Ouch. I’ve Been Hiding Behind “Leadership”
Does calling “authority” something else make it safer?
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I had an ah-ha writing this newsletter. Recently, I’ve noticed that almost all my clients resist using the word “authority” when negotiating for new roles. And yet, it is just such power they want. Then I realized–I do this too! So I decided to dig in.
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My Story: A theory on women and power
I have a dirty little secret to share. For someone who writes a lot about power, I have to admit to you (and myself) that my fascination with this topic hides an ugly truth I wish wasn’t true about me. The truth is that I’m very afraid of power. Power scares me. Not just being around it, but having it, too.
Not all kinds of power, mind you. Just the kind we usually think of when we see the word.
Formal power. Positional power. Authority. The ability to say that something should be so, and have it come true in the world. The ability to tell someone to do something, and have them do it without debating, without negotiating for a transactional give and take, without question. Worldly power.
I’m afraid of having worldly power. I’m afraid of having it used against me. I’m drawn to it sometimes, and other times I spit on it.
WTF is wrong with me?
Am I the only one? Probably not.
Is this one reason women have so little formal power in the world? Probably so.
There are many reasons women have developed a complex relationship with authority. But as I dive into trying to help women more directly heal their broken relationships with power of all kinds, I think it’s important to delve into the core issues more deeply. So, my trusty second brain, Jennifer, helped me explore the different dimensions of power that researchers have looked at to understand this topic.
To a large extent, the four categories of power we discovered make intuitive sense:
Formal Power: Authority stemming from positional leadership.
Relational Power: Influence derived from networks, empathy, and collaborative relationships.
Cultural Power: The ability to shape narratives and mobilize societal change.
Personal Power: Internal traits such as resilience, confidence, and adaptability.
Looking at it through my personal lens, enhanced by experiences I’ve learned of helping both female and male leaders, I see some interesting dynamics that lead me to a theory. I wonder if you see the same thing?
Most women I know are much more comfortable with relational power than any other type of power, particularly formal power, and—if they’ve been abused—personal power as well.
My theory is that women default into the “comfort zone” of building relational power at the expense of, or instead of, building other forms of power–especially formal power (i.e., authority).
Am I projecting this based on my own experience and feelings? Maybe. Do I know women who appear to have no fear of formal power at all? Absolutely. (And many of them have it as a result.) Perhaps they are the exception that proves the rule. Given that so few women have top jobs of formal power–fewer than 10% have titles like CEO, COO, CFO–I have to believe a lot of us don’t put authority in our comfort zone. Thinking through it I find several reasons for this.
A target on your back is dangerous
I see my theory born out often by professional women who are content to be the #2 to the most senior man in the workplace. Sometimes, they will admit to taking on the role of “work wife” even if their title is Chief of Staff or Assistant Muckity-Muck. When I ask them why they don’t want to go for the top job, worklife balance (and the lack thereof) often plays a role in their aversion, but it’s not unusual for them to also give reasons like, “I see what happens to my boss. He’s a target for people who want to take him down, and women in those roles pay an even higher price. Why would I want to be a target when I can use my influence to help him and gain almost as much power without having to deal with all the negativity and backstabbing?”
Sometimes, I want to encourage my clients to go ahead and risk some backstabbing, but I’m conflicted. I know how ruthless it can be. One client with a VP title was the CEO’s golden child until the board suggested she be put in the succession plan for his job, thus highlighting her influential and positional power. Within six months, the CEO had bullied her to the point where the board withdrew their suggestion, and she felt compelled to leave the company. This isn’t a female-specific dynamic, but evidence suggests women face greater backlash from male bullies than men do.
The desire to step officially out of the succession planning pipeline, or off the track for greater positional power, is often psychologically logical because the fears of being targeted aren’t made up; they’re backed up by research. “[W]omen with authority jobs are the most likely of all gender/authority status groups to report experiencing sexual harassment, bullying, and intimidation at the workplace, and they have the highest probability of reporting job burnout symptoms.” Stojmenovska - 2023
This resonates with my own experience. My first opportunity to see a woman targeted for her positional power was very personal. It happened in my home when I was in elementary school. My mother was elected to a city council seat of positional power in the 1960’s in bible-belt America. She was asked to run so she could lose, but she won, probably thanks to her relational powers. She was the only woman in her role on the council, and she made a difference. With more public support after her tenure, she ran for state office.
