The term “gaslighting” was having in moment in 2022 when dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster named it as the Word of the Year. Around that time there was an awakening that this descriptor for a particularly nefarious type of manipulation was applicable beyond personal relationships and could apply to medical, political, and yes, professional situations as well.
Harvard Business Review was a beat or two ahead of trend when it published an article in 2020 that sought an answer to the question: what should I do if my boss is gaslighting me?
The author, Mary Abbajay, who is the president of management consulting firm, deftly described how these manipulators operate and why it can be so difficult to defend yourself against them:
While it is easy to spot toxic leaders who scream, bully, and abuse publicly, gaslighting behavior is much more covert. Gaslighters know how to fly under the radar. They are adept at undermining an employee’s self-esteem, confidence, and sense of reality in subtle, sneaky, and hard-to-prove ways.
Gaslighters actively seek to manipulate and control others by making the victim question their own reality and self-worth. They lie. They deny things that they said—even in writing. They project their faults onto others, putting them in a constant mode of defense. They sow confusion. They insinuate that you are the incompetent one.
Narcissistic boss? Self-care your way to freedom
Unfortunately, people of any gender or rank probably have and will experience this type of manipulation in the workplace and it’s particularly devastating if that person is your manager. But that kind of self-blame and bleak introspection is exactly what the gaslighter is hoping to achieve.
Abbajay goes on to describe the type of person who engages in this kind of behavior:
Their need to control can stem from myriad of pathologies such as incompetence, insecurity, narcissism, jealousy, or just plain pettiness. is often associated with narcissistic personality disorder, so confronting them or hoping they will change may be as pointless because narcissists go to extreme lengths to preserve their ego and control over others.
So what’s Abbajay’s advice for addressing a gaslighter in the workplace? Apparently it’s to dissociate and self-care your way out of an emotionally, intellectually, and financially abusive situation:
Imagine you are wearing a golden protective shield that repels your boss’s arrows whenever you feel targeted…Engage in as many life affirming activities you can. Exercise, meditate, journal, and do things that you love that remind you of who you are, and what you value, at your core.
So, if you’re still upset by your boss’s pathological behavior, your golden protective shield isn’t magical enough. Better journal harder.
If Abbajay thought she were addressing a gender neutral audience instead of an audience of mainly women, I have to believe that her suggestions would be much more concrete and externally focused than a metaphorical “live laugh love” poster. Can you imagine telling a group of men to meditate and journal as a solution? Which is a shame because she articulated the problem so clearly and elegantly.
Overconfidence and Competence: Will it Blend? (Spoiler: No.)
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic makes the relationship between this gelatinous soup of pathologies and the frequency that they occur in leaders in his book, “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?”, another HBR publication1. And while the title may seem cheeky, Chamorro-Premuzic is being literal:
This book explores a central question: what if these two observations—that most leaders are bad and most leaders are male—are causally linked?
In the first few chapters, Chamorro-Premuzic shows how the behaviors that we tend to equate good leadership with—overconfidence being the most prominent—in practice signal bad leadership. He goes on to explain why overconfidence is so seductive and why it can often be inversely related to competence:
Overconfidence is an effective mechanism for deceiving others. It is much easier to persuade others that you are better than you actually are when you have already managed to persuade yourself…The most competent people will exhibit much self-criticism and self-doubt, especially relative to their expertise…Expertise increases self-knowledge, which includes awareness of one’s limitations.
What makes the relationship between competence and overconfidence so perverse is that the things that make you more likely to be chosen for leadership positions are the same behaviors and traits that make you worse at actually leading.
I would argue that these traits are even further concentrated in tech where bombastic, grandiose pronouncements that stretch credulity to its limits are not only the norm, but considered a prerequisite for success.2
Chamorro-Premuzic goes on to connect the impressive levels of career success that many toxic people have with high levels of narcissism and psychopathy.
Manipulation is a major link between the toxicity of overconfident leadership and the hallmarks of a gaslighter. If narcissistic personality disorder is a hallmark of what is considered “good leadership” AND a key trait of gaslighters, it serves to reason that gaslighting is a common behavior among high-level leaders.
And because these toxic behaviors are more common in the average man than the average woman, it becomes a self-reinforcing loop where the most toxic behaviors (and the most men) are more and more concentrated the higher up the ladder you go. That’s how we get this example from the book of the gender makeup of the companies in the S&P 500 in 2017:
Women are…
44% of the workforce
36% of first-line and midlevel managers
25% of senior leaders and executives
20% of board members
6% of CEOs
While women in leadership roles do exist, their representation is not even close to proportional and gets less so in direct relation to the power the position holds.
