke with many women who have been told that, in some way, they weren’t enough. They didn’t have “executive presence,” or there was a perception that they were “not tough enough.”
Could the Lauras of the world change in response to the feedback they’re offered? Sure. Women who naturally meet the expectation that they be communal and team-focused can learn to be more direct and more assertive. The Lauras know that and they’ve generally made some stylistic adjustments. They talk slower. They ask more directly. They stop apologizing. In a best-case scenario, that improves their output and their results, empowers them, and makes them better leaders.
What I heard more frequently is that the focus on their style and their subsequent efforts to change only got them so far. Even when they became more assertive, they were still told it wasn’t enough. Even worse, the effort to change and the performance of a certain style of leadership often left them turned around and discombobulated.
And then there are women on the opposite end of the spectrum, women like Michelle. An East Coast native, athletic, with a wry sense of humor, Michelle is also in her mid-thirties.
Ever since Michelle was a little girl, she has never been afraid to speak her mind or ask for what she wants. As a kid, it was a hoard of My Little Ponies. They are still in her mom’s basement. As a teen, it was a later curfew (no dice). As an adult, working in consulting, she now asks for higher-ticket items: spots on the most important teams, the most challenging and prestigious assignments, promotions, and raises. She is never afraid to ask and ask directly.
In meetings, she always contributes. She leads with her answer and is prepared to explain how she arrived at it. When she disagrees with her colleagues’ assessments about project timelines and budgets, she stands her ground. When the people who report to her do an assignment incorrectly she respectfully but pointedly tells them to do it again. She is fair, but she doesn’t sugarcoat things. That feels like a waste of time, especially in an industry where speed matters. Michelle makes hard choices: she has managed out and fired low performers, and she has parted ways with clients who weren’t a fit. She knows how to take charge.
Michelle is doing all of the things that are supposedly required of a leader: she asserts herself, she offers direct feedback, and she has clarity of vision. She’s also wildly ambitious and transparent about that ambition. She has been clear since the day she was hired that she wants to have impact and influence. She wants to learn from those around her and take on challenging assignments so that one day she will be equipped to call the shots. And why shouldn’t she be vocal about her ambition? She puts in the work, she cares about her company and her colleagues, and she has all the skills necessary to be in charge.
And yet, when Michelle is at the very top of the middle management chain, with senior management just out of grasp, she is told in her annual assessment that she’s a little . . . too much. Her results are great, it’s all there on paper, but the way she communicates with others rubs people the wrong way. She gets the sense that her manager would use the word “bitch” if it wouldn’t be an HR violation. Instead, her manager dances around the word by using a lot of descriptors that sound like it: Too aggressive. Too direct. Too comfortable with confrontation.
Michelle walks out of the meeting dejected. At beers later with her colleague and friend Tom, they’ll compare notes on their evaluations. Tom’s went well. In fact, he was lauded for the very things that Michelle was told to minimize—his aggressiveness, his assertiveness. For Tom, all of those things are seen as big assets.
Sound familiar? You are too much—too aggressive, too assertive, so commanding that you ruffle feathers. You are told that you are difficult. Even worse, it is a thing people say about you but not to you. And this smarts more because you look around and see some of your male peers being celebrated for the very thing you’re being penalized for.
Can the Michelles learn to change? Yep. They can learn to thread the needle between aggressive and sweet, smiling as they disagree in a meeting, framing their successes in the context of the team, and asking for a raise ever so gently. If they learn to do it convincingly, they might improve their efficacy and their position within the office. But so often, their natural way—to be assertive—is what is necessary to deliver results. If others around them are able to apply those qualities without fear of penalty, how can the Michelles ever compete? Can they round off all of their edges and still maintain their competitive edge?
Every woman is not exactly a Laura or exactly a Michelle, but they represent the two types of leadership assessments that women get most often. They are either, like Laura, told they are not enough or, like Michelle, told they are too much. Plenty of women, myself included, have (confusingly) been given both sets of feedback. They have—in different contexts and by different people—been told they are either too passive or too aggressive, which underlines just how context-driven and circumstance-specific this feedback is.
And listen, I get it: not everyone is destined to be a number one. But if the path to leadership is hemmed in on both sides of the spectrum, then even the women who are destined to be number ones may never be able to squeeze themselves through the narrow opening that remains. If most women are too much or not enough, who then is just right?
In 1982, Ann Hopkins, a management consultant at Price Waterhouse, one of the biggest global accounting firms in the United States, was nominated for partnership. Ann should have been an obvious choice: she had brought the firm more new business than any of the other eighty-seven candidates who were up for partner, all of them men.
