Why Women Have Less Power in the Workplace

Status is the extent to which one is “respected, admired, and highly regarded by others.” [i][1] In other words, your status is another person’s judgment of how valuable and valued you are.

Status exists only in the minds of others, but its effects are real and important. Your status affects how much influence you’re granted, how much attention you command, how people treat you—and how easy it is to acquire and use power.

Manage Your Status First, Power Will Follow

In society more broadly, and the workforce specifically, power is awarded based on status. Technically, you can obtain power by force, but few among us are dictators. If a person has power, it’s almost always because someone else has given it to them—the title, the authority, the budget, the autonomy, the paycheck.

If you were going to grant someone control over you, perhaps by accepting a job as their subordinate or electing them president of your neighborhood association, what kind of person would you pick? You would most likely pick someone you respected, someone you admired, someone you thought would use their power responsibly and for good.

That is, you would pick someone that you judged to have high status. Decades of research indicate that this is essentially what everyone does. [ii] In short, resources follow respect.

Women Have a Status Issue

The notion that power is based on status probably sounds like bad news for women in the workplace, because women lack status relative to men, on average. There’s a lot of science to support that assertion, but compelling evidence for women’s lower status can be seen in the lived experience of Ben Barres, a former professor of neurobiology at Stanford University.

Ben transitioned from female to male in 1997, four years after joining the Stanford faculty. With an undergraduate degree from M.I.T., a medical degree from Dartmouth, and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Ben had credentials that were beyond compare. [iii] However, because he had worked and published while perceived as both a man and a woman, he was able to observe and recount how his status increased after his transition, especially among those who were unaware of it.

When perceived as a woman, Ben experienced the devaluing of his contributions in multiple ways. He once wrote:

"As an undergrad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I was the only person in a large class of nearly all men to solve a hard math problem, only to be told by the professor that my boyfriend must have solved it for me. I was not given any credit. I am still disappointed about the prestigious fellowship competition I later lost to a male contemporary when I was a Ph.D. student, even though the Harvard dean who had read both applications assured me that my application was much stronger (I had published six high-impact papers whereas my male competitor had published only one)." [iv]

These same contributions were held in higher regard after his transition. After giving his first presentation when perceived as a man, a person in the audience was overheard saying, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.” [v] The "sister," of course, was Ben himself—a reference to his earlier research.

Ben’s intellect and credentials remained the same, but when his gender changed, his status increased, almost overnight. [2] As he recounted, “By far, the main difference that I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered [3] treat me with much more respect: I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.” [vi]

The Status Bias

When we bring status into the equation, women’s longstanding struggles to achieve the power they deserve, while still infuriating, start to make sense.

Power is based on status + Women have lower status = Women have less power.

It’s a subtle but important difference in the nature of the problem. What we often think of as a “gender bias” against giving women power is better understood as a “status bias.” Gender is one variable that affects how much a person is respected, but it’s ultimately the level of respect, not gender per se, that affects how easy it is to acquire and utilize power.

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This can still be a bias, because some of the decisions we make to award certain people more status than others, like women versus men, are not based on legitimate differences in skill. But it’s not a bias that is solely directed at women. It’s a general tendency to keep control away from anyone who is not highly respected. Anyone who lacks status will have a hard time acquiring power.

Once You Have Status, Use It for Good

This is why I’m evangelical about managing status first, rather than focusing only on power. When we get others to respect our value—which we can all do, regardless of our gender or any other characteristic—we have a much easier time getting what we want, including power.

Even if you don’t want to be promoted or paid more, you still benefit from power. Maybe you want to work from anywhere or set your own work hours, maybe you want to spend your budget or make hiring decisions without approval, maybe you want to have your ideas be the ones implemented, or maybe you want to control the distribution of information.

These are all different forms of power, giving you control over how you spend your resources. And your power doesn’t just benefit you. The resources you control can help others, too—you can use your authority to hire the woman returning to the workforce after caring for her family, your money to pay the babysitter what she’s worth, and your flexible work schedule to make time to volunteer for a cause that matters. There are countless ways to use your power for good—once you have the status.

Excerpted from LIKEABLE BADASS: How Women Get the Success They Deserve by Alison Fragale, Ph.D. Copyright © 2024 by Alison Fragale. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.