Do Women Have to Act Like Men to Get Ahead?

The most successful female leaders learn to communicate not as men—but as alpha women.

Susannah Baldwin, PhD

Do women in corporate America need to speak and act like men to get ahead? Alaina hadn’t thought so, but she was beginning to wonder. Having been passed over for a promotion that was given to one of her male colleagues, she ended up in my executive coaching practice. In our first session, Alaina explained that her manager told her she needed to develop more “executive presence” in order to progress. She wasn’t making herself visible across the organization, her manager said. She didn't speak with authority or confidence, nor was she assertive, aggressive, or decisive enough. In essence, she wasn’t behaving like the men around her who had been promoted.  

This was not the first time a competent, intelligent woman had found her way to my office with a story like Alaina’s. I’d heard it before—too many painful times in my twenty-plus years of coaching. 

The reality is that executive presence requires a communication style that remains associated with masculinity and socially-sanctioned only for men. Most workplaces are still disproportionately run by men and therefore rigged to benefit how they speak and behave. It’s no surprise that many women end up believing they must “act like men” to get ahead. But this is not true. So long as we continue to believe this, women will not advance as often as men do.

In her 1998 paper, “Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools,” Karin A. Martin—professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of Michigan—detailed observations from spending eight months in five Midwestern preschool classrooms. Martin methodically noted minutia of interactions between the all female teachers and their total 112 three, four, and five year olds. Martin’s paper reveals consistent themes: From a very young age, girls are socialized to consider others before themselves, speak in a collaborative style that prioritizes inclusion over their authority, make themselves small in their physical presence, and be timid in commanding attention. As one example, teachers tell preschool girls to be “quiet” and repeat things in a “nicer” voice three times more often than they say the same to boys. By contrast, preschool boys are given room to run around, be loud as they play, and issue directives to classmates in any tone they please. Whereas girls grow up feeling uncomfortable and unskilled at speaking up, directing others, or demanding what they want or need, boys feel natural doing so.

These deeply-etched childhood patterns carry into adulthood and wield enormous influence over corporate culture. Research affirms that the communication style of leaders matches the stereotypical communication style of masculinity. In 1974, psychologist Sandra Bem wanted to test her then radical theory that communication and behavior were not a function of biological sex. She recruited Stanford students to rank a list of 600 characteristics according to their desirability for men and women. The results are the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which present the 20 characteristics deemed most desirable for women, the 20 deemed most desirable for men, and 20 most deemed neutral. Words on the masculine scale include “assertive,” “acts as a leader,” “aggressive,” “willing to take a stand,” and “ambitious.” Contrast those to words on the feminine scale, such as “yielding,” “cheerful,” “sensitive to others’ needs,” “childlike,” and “does not use harsh words.” 

While conditions for women have improved since 1974, in her 2009 book, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls With Courage and Confidence, Rachel Simmons points to a breadth of research that affirms today’s young girls are still conditioned to behave as the “quintessential good girl”; that is, “unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless.” A poignant example of such research comes from a 2008 report from the Girl Scouts Research Institute, in which survey results revealed that girls aged eight to seventeen believed taking leadership positions would elicit a negative response from peers.

I’ve found that most of us are unfamiliar with this kind of research. So long as this remains the case, corporations will relegate women to the confines of “femininity”—allowing them only empathy, collaboration, and an ever-present consideration of others’ needs, as companies simultaneously hold women back for failing to communicate outside of these norms. These same corporations also tend to punish women when they do deviate from feminine norms, putting women in an impossible bind.

It was this bind that convinced Alaina she needed help. By the time she came to me, she’d responded to her manager’s feedback by mimicking the behaviors and speaking styles of the men around her. She tried speaking more in meetings but felt she was talking merely for the sake of talking. She tried managing her team with a more authoritative style but was uncomfortable parting with her more empathic approach. She began making more decisions on her own but felt it was risky to exclude certain stakeholders from the process. Ultimately, she felt inauthentic and that trying to behave like a man was unsustainable—and not working anyway. She gave up, reverted to behaving and speaking as she always had, and came to terms with the likelihood that she’d never get promoted.

Many women don’t stop there. Many women will opt out of the workforce entirely. A staggering 1.8 million women are reported to have voluntarily left the workforce since the pandemic started. Of those who were laid off, many millions of women have chosen not to reenter the workforce. I believe many of these women leave because they feel they have to change their personalities to excel at work—something they rightly decide is too much to ask. 

What is an ambitious woman to do?

To start, information is power. When it dawns on women just how much their decades-old communication patterns have held them back, they find the will to change. They also discover that executive presence and leadership are not fixed traits innate to one gender. It is usually this awareness that triggers a breakthrough: Women realize that they do not have to act like men to get ahead. Rather, they have to reclaim behaviors and language that their conditioning denied them.

Coaching women specifically to expand their language repertoire is often the focus of my practice. In my experience, speaking with more directness and assertiveness initially makes women uncomfortable. To help them work through this phase, we script language before high-stakes conversations. While I offer clients different formats for different types of scenarios (e.g., asking for a promotion, giving a presentation, speaking up in a meeting, etc.), for general conversations of consequence, I provide clients a series of prompts to determine the language most strategically aligned to their goal, which include:

• Consider the context: Who is the audience and what are their goals or interests? Are there any relevant circumstantial factors that must influence my language choices?

• Identify the goal: What do I hope to achieve from this conversation?

• Define the appropriate language mix: Given the audience and context, how assertive can I afford to be? At what point could being too assertive subvert my goal? It is here where I guide clients to “thread the needle” of language; that is, to utilize a constantly changing mix of language from both ends of the spectrum—with authoritative and hierarchical on one end and collaborative and inclusive on the other—based on the circumstances. 

• Script every word of the “ask” or critical point, which must be direct: I always urge clients to keep their ask or critical point free of considerate or collaborative modifying language that detract from the conviction. The ask or critical point must always be clear and decisive, and surrounding language can modify the overall tone as appropriate.

Ultimately clients draft a script tailored to the context at hand and optimized for success. When women learn to strategically pull from a full language repertoire, they are not communicating “like men” but as “alpha women,” as sociolinguist Judith Baxter, who studied the communication patterns of female leaders, put it. By threading the needle, women learn when to be direct and when to show more consideration to get what they want. In other words, they learn how to embody leadership while still leaning on their feminine superpowers when to their advantage. In time, nearly all women tell me they feel liberated choosing language that captures their actual feelings and wants instead of having to modify all of it to make others comfortable

I’ve seen this strategy guide countless women out of the bind that drives too many to downshift their ambitions. It was this approach that earned Alaina the promotion she once believed was out of reach. More importantly, Alaina’s self-perception shifted. She discovered that she was capable of expressing her ambitions without fear of being seen as self-aggrandizing. She was capable of prioritizing her needs instead of yielding to those of others by default. She no longer succumbed to the biases that still surrounded her. Instead, she saw herself as empowered to navigate them with awareness and become the leader she now knew she could be.

The path to women’s advancement is not changing personalities or mimicking men. It is learning to inhabit fully who they already are. To help all women restore their sense of power, we must accept that there is nothing inherent in gender about executive presence and leadership. And we must each work to, once and for all, rid our workplaces of these toxic beliefs that hold women back. 

If we can retain and promote more women in the workforce, we all stand to gain.  

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