The smear campaign against her was intense and touched my life. I was bullied at elementary school as “the daughter of a communist from California who didn’t go to church(!)” Being an outsider already, this was very painful for me. Mom lost her campaign and retired from politics. I don’t blame her. Her treatment was brutal, and she didn’t have many cheerleaders around her telling her, “You go girl!”
Personal resilience may not be enough
A fear of being targeted isn’t the only reason women, often logically, eschew formal power. It takes resilience to put up with being a target. But I am a very resilient person, and something else was missing. I realized—belatedly in my career—that I didn’t have anyone, mentors, friends or family, who encouraged me to pursue formal power. They all told me I was smart and could do anything I wanted to, but I’ve come to appreciate the unique importance of having “You go girl!” people in your court who actually push you out of your comfort zone.
Those personal and mentoring champions tell you to go further into your stretch zone and then pick you up when you get knocked down (women and men who make the tough decisions at higher levels of authority do get knocked down a lot.) Sometimes, it’s a competitive knockdown that results in targeting; other times, it is just the wear and tear of no-win decisions during tough times. Since women are at greater risk of health problems and burnout due to work-life demands alone, it’s not unreasonable for women to think twice about taking on the greater stress of high-power positions. It truly is lonely at the top, and if you’re going to survive there, you need personal resilience and a community of people who have your back.
Failure is brutal for women
And then there’s the shame element. Whatever knocks a person down at the top, shame is a special kind of setback for women because they’re fighting against the stereotypes that predict their failure, and others will use any setback as a reason to lose faith in them. This is where many of our imposter fears sit alongside our drive for perfection.
If we’re not careful as we achieve more formal power, women find themselves falling prey to the very real glass cliff phenomenon, where they may literally be set up for failure and have to work ten times as hard not to fall off the cliff, risking their professional demise (especially as a woman of color.) Many people won’t have sympathy for a fall from the glass cliff, because those in the top job have the power that others want.
And for women who admit to having any kind of sexual life, or life of less than perfect virtue, the takedown can be quite personal and humiliating. People who want to discourage women from seeking authority frequently use accusations and insinuations about sex to do it. Sexual shaming, by itself, is a powerful weapon as women have been historically ostracized and penalized for having desire and a sexual life. This is why the insult, “you must have slept your way to the top,” is particularly damning and a deterrent for many women from seeking power.
Women are allergic to abuses of power
Back to my theory about women defaulting to relational power to avoid the pitfalls of formal power, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that women have mastered the ability to appease angry men, who often have both physical power and perceived authority over them. Appeasement, or “fawning,” is a specific use of relational power to protect ourselves, children, and other vulnerable people from very real dangers. Trying to assert power and authority over a man often leads to conflict, and conflict with a man leads to frequent uses and abuses of power to “put the woman in her place.”
So women are good at protecting themselves and others, because we’ve had to be.
Many women have aversions to saying they want to have authority because we resent it. We’ve been abused by it. I know women (and men) who are triggered by the words “power” and “authority,” because it reminds them of uncomfortable situations where others have power over them. And it’s no surprise, given that the abuse of women is still prevalent worldwide, and the human abuse of power is so prevalent that it literally makes up the core storyline in much of our media. It’s worth noting that much of this abuse of power historically, in media and against women, reflects a masculine archetype of power.
I often feel when I speak to women about seeking authority that they are skittish because they’re afraid that if they say they want authority, people will believe that what they mean is, “I want to abuse people.” This interpretation is not only solidly against their values, but it makes them vulnerable to being viewed as a b!+ch, thus making them a “legitimate target.”
My ah-ha! I’ve been hiding
Though I’m not sure how conscious I was about the dynamics above, they have been playing themselves out in my life and led me to focus the first decade of my coaching practice on helping women pursue leadership positions. “Leadership” was a safer word, less triggering to people. It connotes the influential (relational) ability to leverage power to achieve things and power with others to collaborate, instead of power over people and things.
