To get ahead in the workplace, you have to be seen. Being visible at work allows employees to demonstrate their skills, land prominent assignments, and build strategic relationships.
Why Women Stay Out of the Spotlight at Work
To get ahead in the workplace, you have to be seen. But for women, the importance of visibility creates a conundrum. On the one hand, women’s contributions are systematically overlooked at work. This limits their professional advancement and helps to explain why the senior levels of organizations today remain overwhelmingly male. Yet, when women try to make themselves more visible in the office, they can face backlash for violating expectations about how women should behave and risk losing the hard-won career gains they have already made.
How do women navigate this no-win situation? Research, on a women’s professional development program at a large U.S. non-profit, finds that many women often chose to stay out of the spotlight at work, and they did so for three reasons: to avoid conflict or backlash, to feel authentic at work, and to balance professional and personal demands. The consequence of this general approach to the workplace was that they often ended up feeling well-liked but underappreciated.
There are three steps organizations can take to make it easier for women to be seen and promoted: value unconventional forms of leadership, fight implicit bias, and balance women’s second-shift responsibilities.