Workplace Gender Differences

🗣️“You must be more assertive.” Last year, those five words burned into Amy’s memory. She’d walked out of her 2023 review at XYZ Global determined to “step up.” Speak more in meetings. Push harder on decisions. Stop softening her tone so she wouldn’t intimidate anyone. She did exactly that. Fast forward 12 months. Same conference room. Same 2 VPs across the table. 🔇“You’ve become too intense, need to work on softening your approach.” 😑 Amy stared at them, speechless. Wasn’t that what you asked for last year? Which version of me do you actually want? She thought about the past year: 🤔 The time she challenged a flawed budget forecast in front of the CFO, saving the company $3 million, but earning whispers that she was “abrasive.” 🤔 The time she stepped in to rescue a failing project, praised for her “grit” publicly, yet privately told she “dominated the room.” 🤔 The time she finally got invited to an executive offsite, only to overhear a VP say, “She’s great, but can be… a lot.” This is the tightrope trap senior women walk daily: • Be assertive, but not too assertive. • Be collaborative, but don’t fade into the background. • Be visible, but not “hungry.”    The same behavior praised in men (decisive, strong leader) gets women penalized as abrasive or too much. Until you set the narrative yourself, you’re trapped performing for a moving target. If you’re exhausted from balancing on a wire men don’t even see, here’s how to step off it and still rise. 1. Audit the pattern, not just the feedback • Track every piece of feedback, especially contradiction. Patterns reveal bias. If the goal keeps moving, it's not you! • Phrase to use in review: “Last year I was encouraged to increase my presence; this year I’m told to soften it. Can we clarify what success really looks like?”    2. Control the frame before the room does • Pre‑set the narrative in 1:1s and emails leading up to reviews. I.e., “This year I focused on driving results while bringing the team with me, you’ll see that reflected in project X and Y.” • This primes leadership to view your assertiveness as an intentional strategy, not a personality flaw.    3. Build echo chambers, not just results • Secure 2–3 allies who reinforce your strengths in rooms you’re not in. • Promotions happen in the absence, you need people echoing your narrative, not someone else’s. • Phrase to brief an ally: “If my leadership style comes up in review, can you speak to how I challenge decisions but still align the team?”    Women aren’t just asked to deliver results. They’re asked to perform, decode, and reframe, all while walking a wire men don’t even see. If you’re exhausted from balancing between “too soft” and “too aggressive,” stop walking the wire and start controlling the narrative. Join the waitlist of our next cohort of ⭐ From Hidden Talent to Visible Leaders ⭐ https://lnkd.in/gx7CpGGR 👊 Because leadership shouldn’t feel like an impossible balancing act.

If you’re a senior woman on your way to meetings you’ve over‑prepared for and under‑paid to attend, these are the 8 limiting beliefs that put you there. In the last 18 months, I’ve worked directly with over 100 senior women. Their careers cracked along the same 8 sentences they’d been repeating for years. That’s what a careerquake is for me now: when the stories that once kept you safe start quietly keeping you stuck. Here are the 8 I hear most often: 1. “My work should speak for itself.” I deliver, they’ll notice, they’ll reward me. Except the room is busy and someone else is narrating the story.     2. “I’m not ready / I need to prove myself more first.” Everyone else is already acting at the next level. You’re still waiting to earn the right to ask.     3. “Deep expertise comes before leadership.” If I haven’t spent 15 years in this niche, I can’t shape strategy or challenge the room. So you stay smaller than your actual range.     4. “I don’t want to come across as arrogant or self‑promotional.” You dilute your impact, remove “I” from your stories, and talk about “the team” until no one can see what you actually did.     5. “Visibility is dangerous.” If I post, speak up, or share a point of view, I might be judged, wrong, or exposed. So you stay silent and let other people define the narrative.     6. “The system is against me, so there’s not much I can do.” The bias and politics are real. The belief that you have zero leverage inside them quietly becomes another cage.     7. “Sponsorship will happen when the right person notices me.” You wait to be chosen, mentored, tapped on the shoulder, instead of treating sponsorship as a relationship you can deliberately build.     8. “I have to absorb the dysfunction around me to be a good leader.” “I have to absorb the dysfunction around me to be a good leader.”    I’m not talking about the ‘everything happens to me’ victim story. I mean the women who see the chaos clearly, understand everyone’s side, and still feel compelled to hold it all together on their own nervous system because that’s what a ‘good’ leader does. You carry broken processes, absent bosses, unclear feedback, and everyone else’s emotions on your own nervous system and call it responsibility. If even one of these sentences feels uncomfortably familiar, you’re not behind. You’re at the exact point where your old operating system is due for an upgrade. If you’ve walked through your own careerquake and out the other side, which sentence did you have to retire before things started to move?