In this safer vocabulary, I personally ocused on attaining personal power and relational power to build my business. Even though I put “power” in my company name, I wasn’t comfortable using it in my writing and much of my talking. Using the word “power” to mean authority felt wrong to me. It felt manipulative and harsh. Early on, I sensed my theory about relational vs. formal power budding in my clients. So, I softened my tone and language even more. I hid behind the word “leadership” and used it as a proxy for “power.” To be fair, so did most of the publications I was reading, which were also exploring the dynamics between women and power.
While I’ve succeeded in achieving personal power, relational power, and comfortable-for-me forms of both formal and cultural power, I think that the bullied little girl inside me was listening closely all this time, ready to skitter away if I gained too much worldly power. Until literally this moment–as I write this–I don’t think I’ve realized the extent to which I have fallen prey to a cultural effort to smear, shame, and threaten women from seeking authority and other types of formal power.
This pisses me off.
I’m done hiding. I’m done using proxies. I’m going to the core of it.
Eve’s Story and Eve Reimagined are a new feature of InPower Women, based on my shift to provide more direct tools and approaches to help women heal their broken relationships with power.
Eve’s Story: Being a woman with power has never been easy
So where did this complex relationship between women and power all start? It’s hard to know since, historically, so many women with formal power (or any power) have been written out of history. Despite being half the population as long as populations have been counted, women occupy .5% of it’s written record. That’s 50 cents on the hundred-dollar bill.
But there have been female rulers–Queens, Empresses, Prime Ministers, and Presidents–throughout history. Did they all have targets on their back? Did they all struggle with gaining and maintaining authority? According to the AI hive mind (sources validated), the answer is pretty much yes. Queens and female rulers have encountered four kinds of resistance due to their gender:
Legitimacy and Succession: Women often came to power only in the absence of a male heir or when no other option was available to continue a dynasty. They were frequently seen as second-choice successors and often isolated outside their native region, used historically as political tools to seal agreements (an extension of the women-as-property legacy) and even in modern times used to extend family histories of power in elected office.
Social and Political Resistance: Female rulers faced societal resistance due to prevailing gender norms that favored male leadership. This resistance manifested in challenges to their authority and attempts to undermine their rule (check out Melisende’s and Zumurrud’s drama).
Portrayal and Image: Women rulers had to carefully manage their public image, often being scrutinized more harshly than their male counterparts. They were sometimes portrayed as overly ambitious or manipulative, and their sexual conduct and appearance was more carefully and negatively scrutinized. This pattern continues into the modern day.
Political Isolation: Many female rulers were isolated politically, relying on marriages or alliances with male relatives to secure their positions. This dependency sometimes limited their ability to exercise power independently.
So, yeah. There really has never been a time when women with formal power had it easy. And based on the two elections where women ran for U.S. President, it’s still hard to gain enough public support to succeed at achieving authority. (Though, to be fair, Americans says the gender of their boss matters less and less.)
And we can’t forget Eve’s mythical story and how she became a political tool to help Christianity bind itself to Roman rulers and eliminate the power of women in the early Christian Church. After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the one position in society that remained open for women to occupy unabashedly and powerfully was motherhood. Motherhood, along with its stewardship of family relationships, included participation in “the village” needed for society’s social structure to remain strong.
Early Christian doctrine, as expressed by Augustine of Hippo, aligned with Roman culture at the time, and built up the role of “mother” as the only way women were allowed to exert influence and achieve kudos from men. There’s an argument to be made that this built the most basic and damaging double standard for women, the Madonna-Whore Complex, into our modern psychology. Mothers were lauded for their chastity–to the extent that the most lauded mother of the time managed to have a baby while remaining a virgin. Mothers were rewarded when they were obedient to the father of the family, to the extent that they were encouraged by society to take any kind of abuse he gave her legally and without complaint.