But early the following year, the firm informed Ann that she would not be promoted. Instead, partners placed a “hold” on her candidacy. The problem wasn’t her work, they told her; the problem was her. She was told that she had “consistently irritated senior partners of the firm.” In their reviews, they described Ann as “overly aggressive, unduly harsh, difficult to work with, and impatient with staff” and argued that she needed to attend “charm school.” Ouch.
Then, when Ann asked a partner how to best reposition herself so that she might be considered for partner again, his recommendation was, “Walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear makeup, have your hair styled, and wear jewelry.” (Perhaps it should tell us something that Tootsie, the film starring Dustin Hoffman as a desperate actor who resorts to dressing in drag to revive his career, came out the year Ann Hopkins received this advice.)
Ann could have opted for the full makeover inside and out. Imagine it: rolling curlers through her hair, wobbling around in unfamiliar kitten heels, and applying just the right shade of lipstick. Sashaying through the halls of the firm (as a woman does!), smiling until her cheek muscles twitched, learning to bite her tongue when others offered ideas that were clearly ineffective or wrong, and making requests rather than giving orders.
Or she could have said “screw you and screw this” and left the firm. But Ann wanted to make partner, so she stayed.
A few months later, the firm informed her that she would not be renominated. Ann left, and sued her employer for discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids employment discrimination based on a person’s sex. And in doing so, she transformed the parameters of workplace sex discrimination.
The legal fight was arduous; it took seven years. “My kids keep asking how many times we have to win this before it’s over,”2 Ann told the press near the end of the journey. The case even reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Court decided that Price Waterhouse had based its decision not to offer Ann partnership in part on sexual stereotyping. Price Waterhouse could not prove that—beyond the critiques of her manner and her style—it would have otherwise denied Ann partnership. Justice William Brennan, in his opinion wrote, “[I]n the . . . context of sex stereotyping, an employer who acts on the basis of a belief that a woman cannot be aggressive, or that she must not be, has acted on the basis of gender.” Brennan also noted the impossible double bind these gendered standards put on women. “An employer who objects to aggressiveness in women but whose positions require this trait places women in an intolerable and impermissible Catch-22,” he wrote. “Out of a job if they behave aggressively and out of a job if they don’t.”
Three decades later, many of us will read Ann Hopkins’s story and recognize the emotional roller coaster of operating in a way that produces the desired results, only to be told that your way of operating is what is holding you back from getting ahead. While the type of overt sexism and discrimination that Hopkins contended with is now legally recognized as discrimination, it hasn’t gone away. Instead it’s been largely replaced by a much more subtle, “second generation” form of the same. Today’s professional woman probably won’t be told to go to charm school; she’ll be told to tone it down. She won’t be called “sweet cheeks”; she’ll be regularly interrupted by colleagues. She won’t be told to wear heels; she’ll be tasked with office errands that have nothing to do with her actual job.
The bias is more subtle, and while that might seem like progress, it is anything but. In many cases, covert discrimination at work is as bad, if not worse, than overt discrimination.3 If your boss tells you that you aren’t being considered for a more senior role because they don’t believe that women have what it takes to lead, you won’t need to wonder why you didn’t get the promotion. You would know you didn’t get the job because you are a woman. (You’d also march yourself over to HR, or to the nearest workplace discrimination attorney.) But if your boss tells you you’re not ready, or you’re not enough, or too much, you are left to wonder whether there is merit to their thinking. Are your boss’s concerns legitimate? Or are you being denied a promotion because he is biased against you?
There’s another element of Ann Hopkins’s story to which most can relate: the way she is described by her friends is completely different from the assessment of the partners who critiqued her. Hopkins’s coworkers turned friends called her “kind” and “gracious.”4 With intimacy, they were able to see her in her complexity. The gruff exterior masked a gentler, softer side. But that essence of who she was, the essence of who we each are, is wrapped up in cultural markers that inform what we expect and from whom.
To the world, and certainly to those firm partners, Ann Hopkins was a cisgender, straight, able-bodied white woman who was a professional, a wife and a mother. With each of those markers come cultural expectations and, often, unconscious bias. When any one of us violates those expectations, when we disrupt what other people thought they could expect, supposed order in a disorderly world, people tend to feel some kind of way about it.
Unconscious bias is the qualities an individual attributes to a member of a certain social group. What makes unconscious bias so tricky, as the name might suggest, is that it develops outside of our own conscious awareness. In many cases, it even runs counter to one’s own personal values. Read: you can purport to be “super woke” and work to behave without prejudice . . . and still think mothers belong at home.5
Analysis by Catalyst, a nonprofit that helps build workplaces that work for women, found that 88 percent “of white people had a pro-white or anti-black implicit bias” and 83 percent “of heterosexuals showed implicit bias in favor of straight people over gays and lesbians.”6 Certainly not all of those people would admit to having that bias! And those biases don’t just exist in the abstract; they affect behavior ranging from split decisions to long-term plans like whom you hire or who leads the country.