Have you ever been told you are too quiet? Maybe you don’t speak up enough so, “people worry about your leadership skills.” Or, you don’t advocate enough for yourself so, “you aren’t taking control of your career like a natural born leader.” If so, this article is for you. Maybe you’ve received feedback that there is concern over your analytical skills and “quant chops.” Or, there is some general, yet vague, feedback that leadership worries, “you lack that killer instinct.” Or, maybe it’s the opposite and you are “too bossy” or “too opinionated.” Have you heard any of these things?  I have over my career. Instead of letting them control my path, I got upset, then angry, then curious. I decided that none of these descriptions were really a good read on me, or my leadership potential, and I decided to change the perception. You can too. I’ve interviewed hundreds of women in senior leadership over the years and one thing is clear: we’re navigating a constant push and pull. Be strong, but not too strong. Be likable, but not too soft. Show your ambition, but don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Women aren’t just doing the job, they’re doing the extra work of managing how they’re perceived while they’re doing the job. We wrote this piece for HBR because it’s important for women to know how to not only subvert stereotypes and shape how others see them, but to do it without losing themselves in the process. Too many of us think there is nothing we can do when we hear feedback that doesn’t feel quite right. Sometimes, there are actions we can take. I love this piece so much because it says we don’t have to be victim to the stories about us or around us, we can do something about it.   1️⃣ Craft a counternarrative – Instead of internalizing biased feedback, reshape how people see you by aligning your strengths with what the organization values (on your terms!). 2️⃣ Use positive association – Enthusiasm and future-focused language can subtly shift others’ assumptions  and build trust. 3️⃣ Turn feedback into power – Don’t immediately accept or reject it, investigate it. Use it to understand what success looks like in your environment, and then find authentic ways to express that in your own leadership style. So if you’ve ever felt like your success depends not just on what you do, but how you’re seen…you’re not imagining it. Especially in times of economic uncertainty and shifting priorities, it becomes even more pronounced. And while there are no one-size-fits-all strategies, when women take control of their story, they open doors for themselves AND others. Let’s stop contorting ourselves to fit outdated models. We can rewrite the models themselves. Let me know what you think. https://lnkd.in/gcCSE7XW Colleen Ammerman Harvard Business Review Lakshmi Ramarajan Lisa Sun

I wrote The Glass Cliff because although we know that more and more women are breaking through the invisible barrier of the Glass Ceiling, I still found myself struggling to find the number of success stories about their lives in leadership that I would have expected, or hoped for. Which led me to ask - what is life really like on the other side of the Glass Ceiling, and are women really taking on their dream jobs, or being set up for a nightmare? What is The Glass Cliff? The Glass Cliff phenomenon, first described by researchers Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, recognises that women are most likely to be appointed to leadership positions in companies, and organisations which are going through a prolonged period of poor performance. This means that women often find themselves having the opportunity to take on leadership roles that have a limited likelihood of success, or acting as stopgaps whilst businesses look for the right man for the job. Of course, not every story of female leadership is a story of an inevitable slide off the edge of The Glass Cliff, because for the phenomenon to play out, a certain set of factors need to be at play - which gives us a good idea of what to look out for when considering new roles, or opportunities. A moment of crisis - when businesses are in crisis, they often turn to women to lead because of their perceived soft skills, and the comfort they can bring to a struggling team. These crises can be a hit to profitability or stock performance, a reputational scandal where the tarnish is likely to be passed to a new leader, or even a crisis global or national level - like a recession or navigating through Covid 19. A history of all male leadership - When a business has only been led by men up to that point, bringing in a woman to lead can be seen as a break from the norm, a chance to bring in a fresh new perspective, as well as signaling their progressive and open minded nature. However, in these appointments, women are usually given a much shorter timeframe in which to prove themselves, and are more likely to be exited with a short tenure, and then replaced by a white male - which is known as the savior effect - signaling a return to a ‘safe pair of hands’. A lack of internal support - Even the best leader isn’t going to turn around a business in a crisis single handedly. She needs the support of her team, particularly her senior team. When this support is lacking, as it often is for women in leadership thanks to out-group bias, an already challenging role can feel like an impossible slide towards the edge of the Glass Cliff. The first thing we can all do to overcome the Glass Cliff is to be aware of the phenomenon. We must recognise its prevalence in women’s working lives, and understand it as a shared experience faced by female leaders in many, and then commit to investing in underrepresented leaders, at whatever stage of our careers we ourselves are. #LinkedInBookClub

