What Women Leaders Carry

The double job — what it costs

These disadvantages do not stay external. Over time they find their way inside — as I could see in Astrid’s exhaustion at the end of that day. The double bind creates a double job. A woman leader must manage how she is perceived at every turn. She has to read the room before she speaks, calibrate her tone, adjust the style of her own authority to fit the frame she did not design. As a seasoned leader, her long years on this terrain told her that to call Kent out would be read as aggression, while not doing so would be viewed as weakness. Kent is operating on auto-pilot, Astrid cannot afford to. No wonder that the additional vigilance exhausted her.

Women who have succeeded in carrying the second job, the ongoing management of how they are perceived, the calibration of how and how much they can show, the habitual self-assessment and need to qualify or adjust their style — demonstrate an intelligent adaptation to adverse leadership conditions. But aside from the inner resources it costs her, there are other costs.

Imposter syndrome — a brief bridge

When Clance and Imes coined the term “impostor syndrome” in 1978,³ they were observing something specific: that women arriving at tables from which they had historically been denied a place often felt themselves to be frauds — not because they were, but because generations of conditioning had told them they did not belong there. That phenomenon is explored more fully elsewhere, but relevant here is the broader reality it points to — namely, that external constraint becomes an internal one. That self-doubt is not a character failing, but a reasonable response to an unreasonable history.

Malaya — pushing back and paying for it

Malaya, the Chief Nursing Officer, found herself mired in a messy job. A chief surgeon was leading a messy department — poor documentation, insurance denials, and complaints from nurses — which is how it ended up on her desk. After months spending too much time on work that properly belonged across Finance, Medical, Legal and HR, she forced the issue at a leadership meeting. It was on her desk because she was the first to hear about it, not because she had the authority to fix it. She spoke longer than she was used to, and in a louder voice. When she was finished, the CEO asked what she proposed, and without looking at them, Malaya said that the problem belonged as much to those other departments as to Nursing. Somewhat rotely, the CEO said: “Tom, Joe, Bill — can you work with Malaya on this?” Each grunted assent while nodding at their legal pads. When the meeting was over, everyone left without looking at Malaya.

There is something of the asking the only woman in the room to go and get coffee in this anecdote. With an ambiguous and cross-functional work outside of any department’s mandate and full of unwanted chores, no upside, risk exposure without authority, Malaya’s burden is decidedly low-status. Everyone wants the coffee, but no one wants to be the one assigned to go get it. Malaya’s right to feel resentful is clear, and her efforts to change the situation to redistribute the load fair.

Yet she is the one who leaves the meeting doubting herself. The social shunning — the averted eyes, the absence of acknowledgment — effectively enforces the tradition and signals the cost of challenging it. Why would Tom, Joe, and Bill want to pick up the coffee run if Malaya has been doing it? The tradition is working well for them. It is Malaya’s burden to swim against the current, and it is natural that when, not only did she make no headway but in fact is pushed further back, she is left wondering if she did something wrong. We are talking about a feeling here. She did not do anything wrong. But the feeling, the private buckle of self-doubt after a legitimate act of self-advocacy — is not only predictable, but structurally designed and enforced. By structurally I mean by history, by tradition, by social norms. And this internal, self-propelled self-undermining is as much, if at times more, challenging than the external.

At a superficial level, one might ask, why doubt? A coaching intervention might be: “Malaya, you were right to do what you did. You had the right. Keep it up.” This is not wrong. But it is not enough. It does not account for the layer of internalized doubt that lives beneath the surface of the reasonable argument. The doubt about deserving is not logical — it will not be resolved by a correct analysis of the situation, because it has roots that go deeper than this meeting, this hospital, this year.

The transmission

The transmission is not always conscious. A woman’s relationship to her own ambition is formed early, shaped in part by what she saw her mother be permitted to want. If her mother’s role was constrained — by culture, by circumstance, by the expectations of her own generation — that constraint is transmitted, not as instruction but as atmosphere. The daughter absorbs it as something close to fact: what women do, what women can want, how far women go. By the time she is in a corner office, these templates are deep. They do not announce themselves. They operate quietly, as the background assumption against which every decision about how much to push, how much to ask for, how much to take up, is made.

Nor is there any easy way of managing the anger that is entirely reasonable when things are genuinely unfair. Malaya spoke too long and too loud by the room’s unspoken standards — and she was punished for it with silence. She got the formal acknowledgment. Whether Tom, Joe and Bill will actually follow through is a separate question, and not the point of this discussion. The point is what happens inside Malaya after that meeting. Instead of being externally legitimized, her action led her to question the legitimacy of her message, of her wishes, of her right to negotiate. Had she gone too far? Did she read the room wrong? Would it cost her something she wouldn’t be able to get back?

This is what the double bind often produces in the interior life of a woman leader. And it is as much in the investigation of this interior life as of improving external tactics, that coaching can offer its best value.

What becomes possible

What a woman finds, in a space genuinely held for her, is not only a set of skills or tactics to navigate her particular circumstances (though that is a part of it), but a space to examine, acknowledge (and be acknowledged) and be supported to grow. The external constraints are real: the cultural and structural disadvantages, the double standards, and the costs of adjusting to these. So do the internal ones: the strategies that have been developed, the deeper emotional realities that underpin these adaptations — habits of underestimating, blaming, or doubting oneself, curtailment of ambition, accommodations that cost too much or have simply stopped being effective, if not downright counter-productive.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge and honor the intelligence of the adaptations that have been made, even if some of them may have outlived their usefulness. To make a reality-based assessment of what is genuinely risky in a person’s specific environment, and what has been accepted as habit. Malaya’s distress at the initial reaction of her team to her assertiveness need not be the last word in her leadership life. When she is helped to see the legitimacy of her position and the roots of her self-doubt, she can return to the room — not necessarily louder, not necessarily more aggressive, but more grounded. Less alone with it. And that changes what is possible.