Finally, in addition to being potentially unconscious and subtle, there is the basic truth, backed up by sociological research, that people favor people who are like them. It’s called “in-group” bias. We prefer other members of the groups with which we identify. This presents a major opportunity for those who identify with the same groups of people who are already in power, and it presents a challenge for everyone who does not.
Researchers Amy Cuddy, Susan Fiske, and Peter Glick have pinpointed two qualities that form the basis of our judgments of others: warmth and strength.7
When we evaluate someone’s warmth, we’re determining their motives. Do they want to help me or harm me? When we evaluate an individual’s strength, we’re assessing their will to follow through. Does this person have the capacity to bring their idea—whether it’s starting a company or punching a hole through a wall—to fruition?
Warmth and strength go hand in hand: warmth tells us about someone’s intentions, and strength indicates whether that person is capable of carrying out those plans.
These judgments of an individual, in turn, influence people’s emotions and behaviors toward the individual. A person who is warm but is perceived to lack strength is liked by many, but isn’t always taken seriously. These are the Lauras of the world. On the other side of the spectrum is a person who is strong, but is perceived as lacking warmth. These are the Michelles. They are regarded as a threat, evoking envy and fear.
Strength and warmth tend to function like a seesaw: as one quality goes up, the other quality goes down. The trick, theoretically, is to balance out somewhere in the middle. But much like an actual seesaw, hitting that midair mark is harder than it sounds.
Leaders require a combination of these two qualities: warmth, so we trust them, and strength, so we believe that they can take action.
With our friends and romantic partners, we tend to prioritize warmth. We’re drawn to people who make us feel like they have our best interests at heart. But in a workplace, a premium is more often placed on strength. For this reason, judgments about an individual’s strength can impact hiring, evaluations, and negotiations, and influence who gets to do fancy Don Draper–style presentations and who gets tasked with bringing in cupcakes for everyone’s birthday.
If we were each being assessed as individuals that would be complex enough. But these judgments are often informed by our membership in a number of social groups. Older people, housewives, and the disabled are all stereotyped as being warm but weak or incompetent.8 This, in turn, makes people feel pity for those groups and to disrespect them. On the other end of the spectrum, “model minorities,” the wealthy, and professional women are stereotyped as strong but cold. In certain contexts, they elicit envy and dislike.
For women, putting aside our many other cultural markers (we’ll get to those in a minute), there is an assumption of warmth. If warmth is a major determinant of likeability, then women might even have a natural advantage. But what about at work, where strength reigns supreme? Just dial it up, right? The challenge is that as women express strength, they are perceived as losing warmth. In proving their competence, they become less likeable.
The critique doesn’t need to be explicit to have an impact on others’ perceptions of what you have and what you lack. Research shows that even when others say entirely positive things about a woman, what they choose to omit creates impressions of what she is and is not. It’s called the “innuendo effect.”
Let’s say you list a former colleague as a reference. When she receives your reference call, she describes you as “So nice. Really easy to collaborate with. Everyone loves her.” Those are all positive, lovely things. Yay, you! But if your colleague emphasizes your warmth to the exclusion of your ability to assert yourself, then that potential employer might infer from the omission that you aren’t particularly strong. If you were, the thinking goes, someone would have mentioned it. Conversely, if that coworker describes you as “focused, diligent, and hardworking,” it can lead to the impression that you aren’t particularly warm. If you were, wouldn’t the person describing you say that?9
And as we all know, those judgments can also be expressed in very explicit terms. A woman who is “too strong”—is pushy, bossy, a handful, and, most commonly, a bitch. These words get used so frequently that it is easy to become numb to them, but these words matter. As Greta, an academic told me, “If you get called a slut your first week of college, you’re marked for the next four years. Bitch is the same. Once you’ve been labeled, it’s hard to shake it.”
Once people perceive you to be lacking in warmth, it’s hard to come back from that. Let’s say you’re pleasant. You smile. You take your team out for lunch once a quarter. But one time you do something to make people question your warmth. You’re short with someone. You deliver critical feedback. Even if you are in the right, and even if you try to reconcile by bringing in donuts the next day, it’s hard to reestablish your warmth. Strength, on the other hand, can usually be restored. Messed up a project? Missed a deadline? Came up short on your target numbers? A new client, a new win, or setting a new record can reestablish your competence after a fumble.10
Here’s the big, underlying challenge: what is expected of women (warmth and communality) is perceived to be the opposite of what is required of a leader (ambition and self-reliance). So when a woman acts the way society expects a woman to act, she is told she is not leaderly enough. When a woman acts the way society expects a leader to act, she is told she is not feminine enough. She cannot win.
