Language is one of women’s most essential—and most overlooked—tools for acting on their power and achieving their ambition.

Women are trained to speak in ways that undermine their power. Too often women’s choice of words, and how they speak them, minimizes their authority and dilutes their effectiveness in daily interactions. Women, Language, and Power explores issues of gender, power, and the extraordinary role language plays in inhibiting or unleashing women’s potential to be effective and powerful in the business world. Susannah Baldwin offers inspiration, insight, and practical tools for reclaiming the language women have been denied in order to successfully give voice to their ambition.

Who is this book written for?

if you are a woman in the business world, I know you. We may have never met, but I promise I know the difficulties you experience as a woman trying to progress in today’s professional world—a world that remains predominantly run by men, with biases toward male leadership and barriers to women’s advancement. I know how hard you work and how much you have to tolerate to work within this environment.

I know this because I have worked with so many women like you, who are trying to make it into management and leadership roles and confronting barriers and frustrated ambitions along the way. As a clinical psychologist who works as a communications and leadership coach to individual clients and teaches workshops to large groups of women, I have listened to scores of women share their professional aspirations, fears, hard pursuit of advancement, and disappointment when it doesn’t come for reasons they either don’t agree with or don’t understand.

The conversation about the forces that challenge women’s ability to rise to leadership levels, earn salaries commensurate with those of their male counterparts, and break the glass ceiling tends to focus on institutional barriers. This conversation is critical, as the more light we can shine on the structural forces that unfairly hold women back, the closer we can come to eliminating them once and for all. However, my lens as a communications coach has allowed me to see another force hindering women’s advancement—one that women have the capacity to influence and change today: how they use language.

Over the course of my career, I have observed women at all levels of management and leadership communicating in corporate environments. I have seen strong communication skills accelerate careers—and weak communication skills stall them. The ability to leverage communication to influence, inspire, and build alliances requires a high level of skill and confidence in the public arena. Women who have mastered these skills gain power and thus feel powerful. Women who have not yet mastered these skills are often missing the biggest piece of the puzzle.

Women have been conditioned to communicate in a style that can undermine their power and effectiveness at work, ultimately thwarting their advancement. Through no fault of their own, they have been socialized to speak and behave in ways that are antithetical to what is necessary to advance in most corporations. Women develop their technical skills and talents to the point of qualifying for advancement, but then many hit a point where they are told they don’t have “what it takes” to be effective at senior levels and that, in essence, they are not leadership material.

Feeling helplessly sidelined by the power players and structures of their organizations, women often decide that “what it takes” to get to where they want to go just might not be worth it. Many begin to settle for less, pull back on their desire for promotions, or take less senior roles and focus on other priorities. Essentially, they abandon the goals, ambitions, and dreams that once fueled their optimism and drive.

What these women often don’t yet see is that language is a significant barrier to women’s advancement. It is not a barrier that many people talk about, but it is a barrier we, as individuals, can do something about. Language is an accessible way women can reconnect with their power and consciously create alignment between what they want to achieve and what they say.

I hope this book will help you achieve just that.

—Susannah Baldwin

Susannah Baldwin, Ph.D. is an executive and communications coach who combines her experience as a clinical psychologist with extensive corporate expertise to help clients hone the skills they need to lead diverse teams in demanding environments.