Where Did the Intimidating Woman Go?

On leadership, loyalty, and the resentment we might be calling burnout.

I’ve been called intimidating enough times in my career that I should probably have it professionally added to my résumé. Usually, it means I’m direct, willing to disagree, and unlikely to suggest we revisit an obvious problem sometime after it has become a larger, more expensive problem. What makes the label interesting is how little it tells anyone about the woman receiving it. She can be perfectly comfortable challenging a decision and still spend far too much time worrying about what will happen if she stops being accommodating.

I recognize that contradiction. I have no trouble asking for what I want or saying that something isn’t acceptable. But I also care about people, feel responsible for the work, and can see possibilities worth sticking around for. Across my career, I’ve noticed how easily those qualities can complicate a decision I would consider fairly straightforward on someone else’s behalf. And I have a hard time believing I’m the only woman who can deliver an extremely clear message and then quietly negotiate exceptions to it with herself.

Maybe you’ve experienced some version of this too. You’re confident in the meeting, capable in a crisis, and the person others trust to handle a difficult conversation. Yet when the decision involves your own limits, you suddenly have a much more elaborate assessment of everybody else’s circumstances. You know what you need. You also know who might be disappointed, what could be disrupted, and how much easier it would be for everyone if you could just manage a little longer. Apparently, everyone includes everyone except you.

That doesn’t look much like the usual picture of a woman “playing small.” She may have a senior title and no shortage of opinions. What gets smaller is the room she allows her own needs to occupy. She has authority, but using it to protect herself can feel less justified than using it to protect the team. How does someone become comfortable being seen as demanding while still feeling compelled to make as few demands on other people as possible?

The expectations surrounding women’s leadership offer one place to look. Psychologists Alice Eagly and Steven Karau’s role congruity theory describes the tension between traditional expectations of women and expectations of leaders. Women can be judged less favorably for lacking qualities associated with leadership, and also for displaying them. Being decisive doesn’t guarantee that decisiveness will be received the same way it would from a man. Women may be expected to exercise authority while also managing the discomfort that authority creates. A convenient arrangement for everyone who isn’t doing both jobs. mlkrook.org

So perhaps some of the hesitation we describe as a confidence problem involves a different question: when are women allowed to make their own interests consequential? Advocating for a team has an obvious purpose. Insisting on a limit for yourself can invite questions about whether you’re flexible, committed, or sufficiently understanding. If you’ve learned to make your leadership acceptable by demonstrating how much you care, a decision that disappoints people may feel like putting that acceptance at risk.

Then there’s the responsibility we pick up before anyone formally asks us to. A gap appears, somebody needs support, and a capable person sees a way to help. Taking care of it seems easier than letting it become a problem. The first time, that may be a sensible choice. Over time, however, there can be less and less discussion about whose responsibility it actually is, because the same person keeps preventing the consequences of nobody deciding.

This isn’t always an explicit request or a deliberate attempt to take advantage. Sometimes it’s a habit that forms because one person notices, volunteers, and follows through. Others get used to the result. Research by Linda Babcock and her colleagues found that women were more likely than men to volunteer for, be asked to do, and accept tasks that helped the organization but contributed relatively little to their advancement. Expectations that women would agree helped drive the pattern. That finding doesn’t explain every workplace, but it gives us a reason to look beyond “she’s just naturally helpful.” sites.pitt.edu

Being helpful matters. Teams need people who notice things and contribute beyond the narrowest interpretation of their job. But contribution becomes harder to assess when it is consistently expected from some people and treated as optional for others. Who gets to notice a problem and delegate it? Who notices the same problem and immediately feels responsible for solving it? And why can two people with comparable authority feel so differently about whether the unfinished work belongs to them?

One question I’ve had to ask myself is why seeing a need so often feels like accepting an assignment. I like being capable. I like making things work. But there’s a difference between knowing how to help and being the person who ought to do it every time. It’s surprisingly easy to skip that distinction when you care about the outcome, then become irritated that nobody else seems to have felt the same urgency. Apparently, some people can observe a problem without adopting it. Fascinating. Would love to hear more about that experience.

This is where resentment starts to make sense, and where another question becomes interesting: could some of what we call burnout be resentment in hiding? You may be exhausted, certainly, but also angry that the help has become assumed, that others aren’t meeting you with comparable effort, or that nobody seems curious about what keeping everything functioning is asking of you. The task itself may be manageable. Repeatedly carrying it while the people who could help remain comfortably uninvolved is a different experience.

“I’m burned out” can feel easier to say than “I’m angry about what has become expected of me.” Exhaustion invites sympathy. Anger may invite a conversation about your attitude, especially if people already find you a little too direct. Describing the problem as burnout can also make it easier to respond with advice about rest, resilience, and looking after yourself. Describing the unfairness asks more of the people around you. A scented candle has limited authority over other people’s decisions.

