Is being a woman ‘too much’ in the workplace?
Last week I reshared a great post by the Female Quotient that asked people to introduce themselves with the wildest feedback they’d ever received. Honestly, I thought it was just a throw away post that I shared to make others in my network laugh, but the response has been so strong I can’t help but notice it struck a real chord. While a handful of men gamely joined in, the response has overwhelmingly been from women and the feedback they’ve received is, in fact, wild. Reading through the comments, I’m struck by some very clear patterns that have emerged – none of which (you may not be surprised) have anything to do with their work performance.
The women in the comments have been told they are:
Too intimidating
Too good at their jobs
Asking too many questions
Too passionate
Too masculine/unladylike
Too direct
Too smart/educated
Too much
In other words, they are all guilty of being female in a space that has long been coded as ‘male’. In fact, women and people of color are far more likely to receive feedback on their personality and the encoded message underneath these patterns is both biased and clear -‘you don’t belong here’ or possibly worse ‘know your place’.
And apparently our place is not to lead. While study after study indicates women are stronger leaders – especially in a crisis - there is still a dearth of women in leadership positions. (When I was an executive at the Girl Scouts I refused to do business with vendors who had no women on their leadership team. You might be surprised at just how many vendors could not make the cut. My own vendor Bechdel test.) The reason is insidious and (presumably) unconscious bias. A recent paper from MIT revealed that while women in the study consistently received higher performance ratings than their male counterparts, the same manager rated their potential 8.3% lower than their male colleagues. No wonder this resulted in women being 14% less likely to be promoted.
We can’t be certain that all of this feedback was delivered by men in the workplace (after all, it was a woman who told me I needed to smile more), but we can be certain that this dynamic of women being seen as ‘too’ in the workplace cannot and will not change until we increase the number of women and people of color in our leadership.