Why telling women of color to try harder misses the psychology entirely
I am a woman of color with ten years of experience in tech. I have navigated rooms where my ideas were dismissed and later credited to someone else. I have been told I was “too direct” for saying exactly what a male colleague said five minutes before me. I have code switched, and watched so many others do the same. For most, it’s exhausting on the spot. For others, the exhaustion creeps up on you…
I didn’t always have the language for what I was experiencing. Then I started a Master’s in Political Psychology — and suddenly everything had a name.
The problem with “leaning in”
Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s iconic framework, told women to take up more space. Be more assertive. Ask for the promotion. Sit at the table.
It’s not bad advice. But for women of color, it’s incomplete at best and counterproductive at worst.
Here’s what the psychology tells us: attitudes are a three-tier system — cognitive, affective, and behavioral.
What people think, how they feel, and how they act are all deeply intertwined. And because of this, attitudes are extraordinarily resistant to change. The biases women of color face in the workplace aren’t random — they are deeply formed attitudes that people carry into every single interaction.
No amount of leaning in fixes that.
In fact, leaning in can backfire.
Women of color already navigate an underlying stigma of aggression — the assumption that assertiveness reads as anger, that directness reads as hostility. When you tell a woman of color to take up more space in an environment built on those attitudes, you’re not leveling the playing field.
You’re asking her to walk further into a trap.
The psychology underneath the problem
What I’ve come to understand through my studies is that the barriers women of color face aren’t just cultural — they are psychological and systemic.
Here are the mechanisms at play:
Stereotype threat — the performance burden of fearing you’ll confirm a negative stereotype. When you’re being direct and you know it might read as aggressive, part of your cognitive bandwidth is spent managing that fear instead of doing the actual work.
The double bind — the no-win communication paradox. Too assertive and you’re aggressive. Too collaborative and you’re weak. There is no correct way to communicate when the evaluation criteria are built on bias.
Code switching — the cognitive tax of constantly shifting your communication style, tone, and presentation to fit white corporate norms. It is exhausting in a way that is difficult to quantify but very easy to feel.
Intersectionality — women of color don’t just navigate gender bias or racial bias. They navigate both simultaneously, in ways that compound and interact. This is not the same experience as white women or men of color. It is its own distinct psychological burden.
Identity threat — the chronic stress of being a numerical minority in leadership spaces. When you are one of few, every mistake feels representative. Every success feels like it has to be defended.
Implicit bias — the unconscious attitudes that shape how women of color are perceived and evaluated before they even open their mouths.
Elite decision-making access — perhaps most critically, the informal networks where real decisions get made are often the spaces women of color are most excluded from. And when you’re already depleted from navigating everything above, there is less cognitive energy left for the actual work of leading.
What needs to change
The solution is not to ask women of color to adapt more skillfully to a system designed to exclude them. The solution is to change the system.
That means organizations like Lean In need to shift from individual-focused strategies to psychologically-informed systemic ones. It means targeting the attitudes and environments around women of color — not asking women of color to change themselves. It means acknowledging that the burden of change has been placed, too often, on the very people requesting it.
I’m currently developing a full strategy memo on this topic as part of my capstone project in the MA in Political Psychology. This is the beginning of that conversation.
Because ten years in tech gave me the experience. The MA gave me the framework. And now I intend to do something with both.
Yo, did you get your workout in today? Remove to MOVE your body. It’s the secret to longevity.