There’s a piece of feedback that most senior women recognize the moment they hear it, whatever costume it arrives in.
Too direct. Too much. You’re coming across as aggressive. Read the room.
Sometimes it comes in softer clothes: you might want to soften your edges. Or, more gently: I wonder if the team is finding your style a bit intense.
The details vary. The shape doesn’t. And underneath all of it, the math women in leadership know by heart: too direct and you’re difficult, too warm and you’re not executive material.
Researchers call this the double bind. Catalyst named and documented it in a 2007 report on women in leadership: women leaders tend to be perceived as competent or likable, rarely both, so the same behavior that earns a male colleague the word decisive earns a woman the word abrasive. Nearly two decades later, most of the senior women I coach can describe the pattern from memory, because they’ve lived inside it.
What I want to offer here isn’t a way to win the bind. There isn’t one. It’s a way to stop letting the bind author how you lead.
The lens, not the leader
When the feedback lands, the first question most women ask is: what’s wrong with me? The research suggests a better first question: what lens is this coming through?
The classic demonstration is the Heidi and Howard study. Business school researchers Frank Flynn and Cameron Anderson gave students an identical case study about a real, successful entrepreneur, changing only the name. Half read about Heidi. Half read about Howard. Students rated both as equally competent, but Heidi came across as less likable and less someone they’d want to work with. Same accomplishments. Same words on the page. Different verdict.
The pattern shows up in feedback language too. When researcher Kieran Snyder analyzed performance reviews in 2014, she found personality-based criticism, words like abrasive, appearing frequently in reviews of women and almost never in reviews of men. Stanford’s Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard reported related findings in 2016: feedback to women runs vaguer and more personality-focused, while feedback to men tends toward the specific and actionable.
I share this research with clients for one reason. It relocates the question. Not what’s wrong with me, but what’s happening here.
The rules nobody wrote down
Where does the lens come from? From rules that were never written down, which is exactly what makes them hard to question.
Who gets to sound authoritative. Which emotions are acceptable at work and which ones cost you. What executive presence is supposed to look like, and who it was modeled on. These assumptions come from a very old worldview about power and who holds it, one so thoroughly woven into how business runs that it reads as neutral. Water doesn’t look like anything when you’ve never been out of it.
Naming this isn’t about assigning blame to any individual giving you feedback. Most people applying the lens can’t see it either, and plenty of them are women, because we all learned the same rules. Naming it matters because awareness is the beginning of choice. You can’t make a conscious choice inside a constraint you haven’t seen.
Leading from the inside out
The double bind’s whole power is that it makes you lead from the outside in, adjusting yourself to a standard that moves every time you reach it. Every adjustment aimed at fitting the narrow band of acceptable shrinks your range.
And the band moves anyway.
The counter-move is leading from awareness rather than reactivity, and it begins with a question that belongs to you instead of the lens: what’s actually true for me here, and how do I want to lead from that?
Anchor to values, not approval. Approval inside a double bind is a moving target. Your values hold still. When you decide from them, you’ll still hear the occasional “too much,” and it will land differently, as information about the lens rather than a verdict on you.
None of this dissolves the bias around you, and I won’t pretend it does. What it changes is authorship. The bind may remain in the environment. It doesn’t have to remain in charge of how you show up.
When the feedback is vague
There’s also a practical skill here, and it’s worth practicing: asking vague feedback to become specific. Kindly, and with genuine curiosity, because sometimes there’s a real development point buried in the vague wrapper.
Can you point me to a specific moment? What did I say, and what impact did you observe? What would you have wanted to see instead?
Specific answers give you something real to work with. Repeated inability to get past “it’s more of a feeling” tells you something too. And ask for the same specificity in praise, while you’re at it. Vague praise stalls careers as surely as vague criticism does, because neither tells you what to do more of.
One comment is a data point. The same personality word from three sources across two years, applied to behavior that earns your male peers promotion, is a pattern worth seeing clearly, whatever you decide to do about it.
A place to begin
The question I’d invite you to carry this week is the one that reclaims authorship: whose standard am I adjusting to right now, and did I ever agree to it?
If that question opens something up, my free guide goes further into the beliefs that run capable leaders’ careers from underneath. It’s called You’re Not Off Your Game… You’re Playing Someone Else’s, and for women leading inside the double bind, the title is more literal than most.
If this named something you’ve been carrying, I’d love to hear what it brought up. You can reach me at Jenna@JennaStoliker.com, or I’d be honored to sit with you in a discovery conversation. You can schedule one here.
Frequently asked questions
What should I say when I get feedback that I’m too aggressive?
Ask for specifics before you accept or reject it: a particular moment, what was said, what impact was observed, and what they’d want instead. Specific answers let you evaluate honestly whether there’s a development point. Vague answers that stay vague under gentle questioning tell you the feedback may say more about the lens than about you.
Should I change my leadership style to fit expectations?
Adjusting communication to be effective with different audiences is skill. Shrinking your range to fit a standard that moves every time you reach it is the double bind at work. The test: does the change grow what’s possible for you, or narrow it? Choose adjustments from your values, not from the pressure to be palatable.
How do I tell useful feedback from biased feedback?
Useful feedback is specific, behavioral, and actionable: this moment, this impact, this alternative. Biased feedback tends to be vague, personality-based, and asymmetric, criticizing in you what gets praised in others. Ask clarifying questions, look for the pattern across sources and time, and check the feedback against people who know your work and will tell you the truth.
Does the double bind ever go away?
The external pattern is bigger than any one leader, and it’s shifting slowly. What can change completely is its authorship over you. Leaders who name the bind and anchor to their own values still encounter it, but they stop reorganizing themselves around it, and that’s the difference between living in it and leading through it.