The result is a pathological system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence.
If good leadership is boundless confidence and overconfidence is “male,” how do women become leaders at all? Turns out, when you are both competent and NOT as confident, you become MORE competent:
When competent individuals lack confidence, they will prepare more, act with caution, and become more aware of potential risks and obstacles, all of which enhance their performance.
So the next time you’re in a meeting and you hear a woman say “I could be wrong about this, but…” you should pay attention because the next thing she says is probably going to be brilliant.
Be like Mike (or John or Dave)
Most business advice for women tries to get us to be more like men. The assumption here is that women will get the same positive response for the same behavior (laughs in salad). Chamorro-Premuzic shows that female leaders have to be more exceptional to break through to leadership positions and take longer than men to reach the same leadership levels.
And I’m not even going to dip my toe into the additional expectations and work outside of paid employment that women face relative to men.
For men, the projection of confidence translated into having influence, but for women the appearance of confidence alone did not have the same effect. Women needed to couple that confidence with both competence and (very interestingly) a caring attitude. Competence aided men, but was not required.
What’s more, if a woman was perceived to have a level of confidence that does not fit the gender stereotype, her likeability took a nosedive.
So women, because they are women, cannot succeed by emulating men. But they also struggle to succeed by behaving “naturally” as women. It also means that any men or non-binary folks who are perceived to be more “feminine” are also at a disadvantage.
It’s pretty clear that behavior that is coded as female is not recognized as leadership material. Which is crazy-making given that:
Reliable evidence shows that among leaders, women generally outperform men…Specifically, women elicit more respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision more effectively, better empower and mentor their subordinates, approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way, and are fairer and more objective in their evaluation of direct reports…Men focus less on developing others and more on advancing their own career agenda. -Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
So, women are, generally-speaking, better leaders because their focus is on the collective and men are worse leaders because they focus on themselves. But because women leaders are less narcissistic, they are less likely to become leaders at all, and especially high-ranking ones.
Techno-Narcissism Concentrate
Here’s a logic puzzle:
IF men are 4x more likely than women to be senior leaders
AND men are much more likely to display narcissism
AND are rewarded for that overconfidence
AND do not need to be particularly competent
AND women have to prove superior competence
AND likeability
AND display enough confidence, but less confidence than men
THEN how do women stop feeling uncertain and under-prepared when they are demonstrably anything but?
The interpersonal dynamics on many leadership teams is grim for women. These are supremely competent, effective leaders often outnumbered by overconfident, egotistical fools by a factor of four.
And in tech those fools are often 20- or early 30-somethings with limited business experience and a couple of semesters at Harvard Business School or Sloan. As Scott Galloway put it, “If you tell a thirtysomething male he is Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you.”
These are the conditions that cause those fragile, narcissistic personalities to be concentrated, and they are reactive to anything that (intentionally or not) punctures that soft balloon of infallibility that have cocooned themselves in.
“When confident people lack competence, their best bet is to hide from others.” -Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
A competent person is a danger to the narcissist; they can create cracks in an confident/incompetent person’s projection of themself. So not only does the overconfident person have to deflate the ideas of the competent person, they have to destroy the competent person to prevent their own ego death.
This existential fear response is why these overconfident leaders—who are overwhelmingly male—are gaslighting the women they perceive as competent. Chamorro-Premuzic found that “when women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored…As the researchers found, women were selected as leaders 30% less often than their competence level would predict.”
There’s also a dynamic specific to tech that further amplifies these narcissistic tendencies and the reactions to it. It’s no secret that tech companies often lie about product capabilities, inflate numbers, and layoff employees while making billions for stock buyback schemes. And it’s not just at huge, well-known tech companies. Hundreds if not thousands of small tech companies do this on a small scale every day.
It takes a narcissist to continue to do this in plain sight, yet an entire $1.6 trillion industry and Wall Street smiles and claps away as long as they get a seat before the music stops.
Combine that with the fact that women, in tech specifically and in other industries generally, are much more likely to be whistleblowers.
Therefore, the higher a woman climbs, the more likely she is to be perceived as a threat, more likely to have these kind of men surrounding her, the less likely she is to have other competent women as her peers, and the more likely she is to have the validity of her ideas, opinions, experience, and even the data she presents challenged or ignored.