Every so often, something happens that reminds me of a pattern many women in expert roles recognize immediately: our expertise is treated as tentative until a less-qualified man “confirms” it by explaining our own field back to us. 🙄 Recently, after watching an older webinar of mine, a man sent me a polite, clearly well-meant email explaining the complexity of legal translation. I don’t think he intended to offend... But intent doesn’t change the underlying dynamic — or the impact. 🔍 And here’s the irony: the fact that I can take his message apart, analyze its linguistic presuppositions, and explain the pattern in detail — and he clearly cannot, or he wouldn’t have sent it in the first place — is exactly why he shouldn’t be explaining my field to me at all. And the context matters, too: the webinar he referenced was one I delivered for the American Translators Association while I was working as a legal-linguistic consultant at a top law firm. That role (and that talk) came after years of work that include: 🔹 external legal-linguistic consultant to the United Nations 🔹 translating multiple Nobel Prize laureates 🔹 20+ years navigating both common-law and civil-law systems By any objective metric — scope of work, seniority, training, international practice — I was the expert in that exchange. Yet the message positioned me as someone who needed things explained… followed by a request that I review his CV. And this isn’t unusual. Women across law, linguistics, academia, and related fields know this pattern well: unsolicited correction, implied deficiency, explanations no one asked for — often from men with considerably less experience and/or expertise. 🧠 Why this matters For a less experienced professional woman, that pattern can be discouraging. It can create doubt where there shouldn’t be any, and signal that her expertise is always subject to someone else’s audit. 😒 This is the quiet cost of condescension mixed with entitlement: it edges qualified women out of conversations we’re fully prepared to lead. A note for men who genuinely want to engage well with women experts 👇 Research in pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics points to a few basics: ✅ Start with a question, not an assumption ✅ Invite dialogue rather than delivering conclusions ✅ Don’t offer unsolicited explanations when the other person’s expertise is explicit ✅ And absolutely don’t combine “correction” with self-promotion These aren’t soft skills. They’re foundational communication practices that support real professional respect. Women are not here to have our own profession explained back to us. Clear, grounded communication strengthens every field — including ours.

The fastest way to lose authority in a high-stakes moment? Say too much. She walked in with a stack of notes three inches thick. 📚 (I knew exactly what was coming.) Senior executive. Twenty minutes. Career-defining audience. "I've mapped out everything." Five major areas. Twelve key points. Dozens of supporting details. "I can't leave anything out. They need to know I'm the expert." I've seen this pattern so many times - especially with women stepping into more senior roles. Because the stakes feel higher. The visibility feels sharper. And the pressure to prove yourself kicks in. ⚡️ (We think more content = more credibility. IT DOESN'T.) So what do we do? We overprepare. We overexplain. We overdeliver. And ironically… We dilute our impact. I didn’t look at her notes. I looked at her. "You don’t need more content," I said. "You need more clarity." She paused. "What if instead of covering everything… you chose one idea - and made it land?" Resistance. "But they’ll expect more." (They always say this. And they’re almost always wrong.) "No," I said. "They’ll remember what’s clear." 👉 At senior level, your value isn’t in how much you know. 👉 It’s in how clearly you can cut through. (That’s the real promotion skill no one teaches you.) That’s the shift from expert… to leader. When you try to say everything, your message gets lost. When you focus, your authority rises. She chose one idea. The one that would change how that room thought. Twenty minutes of depth. Not breadth. The result? 🎯 Standing ovation. 👏 And this message: "You didn’t just inform us. You equipped us." Because the most powerful communicators don’t overwhelm. They distil. So before your next big moment, ask yourself: 💭 What’s the one thing they must remember? Not five. Not ten. One. ☝️ Follow Arti Halai for more on confident communication when it really counts. 😊

I once got feedback that I was “intimidating.” I took it to heart. I spent the next few years trying to be as approachable, warm, and agreeable as I could be. I assumed this was a character flaw that I needed to fix. But years later, I realized something: this feedback wasn’t about me. It was about the system - one that judges women more harshly and polices their personalities more than their performance. And the numbers back this up. 👇🏽 🎯 Women are 7x more likely to receive negative personality-based feedback than men. 🎯 56% of women have been called "unlikeable" in reviews (vs. 16% of men). 🎯 Harvard Business Review found that 76% of “aggressive” labels in one company’s reviews were given to women (vs. 24% to men). This Is the Leadership Double Bind: Speak up? You’re “too aggressive.” Stay quiet? You “lack confidence.” Show ambition? You’re “unlikeable.” Ask for a promotion? You’re “too pushy.” And here’s the kicker - it’s worst for high-performing women. This is why women... ↳  Hesitate to showcase ambition. ↳  Are reluctant to ask for opportunities. ↳  Are leaving workplaces faster than others. So, what can we do? Here are 3 ways we can start changing this narrative today: ✅ Check your language. Is the feedback about personality or performance? If you wouldn’t give the same critique to a man, please reconsider. ✅ Challenge vague feedback. “You need to be more confident” isn’t actionable. Women deserve the same clear, growth-oriented feedback as men. ✅ Support women’s ambition. If certain leadership traits (ex. being assertive) are seen as strengths in men, they should be seen as strengths in women too. Have you ever received unfair feedback? What’s one piece of feedback you’ve had to unlearn? 👇🏽 ♻️ Please share to help end unfair feedback. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor (She/Her) for more insights on conscious leadership. Source: Textio 'Language Bias in Feedback' Study, 2023 & 2024 #EndUnFairFeedback #IWD2025