Mothers were so defined by their nurturing and empathetic abilities that they became the polar opposite of a person with formal, positional power in society. When women married under coverture laws, their assets transferred to their husbands so that their only role became bearing children and tending the home. Of course, in reality, this was often not the case, as Queen Maria Theresa was an excellent example of a prolific mother who ruled successfully. In addition, this dynamic was largely a caste privilege. Poor mothers and women did not have the luxury of tending children and the home but had to work in addition. Many mothers rule their territory with an iron fist, but the myth of the virtuous mother, whose only role is to support others, remains pervasive.
Reimagining Eve: Is my aversion to formal power authentic? Or conditioned?
Reimagining Eve is the section of the newsletter where we try to imagine a changed history for the purpose of finding access to power that is hard to find in the culture we actually live in. This topic is really hard for me as I try to imagine that half of the people in our world who wield worldly power are female.
Half the leaders in government
Half the leaders running companies
Half the leaders in our courts
Half the leaders in our military
Half the leaders in our health systems
Half the leaders running manufacturing plants
Half the leaders policing our cities
Half the leaders running financial institutions
Imagine if we saw women making decisions every day–without extensive negotiation– that other people simply followed because they had the authority to make those decisions.
Without making snide remarks behind their backs
Without slandering them and accusing them of sleeping their way to the top
Without defying them in front of others and expecting the majority of people to support their rude behavior
Without threatening to rape them, murder them, or attack their families
I don’t know about you, but I find this hard to imagine. I do see it once in a while in my own world, but I know for a fact that every woman who appears to bear the responsibilities and benefits of authority in our real world has stories to tell about attacks of various kinds she’s had to survive in order to do so.
It’s hard for me to imagine this never happening, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. I’m going to try in my own life, too. I’m going to stop worrying about being viewed as an abusive b!+ch if I use the authority others give me. I’m going to stop apologizing when I make decisions that have to be made. I’m going to start owning the authority I have in my life and see what happens.
So here’s the question I want us all to sit with this month.
If there were no greater penalty for you as a woman to seek and wield formal power, what would you do with this opportunity?
Yes, this is a twist on the “if you had no fear” meme, which I avoided last month. But I think it is well placed here. Because we DO have to use our imaginations to get outside the penalty box women have to sit in if they choose to pursue formal power in the world.
And, by the way, I should have mentioned this earlier. I don’t believe it’s the destiny of EVERYONE to seek and use formal power in the world. There are plenty of personality types that aren’t drawn to this, women and men alike. I suspect I may be one of those people. And, I also have to admit to myself, that I simply don’t know if that’s true. I’ve been so completely conditioned to avert any interest I have in formal power that, though my discomfort is real, I don’t honestly know if it’s authentic.
So, I’m going to challenge myself this month and beyond to see if I can find out the answer to this question. Is my aversion to formal power authentic? Or conditioned? I challenge you to do the same. Next week, I’ll invent some ways we can explore this concept to answer the question above (here’s the link). For now, just sit with it and see what comes up.
Power Links:
Here are some of the research links we used in exploring this month’s topic in case you’re interested.
Voters have less positive reactions to female politicians who are perceived as seeking “power” (2010-but possibly still relevant)
VIDEO COACHING TIPS: Victim-to-Leader
I’m embarrassed to note that I don’t have any videos on formal power. But here’s one that people with authority would be wise to use. It’s also a personal power technique to help you show up as someone who deserves formal power. Learn how to show up like a leader who can be trusted with power, no matter how difficult the situation. (Also a great strategy to combat being seen as a “Negative Nelly” or a venting whiner.)
Mastermind Subscribers: Join us next week in chat and on December 18th at noon eastern in Zoom to share your relationship with authority and formal power, what kind of authority you need to achieve your dreams, and how to get it.
InPowering Powerful Women,
Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com
Follow me on my YouTube channel and LinkedIn, for InPower clips and tips, (2-3 minutes tops) taken from these newsletters, blog posts, client advice, and whatever I’m thinking of.
Looking forward to what you "cook up" for the mastermind. 😊 Also, it's a tall order - to try to parse out "authentic" aversion from learned. Is that even possible?