Since 2007, I’ve been coaching professional women to “speak up.” Speak up in the meeting. Ask for the promotion. Push back when you’re interrupted. Negotiate your salary. Advocate for yourself. Learn to be politically savvy, especially because you’re navigating in a workplace full of landmines, a workplace that wasn’t designed for you.
Leadership programs teach women how to communicate, negotiate, influence, and yes, speak up.
But maybe it’s time to ask: What happens when you do speak up and the system doesn’t listen?
Or worse, when you speak up and the response makes your situation even more difficult?
That is the part of the conversation we don’t talk about nearly enough.
What We Don’t See
We can advise women to speak up til the cows come home, but the problem isn’t women being silent, it’s often that women don’t feel safe enough to speak up. Therefore, they stay silent. So if we consider all the women who never report anything in the first place, there’s a bigger issue we don’t see, especially when it comes to sexual harassment.
The EEOC’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace found that roughly three out of four people who experienced harassment never even talked to a supervisor, manager, or union representative about it.
The EEOC later reiterated that 90% of people who said they had experienced harassment never took formal action.
Why?
Maybe we fear no one will believe us or that nothing will happen so why bother. Our experience in the workplace validates this. It’s also possible we fear retaliation that could damage our careers. (That’s a real threat that many of us have also experienced after we speak out against mistreatment.)
Sexual harassment is only one part of the problem.
What about misogyny, racism, gender bias, gendered ageism?
What about the woman who is repeatedly passed over for promotion because her boss thinks she is “not leadership material”?
The woman who is excluded from important meetings and then criticized for not being visible enough?
The woman whose ideas are ignored until a male colleague repeats them?
The woman over 50 who is quietly pushed aside because leadership wants “fresh energy” and she knows that if she leaves, finding another comparable position may be difficult because of the very age bias she is experiencing?
The Black woman whose assertiveness is interpreted as aggression?
The woman who returns from maternity leave and discovers that her career trajectory has changed?
These experiences may never become lawsuits or headlines, and they may never appear in an HR report. Let’s face it. They may never make it to HR in the first place. But that doesn’t negate the fact that this is happening. We just don’t know about it.
What we see in public is only a tip of the iceberg.
Sure, some cases eventually become public. We see some lawsuits involving sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation and ageism.
But that’s a small sampling of women who finally decide they have nothing left to lose in these situations but to speak up.
What about everyone else?
The woman who quietly leaves.
The woman who transfers departments.
The woman who stops raising her hand.
The woman who stops asking for promotions.
The woman who decides it is safer to keep her head down.
The woman who tells herself, I’m too old to start over.
The woman who worries that speaking up will brand her as “difficult,” or call attention to her being “past her prime.”
The woman who says, I’m not going to make a big deal out of this.
The woman who thinks, what’s the point?
We don’t see those women in the statistics, yet organizations experience the consequences.
Women leave. They disengage and stop offering ideas. They lose trust in leadership.
And eventually, some of them walk out the door.
Read the full article on Substack.com
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