“She doesn’t like you” 🥴  Just hearing those words made me stop in my tracks, it’s a small sentence with a big impact. It was delivered as a “helpful heads-up” but it caught me off guard because what was I supposed to do with that information? I am used to not being liked, I get the impression that my personality and energy doesn’t always work for people and on the flip side I value and understand the importance of likeability in an industry where relationships often mean opportunities, reputation or future success. I am a naturally confident person but being told that I’m not liked, especially when I’m just being myself or doing the work I set out to do can feel pretty rough and taps into those insecurities that I try not to pay too much attention to. But I had to remind myself of what I tell my clients, particularly those who seek personal branding guidance. Someone’s personal opinion of you, no matter how strongly delivered, isn’t a full picture of your worth or capability. In business, personalities clash and energies don’t always merge well. People bring their own projections, preferences and biases into the room sometimes without even realising it.  Ask yourself: “Was this really about me or was it about them?” Was it your tone, your confidence, your perspective? Or maybe they simply prefer a different style; softer, quieter, more deferential.  Is there a constructive insight here I can grow from? In business, likability can sometimes be overemphasised especially for Black women or those from minoritised groups who don’t fit traditional moulds. Sometimes the people who shake things up who challenge the norm, who hold a higher standard aren’t immediately embraced. You don’t need to retaliate or overcorrect, it definitely doesn’t mean becoming someone else to smooth things over.  Respond with calm, clarity and presence. You can still collaborate, deliver results and stay rooted in your values even if someone doesn’t vibe with you. Respect doesn’t always require friendship.  You can do everything “right” and still not be someone’s cup of tea which is fine. You’re not in the room to collect fans (unless you’re a celebrity), you’re there to contribute something real and realness isn’t always comfortable. “She doesn’t like you” is just a sentence, I let it pass through me but refused to let it define me. I know that I wasn’t going to water myself down to be palatable although I won’t deny that the thought crossed my mind. I was made to show up fully and so are you and in doing so, not everyone will cheer. There will be people who like you but don't respect you and people who respect you but don't like you. That's life. It's great if you can have both but if you have to choose one, choose respect, it lasts longer because the right people will respect you and more importantly, you’ll respect yourself. So here's to liking myself even if not everyone I meet likes me back! 😁

Smiling for the photo. Doing the internal work behind it. I used to leave executive meetings replaying everything I wish I hadn’t said 🤦🏽♀️ We don’t talk enough about the psychological exhaustion of self-monitoring. The smiling The softening The translating The rehearsing The trying to land a point without triggering defensiveness in the room. For years, I thought I had a confidence issue. The truth was I was running six internal conversations before saying a single sentence out loud. Is this too direct? Too ambitious? Too emotional? Too critical? Will this change how they see me? Should I just leave it? The pressure of performance is one of the most overlooked aspects of mental health at work. It’s how authority leaks, especially when you’re one of the few in the room, carrying a visible difference. And, it comes at a cost most organisations still don’t measure. That cost doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like: ✅ Replaying meetings at night ✅ Emotional exhaustion after visibility ✅ Withholding ideas ✅ Over-preparing ✅ Staying hyper-alert ✅ Never fully relaxing into your own authority So, I stopped trying to “be more confident” and started preparing differently. Before high-stakes conversations, I began using a set of AI prompts because I realised I didn’t need more confidence. I needed less internal chatter, less fragmentation and less self-abandonment in real time. Ironically, the more mentally clear I became, the more authoritative I sounded. Not because I changed who I was, but because I stopped interrupting myself. I’m considering sharing the exact prompts I use before board meetings, leadership conversations, and difficult rooms. Comment PROMPTS, especially if you’re a woman expected to be brilliant and palatable at the same time, And, if this post hit a nerve, that probably tells us something important about the state of mental health at work. Happy #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek. #WomenInLeadership #PsychologicalSafety #ExecutivePresence #MentalHealthAtWork #Boardroom #Kinship