Burnout research gives us a reason to examine more than the volume of work. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter identify fairness, control, recognition, relationships, and values alongside workload as important areas of working life associated with burnout. That doesn’t make burnout and resentment interchangeable, but it does make the question worth asking: would this feel different if the work were shared, your concerns taken seriously, and your effort reciprocated? If a break helps until you return to the same arrangement, what else needs to change? PMC

Resentment doesn’t automatically establish who’s right, and it can involve expectations we haven’t expressed as well as concerns we’ve communicated repeatedly. But it deserves examination before we decide a woman has simply lost her enthusiasm. What was she hoping would be noticed? What has she already asked for? Is she disappointed in the work itself, or in how little responsibility others are taking for it? Those questions might tell us more than another discussion about how she can become better at managing stress.

There is another complication when the woman expressing that resentment has already been described as intimidating. Her frustration can become further evidence of the label, while the circumstances behind it receive less scrutiny. We might discuss whether she sounded angry before asking what she has been trying to address. Women can be accountable for how they communicate, of course. The people hearing them should also be accountable for responding to the substance, particularly when the same concern has been raised calmly several times before.

Loyalty can make this harder to untangle because it attaches us to more than an organization. We care about colleagues, clients, and work that has meaning. Putting a limit on what we will do may feel like letting those people down, even when the problem belongs to a wider group of decision-makers. How much responsibility do we assign ourselves because we care, and how much responsibility do others get to avoid because they know we do?

Hope keeps the calculation going. Maybe support will arrive. Maybe the next conversation will produce a different result. Maybe the effort will eventually be recognized and the relationship will become more reciprocal. None of that is impossible, which is part of what makes hope so persuasive. But possibility can keep receiving extensions long after the evidence deserves a less enthusiastic review. There is a point where we’re asking what could happen so often that we stop giving enough weight to what keeps happening.

Hope doesn’t have to be the first step toward disappointment. It can, however, become an excellent way to prolong it. Every explanation gets evaluated separately, every promise feels like movement, and the overall pattern never quite gets its turn. The question is whether hope is responding to something other people are actually doing, or whether our willingness to continue is still the only thing making the situation sustainable. Optimism is useful. It is less impressive when one person’s optimism has become everybody else’s contingency plan.

So when does it become too much? A limit doesn’t have to wait until care turns into contempt or exhaustion makes the decision for us. We can look at what has changed since the concern was raised, whether responsibility is being shared, and whether the costs of continuing are receiving the same attention as the costs of stopping. The difficult part is accepting that a reasonable decision may still disappoint people. Their disappointment doesn’t automatically mean the decision was unreasonable.

I have a psychology degree, which is helpful for understanding all of this and considerably less helpful for making me immune to it. What interests me most isn’t how to become less caring. It’s whether I can stop treating care as a reason to exempt other people from the standards I would expect them to meet for someone else. I suspect other women recognize that distinction too: we want to remain invested without making our investment an agreement to carry whatever others leave unresolved.

That requires more than another round of advice telling women to be assertive. If a woman has already been clear, the conversation needs to include what the people around her will do differently. If an organization values her judgment, it needs to respect her judgment about her own capacity. Loyalty should involve some responsibility on both sides. Otherwise, we’re praising a quality in her while relying on it to spare everyone else an uncomfortable decision.

Perhaps the intimidating woman hasn’t disappeared. Perhaps she’s busy applying an impressive amount of critical thinking to why her own perfectly reasonable standards should qualify for another exception. She can challenge a bad decision, lead through a crisis, and still give a situation more chances than she would recommend to anyone else. Being capable doesn’t make us immune to attachment, loyalty, or hope. Apparently, it just makes us better at preparing supporting documentation.

Those qualities have value, but they deserve the same scrutiny we bring to everything else. Is loyalty being reciprocated? Is patience producing progress? Does hope have anything to report beyond another encouraging conversation? We can believe in people without giving every possibility an indefinite extension. At some point, “it could get better” needs to submit evidence. Enthusiasm alone would not survive most of our budget meetings.

The resentment underneath some of our exhaustion belongs in that assessment too. We can examine why we keep volunteering ourselves as the solution while also asking why others have become so comfortable with the arrangement. That gives everyone something to work on, which seems fair. Another resilience workshop for the woman already handling everything feels like a slightly ambitious interpretation of solving the problem.

And that brings us back to how women’s leadership is received. We encourage women to exercise judgment, then sometimes become remarkably interested in their personalities when we dislike the result. A woman deciding that something needs to change deserves the same consideration as a woman finding a way to keep it running. She may still care about the people, believe in the work, and want things to succeed. She can also decide that success requires somebody else to participate. If we trust her to recognize what everyone else needs, we should be prepared to take her seriously when her assessment finally includes herself.