leadership role. What does it really mean to be an executive yet feel like you have no options? How do women make sense of the sensation of being a leader but feel there are limited choices when it comes to decision making? From the outside, this rarely makes sense. However, for women in it—and for many of my readers—you know what this is like, and it is hard to explain, and exceptionally painful to experience.
Participants described the phenomenon of feeling silenced with various metaphors, which are figures of speech that go beyond pure intellect; they expand insight. If someone says, “I’m trying to run in quicksand,” it conjures up sensations. It suggests a new way of understanding the concept of feeling stuck. I once asked my CPA husband to respond to the running in quicksand metaphor with a quick reaction. Without overthinking it, he replied that he felt mucky and trapped. I believe that takes stuck or “I can’t seem to get anything accomplished,” to a different level. Different word choices create more profound understanding and empathy.
When I interviewed women about their experiences with silencing, I never asked them for a metaphor. I just asked them to tell me about a time they felt silenced in their leadership role. I would follow up their answers with a question to explain how it felt. The metaphors came without prompts.
The consistent theme across all metaphors was the perceived lack of agency; I am without choice!
The most used metaphors fell into three categories: (a) Fighting, War, Games, and Clubs, (b) Isolation and Death, (c) Body, Heart, and Soul. There were other metaphors used, but these three were consistent across multiple interviews. Let me share some examples.
Fight Club
As long as I have been an active member of the workforce, I have heard and at times used game or war metaphors to describe work. We talk about losing battles to win wars. Or we discuss what chess moves to make next. We are all guilty of saying things like, “play to win” or “fight fair.” It is often unconscious and a way to relate to both genders. Sports, games, and war analogies are laced throughout our English language.
The silenced female leader has taken her language and metaphor up a notch. Her descriptions go beyond the benign examples we find in everyday organizations or teams. She refers to her role or her organization as a game she cannot win. She will fight to feel heard, fight to get work accomplished, or fight to have an equal voice at the table. The concept of the “fight” is prevalent. Male dominance is named as a barrier to her success, and she may have to fight the “good-ol’-boys club.” Fighting to be heard suggests a struggle with voice, and when that fight reaches a certain threshold, women lose their sense of agency.
Isolation and Death
The second theme from the research is the metaphor of dying and isolation. Here, silenced women describe their organization, industry, or environment in multiple life-and-death terms. She may mention that when she is not fighting, it feels that she is being eaten alive, crushed, or strangled on the vine.
She may equate her silencing experience to suffocation, strangulation, drowning, or being out on a limb all alone. Each silencing encounter is described as a form of poison that slowly erodes her sense of self. Her language may include references to her heart, soul, mind, and body. She refers to heartbreak and bone-crushing pain. She protects herself by putting on a metaphoric armor, and she tries to develop a thick skin—this phenomenon of feeling silenced bleeds into all her domains.
Give a Little Bit of Heart and Soul
The last category is her description of her body when she feels silenced. Body, heart, and soul include stories that give a more in-depth insight into the impact of silencing. For instance, a senior faculty member at a university stated, “I refer to that time as living with sandpaper on my soul.” I’ve heard women describe heart-sickness, heartbreak, along with soul-dying, and body-trampling pain when silenced. These are not random experiences that leave this sensation, but ongoing, continuous periods.
My real estate–selling sister is three years older, and I idolized her as a teenager. I remember blasting T’Pau’s 1987 song, “Heart and Soul,” in her brown Chevette the summer after her freshman year of college. I would sing the lyrics about giving a little but not begging for love in the process.
I believe at the root of my being that leadership is a call for courage, heart, and soul. We have to be somewhat in love with the purpose that calls for our leadership, and when we lose our heart, we can begin to feel like beggars.
So, who are these villains and silencers who would evoke metaphors of fights, death, isolation, and loss of heart or soul? I would love to paint them as dark felons who relish in criminal behavior. I wish it were that simple or true—because then we could put them in a category that we believe they belong and turn the key.
The Silencers
I imagine without much analysis, there are several people who come to mind as silencers. Elite players in Hollywood, politicians, and the wealthy well-connected privileged are often the accused and the convicted. It only takes a few casual glances at a news broadcast to be aware of powerful men who silence women with non-disclosure agreements, settlements, and career-limiting threats or actions.
The female leaders in my research did not describe their silencers in this same vein.
Instead, they view their silencers as sometimes intentional but mostly subtle, unknowing, but incessant. They include people, systems, and even themselves. Women experience silencing through the non-verbal opportunism of bosses or peers, primarily when they emphasize written communication over face-to-face conversations. Others may fail to give eye contact or may mock with eye rolls when they speak. Women experience the silence that separates with the silent treatment that can come in the form of people being non-responsive to emails or requests. Female leaders can be excluded from meetings by not getting invitations to attend or even worse, getting uninvited. In more extreme circumstances, silencers may be physical. They can fist-pump the table, be rough with chairs, raise their voices, or slam doors to show their disapproval.
Individuals will also silence her with verbal criticism and control. She is the recipient of dismissive comments that question her expertise based on her gender, race, or her role in the organization. She is criticized privately, publicly, and in extreme cases through random acts of nonviolent behavior—like smearing messages in satisfaction surveys or quite literally on bathroom walls. Despite her role as an executive leader, she is on the receiving end of command-and-control leadership from either her supervisor or in some cases, the board of directors. She notices everything. She sees others conspiring against her and may feel thinly harassed. At times, she will need to ward off more overt sexual advances or public shaming, but that is typically not the norm for women in executive roles. Sexual advances are more prevalent at lower levels of leadership or perhaps when she is starting her career. However, unlike lower levels of leadership, she does not always have a place to take her concerns or complaints when something unpardonable does occur.
As she navigates silencing behavior from individuals, she is also silenced by systems of privilege. Here her silencers are faceless and represent dominant male behavior demonstrated by both genders. Systems of privilege may also favor personal characteristics, like a style of leadership or affiliations that are based on preferred groups, credentials, or roles. If she has those characteristics and associations, she may experience inclusion.
It does not matter if you are five years old on the playground, the new hire in your first professional role, or an executive sitting in a c-suite—exclusion is always painful regardless of an achieved or perceived level of success.
