Whenever Deborah points out to her boss—a man—that she is not treated the same as her male manager peers, he thinks she’s imagining things.

Why then, is her name left off the e-mail list inviting her counterparts to meetings and updating them on their division? She doesn’t even bring up the fact that the men don’t invite her for drinks after work. Nor do they ask her to play golf. It’s being left out of the day-to-day business that irks her most. And that her boss can’t see it.

There is something else that rubs her wrong. And that is that others find fault with her style—something the men never hear. She’s tried to be less direct, but says she can’t seem to bring up her opinion assertively without being labeled harshly. “I know they think I’m a bitch,” she told me. Now she sounds unsure. “When the guys are tough it’s ok. But when I stand firm, they say I’m hard to work for.”

She and nearly every woman in a leadership role I talk to feel frustrated about not being accepted the same as the men—someone who tells it like it is and makes things happen.

“The expectation held by both women and men is that women ought to be nice,” says Peter Glick, professor of psychology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. “When women act assertively, they are perceived to violate the prescription for feminine niceness, leading them to be downgraded, specifically in terms of their perceived warmth or social skills—not in terms of their competence.”

As a result, “Women in powerful positions find themselves trying to perform a difficult tightrope act,” he says. “They need to act assertively and confidently to demonstrate competence, but if they do so they can risk being perceived as insufficiently nice (i.e., bitchy), causing them to be socially rejected and disliked.” Men aren’t held to as high a standard of niceness, so they “have an easier time acting assertively without being labeled as particularly nasty.”

After all the progress women have made in the workplace, you’d think things might be different. But men resent women for that progress, says Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, with “this resentment at the root of the assaultive language against women.”

The language includes such adjectives as “pain in the ass” when describing a women, as opposed to “persistent and savvy” when describing a man. Or “too smart for her own good,” versus “brilliant,” for a man, “who does she think she is?” versus “leader” for a man or “castrating” versus powerful and strong.”

You can start to believe these stereotypes and “act in the very way that supports the stereotypes,” says Deborah Kolb, professor at Simmons College School of Management in Boston. “A woman who is afraid of being stereotyped as too aggressive becomes tentative.” Then, “if she is tentative, she can’t lead.” Dr. Kolb’s advice is to find a voice that feels authentic enough so you can ask for what you need. If you’re negatively stereotyped, respond in a way that neutralizes it—with humor.”

Corporate image consultant, Sandy Dumont, urges women to lower their voices and speak slowly and calmly when upset. “High pitched voice and accusing tone is a killer. It nearly guarantees that you will be tuned out and possibly labeled as a screechy, whining woman.”

But if a woman is “so afraid of being negatively stereotyped that she sounds tentative and unsure, she should get out of the race, since she’s not going to win it anyhow.” says Dr. Lieberman. To get ahead, “she needs to realize that she’s not running for homecoming queen, where betting her eyelashes coyly and smiling sweetly is all that it takes.”

It can be an unconscious tendency to apply different standards to women. We all need to notice whether we do that to others whatever race or gender they may be.

© by Andrea Kay