Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski

person; I have been probably for the last twenty years. As I earned the right, I got more outspoken. I just developed a style that works for me, and I think it’s authentic. I just met with a lot of the interns, and I said you can’t copy me because a) you haven’t earned the right, and b) if it’s not comfortable, everybody can see that.”
    For the rest of us who aren’t comfortable with it, strong language only backfires. A lot of people I consulted with agree that the problem wasn’t really what I said, it was my delivery. I just wasn’t being authentic with Phil. But what about the fact that I was authentically angry? Hannah Riley Bowles comments, “Even if you were genuinely pissed, if you were acting like a guy, it probably wouldn’t work. There is a lot of evidence, our research included, that adopting the guys’ style of doing this is likely to be risky for women. When women just act like the guys, then they pay really important social costs.”
    Bowles and other researchers have various names for this problem. They call it the double bind, or the backlash effect. Research shows that assertiveness is an important
quality for leadership. But when women are assertive, it can hurt them, because being assertive is not an appealing trait in women.
    Professors Frank Flynn, Cameron Anderson, and Sebastien Brion tested this effect on a group of business students at New York University. MBA students were asked to read a Harvard Business School case about a very successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the name of Heidi Roizen.
    The case is often used to teach students networking skills, but the researchers decided to use the case for a study on gender and bias. They gave half their students the case under the real name of Heidi Roizen and the other half a case about “Howard Roizen.” The cases were exactly the same, except for a couple of descriptive words: Heidi’s “husband” was changed to Howard’s “wife,” and Heidi the “cheerleader” became Howard the “football player.” Both Heidi and Howard were described in assertive terms as take-charge executives, captains of industry.
    After reading over the case, the students went online to answer questions about their impressions of Heidi/Howard. They were asked to rate him or her on characteristics such as kindness, generosity, ambition, manipulativeness, concern for others, and a variety of other typically gender-associated traits.
    The results were shocking. The students were looking at exactly the same information, but they rated Heidi less kind and less generous than Howard and more power hungry, manipulative, and assertive than Howard. Clearly the students responded negatively to Heidi’s aggressiveness.

    When the students were asked whether they would want to work with Howard and whether they’d hire Heidi, the researchers discovered that both men and women thought Heidi was competent, but less likeable. Heidi may have been a little full of herself, but Howard was the kind of guy they’d go have a beer with.
    The double bind is this: in order to be a competent leader you need to be assertive—but if you’re a woman, you’re judged harshly for displaying the traits that make you an effective leader.
    I wasn’t surprised to hear that the data showed men were more critical of women than of other men. But I was surprised that women were equally critical of both genders. Women are as hard on each other as they are on themselves.
    Flynn’s students insisted that they didn’t judge Heidi any differently. After the test was completed, however, Flynn shared the results with them, and they, too, were shocked. Flynn says that confronting this group with their own subconscious bias was a powerful lesson for them all. When Flynn relayed the results to the real Heidi Roizen, she responded, “Well, I guess that’s understandable, with a group of grizzled executives.” She was as surprised as anyone to learn the test subjects were