What a name-swap experiment, some magazine covers, and a work experience taught me about the likability trap
This is week two of my series documenting what I’m learning in my organizational leadership graduate program, and how it keeps colliding with my actual life as a leader.
In 2003, a Columbia Business School professor ran a quiet experiment. He took a Harvard case study about Heidi Roizen, a real, successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and gave half his class the original. The other half got an identical copy with exactly one change: Heidi became Howard.
Same accomplishments. Same aggressive networking. Same career. One name swapped.
The students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent. But Howard? Great guy, someone you’d want to work with. Heidi? Selfish. Political. Out for herself. Students didn’t want to hire her or work for her, and it wasn’t just the men saying so. The women in the class penalized her too.
That’s the likability trap in one experiment: success and likability rise together for men and pull apart for women.
The week the research got personal
This module in my program was literally titled “The Likeability Trap”.
Here’s the pattern the research describes.
Alice Eagly and Steven Karau call it role congruity theory: we expect women to be communal (kind, warm, supportive, agreeable) and we expect leaders to be agentic (assertive, decisive, direct). Those two expectations don’t overlap. So a woman leading gets caught in a double bind: seen as less of a leader when she’s communal, and punished for violating “how women should be” when she’s not. Laurie Rudman’s experiments put numbers on it; she calls the punishment backlash. Women who self-promote are rated just as competent as men doing the identical thing. They’re also rated less likable and less hireable. Same script, opposite verdict.
The magazine covers (Random Assignment But Related)
Part of this module involved analyzing GQ covers, and I’ll be honest: I think about this stuff all the time, so the images just confirmed it.
The “Men of the Year” covers: Ben Affleck, Channing Tatum, four more men across a spread, all fully clothed, mostly in suits, framed by headlines about their work. Then the women on the same magazine: Rita Ora, Kim Kardashian, successful in their spaces, and completely naked. And the one that got me: British GQ’s 2012 “Men of the Year” series. Four men in tuxedos, each titled by his achievement. And the “Woman of the Year”? Nude, curled up, knees to her chest.
Same magazine. Same award. Same year.
There’s nothing against showing your body (more power to you). I think it’s genuinely good for women to be emboldened to embrace their bodies. But the pattern only runs one direction, and it communicates something: even when a woman is successful, her body still might often be at the forefront.
Sociologist Joan Acker wrote about this back in 1990: organizations are built around an “ideal worker” who is abstract, disembodied, and unencumbered, which quietly means male. So does this mean men get to be their achievements, and women get to be bodies that also achieved something? Or is this oversimplification?
So what do you actually do?
Be concerned less with likability and more with competence and respect. Because at the end of the day, you cannot control how much people like you. Period. The people who are often liked most focus on amiability and agreeableness, and if it’s a boys’ club, of course they’ll get along a little better together. But when you prioritize compliance, efficiency, protecting the culture and the people, and you hold people accountable? Your likability tends to decrease, sometimes significantly. The research says that’s not a flaw in your approach. That’s the tax.
But don’t confuse “can’t be controlled” with “doesn’t matter.” As a leader, it’s important not to be hated. If you’re hated, you likely won’t get much done. Productivity drops, morale drops. Likability is not the goal, but hatred is a real cost. The floor matters more than the ceiling.
The bridge between those two is understanding. Listen to people. Have one-on-one conversations with your peer leaders and direct reports. Understand who they are, what they want, what drives them, what will retain them, and what their trigger points are. Sometimes the reason your likability reads so low, or gets so misconstrued, is that people simply don’t understand you. Understanding can bridge the gap that likability can’t.
And go to the source. When a grievance about me reached a peer leader instead of me, I thanked the person who surfaced it, and then went directly to the person who raised it. Not to defend myself. To say: what can I do to help you feel more comfortable bringing this to me next time, because if you bring it to me peer, I’m going to work it either way, which may likely involve you in some way. I’ve also started challenging my peers to give more direct feedback, and when they bring a grievance, to bring a potential solution or idea we can explore together. Grievance plus proposal beats grievance alone, every time.
The Carla Harris caveat
Wall Street veteran Carla Harris famously says “perception is the co-pilot to reality”: you can train people to think about you the way you want, by consistently embodying a few chosen adjectives. At first that sounds like the opposite of “you can’t control how much people like you.”
I don’t think it is. What Harris really advocates for is managing perception, and that aligns with seeking to understand people and developing a mutual understanding between two parties. She’s not saying perform someone you’re not; her whole first principle is that authenticity is your competitive advantage. She’s saying: don’t leave the story of who you are to be written entirely by people who might be reading you through a biased lens. Perception management and understanding-seeking are the same motion, run in both directions.
The honest asterisk, which the research insists on: individual strategy doesn’t dismantle the structure. Rudman’s studies found the bias driving backlash is implicit, held equally by people who’d never endorse a sexist statement, women included. You can navigate brilliantly and the scoring system stays rigged. Navigating and naming the system aren’t alternatives. Leaders, especially the ones who got in the room, have to do both.
What I’m doing differently
Less energy on being liked. More on seeking opportunities to increase mutual understanding. Zero tolerance for being misconstrued in silence; I go to the source now. And when I look at criteria (hiring rubrics, performance reviews, “culture fit”) I ask a new question the research handed me: is this measuring the work, or is it giving a stereotype somewhere legitimate to land?
Because the trap isn’t that women aren’t likable enough.
The trap is that likable was never the real requirement. It was just where the bias learned to hide.
Sources for the curious: Joan Acker’s “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies” (1990); Eagly & Karau’s role congruity theory (2002); Laurie Rudman on self-promotion backlash (1998); Rudman & Glick on prescriptive stereotypes (2001); Frank Flynn’s Heidi/Howard classroom study (2003); Carla Harris’s “How to Own Your Power” (2014); and Robin Hauser’s TEDx talk “The Likability Dilemma for Women Leaders.”
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