Because a woman is expected to be warm and sensitive, and not to be assertive and direct, then when she is assertive and direct two things happen. First, she pays a price for being the thing she wasn’t supposed to be. She is derided for being too aggressive. In turn, she becomes less likeable. The next part is even trickier. Because she is a thing she wasn’t supposed to be, aggressive, others also assume that she’s not the thing she is supposed to be, warm. If she is assertive and direct, she can’t possibly be warm and sensitive as well.11
What I want you to understand is that the issue of whether or not other people like you at work, and whether or not other people see you as a leader, often has little to do with the essence of who you are or the leadership potential you possess. Even the most affable woman will run up against likeability challenges if she is also ambitious and willing to do what is necessary to succeed. Even the most capable woman will have her leadership capabilities questioned if her warmth overshadows her strength.
Whether you are a Laura or a Michelle, and you are encouraged to change, resistance comes with its own penalty. If you refuse to comport to either set of expectations—if you don’t step into the role of a leader as defined by someone else, if you don’t agree to try to become more or less—you run the risk of being punished for being difficult, or dismissed as a lost cause. People will stop talking about your work and instead talk exclusively about you. It will become your own fault that you don’t succeed because you refuse to play the game.
Plenty of women know this, and they go along with a lot of BS to avoid being dubbed difficult.
Tracy Chou, a software engineer and advocate for diversity in tech, found herself working alongside someone who, years prior, she had interviewed and decided not to hire. Her now coworker was still upset about it, so much so that it was affecting their working relationship. Managers suggested that Tracy and her coworker go through a mediation.
“It really felt like I had no choice because if I didn’t agree to a mediation then I would be admitting that I was difficult to work with,” Tracy tells me. She was trapped.
The mediation included a number of exercises intended to allow both Tracy and her coworker to “let go” of the past events and to begin anew. At one point, the woman leading the mediation threw her arm around Tracy’s shoulders and told her, “We women, because we birth children, are physiologically more inclined to hold strong feelings towards other people, including grudges. So, we’ve just got to let that go!” Tracy managed not to laugh or cry or fall out of her chair (but you can feel free to do it on her behalf!).
“I can’t say anything in response to this,” Tracy recalls thinking. “If I respond negatively, then it’s proof that I’m a difficult person to work with. So I just have to grin and bear this.”
Knowing that the field is uneven, how you choose to play the game is up to you. Sometimes marginal edits in style can make us more persuasive, dynamic leaders. Other times that stylistic feedback, taken too far, robs us of the very qualities that make us uniquely situated to lead.
I have been on the receiving end of stylistic feedback more times than I care to count. Some of that feedback, such as cheerfully reframing complaints as positive requests, has made me a better employee (and a better human). But much of it has served as a way of diverting attention from the actual problem at hand. (“Yes, there is no budget for the project we are asking you to complete, but have you thought about the tone with which you’re bringing this problem to our attention?”)
I have also been guilty of trying to help women I manage by encouraging them in the direction of both being more and being less. I really thought I was arming them with skills that would allow them to be seen as leaders in others’ eyes. My intentions were good; my results were not.
In one case, my feedback was a cosmetic fix for a misfit; a skilled person in the wrong role. I wanted her to bring more creativity to her assignments, and to inspire the same in her team. What I really needed to say, “We have to reconcile our different visions of success and conflicting beliefs about what is possible within the parameters of our work environment,” felt too direct. (My assumption that she couldn’t handle that feedback is a form of bias we’ll get to in a bit.) Instead of focusing on outcomes, I focused on her style. I coached her to give her team more encouraging feedback. I pushed her to speak up more in high-level meetings. But even when she attempted to do those things, we were ignoring the fundamental problem: our mismatched expectations.
In another instance, I had an entry-level employee who went above and beyond to get the job done, but was frustrated that her responsibilities were disproportionate to her decision-making power. That dissatisfaction bubbled over into tense exchanges and avoidable mistakes. I offered what I thought I could at the time: ways to be less intense in her communication around her frustrations. But that served no one; the frustrations were still there.
When have you been on the receiving end of this bias, and when have you, consciously or unconsciously, directed it at others? And how do these questions become more complicated, in the counsel we give and the counsel we receive, when they are overlaid with other elements of our identity?