Internalized self-doubt and self-censorship that can follow is a much more effective “scold’s bridle” than making an argument because the gaslighter doesn’t run the risk of having to debate publicly and in good faith.
And if that wasn’t difficult enough on its own, going from that kind of a situation to one where you are your team’s chief leader is disorienting. Often you’re switching back and forth between them multiple times in one day. In one context you are belittled and constantly questioned; in another you are respected and admired. In one context you are self-assured; in another you’re interrogating your own judgment and sense of reality.
“It sounds more like noise to some of us”
It’s a cognitive dissonance that is weary. Particularly because women are often saddled with the onus of changing themselves when their behavior is not problematic. We are constantly advised to tie ourselves in knots to fit these man-shaped spaces that are dysfunctional instead of exploring how to change the dysfunction itself.
This absolutely wild HBR article uncritically quoted a male CEO who said, “Women are often either quiet and tentative, or they pipe up at the wrong moment, and it sounds more like noise to some of us3.” The article, authored by three women, went on to advise women to arrive at meetings early, manage their emotions, and use “muscular” words which will, apparently, make their words sound less like “noise.”
This type gaslighting creates a doomloop of even more work for female leaders who (as previously mentioned) already are more likely to self-critique and over-prepare. We are criticized for being too quiet and then criticized for how we speak up. We’re told to devise a buddy system, use assertive body language, and make sure we don’t get interrupted, as if that were even possible. Men just get to show up.
It also assumes that any of these earnest efforts to “do better” will have any effect whatsoever on the pathological, selfish personalities that are at the top of these organizations, which might just be the most pernicious form this gaslighting takes. Keep trying, keep fixing what’s '“wrong” with you, and once you get it right, you’ll be rewarded.
Kobayashi Maru: Reprogram the system or yeet out?
When I sat down to write this piece, I wanted to understand why myself and so many of my high-achieving female friends and peers are emotionally burnt out, frustrated, and discouraged at work, some even stepping down from high-level positions and many more wishing that they could.
Some of it may be due to the bipolar nature of the tech industry in the last few years. There’s a growing cynicism over everything from layoffs to the role of AI to what it is your CEO might be obfusticating in the next all-hands meeting. Many people in tech are thinking about changing careers for increased stability, more creativity, and less stress—and it’s not just women.
But speaking for myself and the many women I know and respect, the way women feel and are talking about their jobs in tech have an air of exhaustion, suspicion, and disgust that is unique to our gender and nearly ubiquitous.
To be clear, I’ve had one tech executive friend tell me she is ready to “put on her armor and fight” when it comes to women’s power and influence in tech. But she’s been the only one out of dozens who’s said anything approaching that kind of activism.
What I’ve come to realize is that many women in tech leadership are experiencing self-confidence like a bell curve and men are experiencing it linearly in relation to their success and position.
There seems to be a particular disbelief, disappointment, sadness, and eventually anger to the realization that you, a high-achieving woman, do not have the same status and respect (and probably salary) of your male peers despite your title, experience, reputation, results, and how much “leaning in” you’ve done.
What’s more, it can feel like there is a conspiracy to make you doubt your own instincts, opinions, and even the “hard” data and facts you bring to the table. Even though you’re considered to accomplished and competent, there’s just something you’re not doing right, though no one, including yourself, can really put a finger on it. All of which is designed to make you feel detached from reality so that you eventually self-censor and all the guys can have it both ways: they are not questioned AND they get to claim there’s a woman on the exec team.
Being a female leader in tech is a peculiar strain of mental exploitation because it dangles real rewards in exchange for a slice of your self-worth and sense of truth.
It is why so many high-achieving women who can are opting the fuck out of this mess right at the zenith of their careers because the relatively high salaries and prestige are not worth the gaslighting—and particularly the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that follows close on its heels.
The industry will be much worse off for it, but every time an intelligent woman can reclaim a piece of her personhood and power, I will cheer her on every time.
If you haven’t read this book yet, please do yourself a favor and get yourself a hard copy and a highlighter. I have quoted him liberally here and it won’t be the last time this book comes up on this Substack.
For the record, I don’t believe that is true but it is lazy.
The “us” here is doing a lot of work but I’m 99% sure “us” does not include other women. He’s describing what the women sound like to the men. Women are not part of the “us.”