The daring truth about why your best ideas never enter the room

The Math Makes Sense. The Cost Doesn't.

You have a more ideas than you know what to do with. Would make sense to share them. So someone else can run with a few.

But you don’t.

Not because you think they’re worthless. Quite the contrary. You know full well what your ideas are worth.

It’s just that you’ve seen too many of them ignored, dismissed out of hand, and only later implemented when someone else re-surfaced them. And got the credit. Usually a male.

So you keep your ideas to yourself, implement what you have control over, and leave others to come up with their own ideas.

Totally reasonable.

You’ve correctly read the water you (and everyone else) swims in. The biases, the incentives.

It’s heavily skewed in favor of males and against females. Judging them against different standards, applying different norms, punishing one for what’s lauded in the other.

Some hard numbers that illustrate the mismatch

Women get interrupted (rude at any time) three times as often as men. And when they share their ideas, they’re 20% less likely to receive credit when they’re acted upon.

Women in executive functions who speak up get rated 14% less competent by their colleagues. Male executives doing the same thing gain 10%.

The numbers are undeniable. The math says to stay quiet.

I get that. I’ve been there. When I was naive enough not to notice it. When I did, I turned to facts and data. Only to learn that those don’t win arguments.

We won’t change the biases any time soon.

But like it’s a ridiculous notion to think it’s futile to save a single living being (flora or fauna) because you can’t save them all, not taking any action towards change is just as ridiculous.

Because there’s a cost to keeping your ideas to yourself that not only hurts you and the organization you’re a part of it, but everyone on this Earth.

Because patriarchy has promoted a profit and extraction mindset through its indoctrination of males into comparison and competition for a very limited definition of “success”.

And the world is and will remain short of ideas for reversing that and repairing the damage done while women keep their ideas to themselves.

Humor me while I dive a little deeper

The tax no one audits

When you keep your mouth shut, your idea either disappears (the moment passes, the context never is that relevant again), or the alternative route you try (sharing it with someone you think is it’s safe to do so with) comes back to haunt you.

Almost two-thirds of multiracial women report having their ideas presented in a meeting by someone else. As theirs.

Not out of malice. Usually.

More a case of having heard it, mulled it over, and made it their own. They probably don’t even remember who planted the seed.

And you wonder whether it’s worth calling it out. Will anyone even believe you genuinely mentioned it a couple of days ago? Wouldn’t it sound like you’re trying to get in on it? And even if that didn’t happen, it would definitely still cost you. (Being labeled “difficult”.)

This is the “workaround” tax.

It compounds the interruption tax.

On top of the credibility tax.

Every route through a room that isn’t prepared to receive women’s contributions directly has a surcharge attached.

While virtual rooms removed the most obvious obstacles for women to speak up, 45% of women business leaders say it’s still difficult to speak up in those.

All three taxes follow you home.

The “lag” tax no business sees clearly

Apart from the taxes women incur, businesses incur taxes too.

The first of these (more later) is a direct result of the workaround tax.

Women know it only too well. But they keep their mouth shut because calling it out comes with more costs for them.

The idea that got “rolled out company-wide” this quarter?

It was actually suggested three or four years ago. By a woman. Who watched it get ignored, resurfaced through the workaround tax, tested quietly by the resurfacer(s), adopted, and then announced as an initiative.

Three to four years.

Imagine what other ideas are languishing in obscurity that could have been acted upon and generating benefits if businesses (and organizations) had the sense to take women’s ideas as seriously as they do men’s.

Gone without a trace

The thing about a suppressed idea is that it leaves no trace.

No one can hear what isn’t said.

You can’t calculate the opportunity cost of an opportunity you didn’t hear.

No post mortem looks into what could’ve been done that wasn’t.

Innovative ideas that don’t get spoken, don’t generate data.

Makes it hard to figure out what women’s (self-)silencing is costing us. But hard isn’t a mission impossible. The workaround is to look at companies and organizations that get the diversity thing more right than others.

Making it safe and rewarding for women to speak up, pays you back with interest and then some

The other taxes business incur when they don’t make it a point to make speaking up safe and rewarding for women, have been measured by comparing them against organizations who do.

The Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity in management report 19% higher innovation revenue.

McKinsey (doing a slightly better job for women than with their ”Broken Rung” report) found that companies in the top 25% when it comes to gender diversity are 39% more likely to outperform on profitability.

Closing the gender gap could add $12 trillion to global GDP according to McKinsey’s Global Institute.

Self-censorship is rational. The incentives are real.

The standard framing says women need to speak up more — lean in, build confidence, develop executive presence.

That framing is aimed at the wrong audience entirely.

It puts the onus squarely on women, while ignoring the ways in which males and culture incentivizes them to keep their mouths firmly shut.

Would you willingly put your hand in the hive of killer bees? (Unless it’s necessary to stay within your integrity?)

Women have the nerve to speak up. They don’t hold back because they lack confidence, or ambition, or ideas. They hold back because the cost-benefit calculation tells them to.

Women have been burned too often to do more than sneer at the “lean in, build more confidence, develop executive presence”. They know, having felt the consequences, that showing up with more “male” behaviors backfires.

Perhaps unless they own the company. Then they still incur all the penalties, but aren’t affected as much because, well, they’re the boss.

What’s at stake

We are living with the consequences of a long period in which one half of humanity’s competencies was systematically called into question and their potential contributions to society actively scorned.

Patriarchal definitions of success — growth over sustainability, hierarchy over connection, output over wellbeing, competition over collaboration — have gotten us where we are now. And I’m not at all convinced that we’re in a desirable place.

Where could we have been if we had appreciated every human the same way?

Where could we have been without the patriarchal mindset and thinking?

Though I’ve often been called a pessimist because I tend to start at the beginning, the problem and its costs, I’m actually a stout optimist. I firmly believe everything can be changed, turned around, fixed. (To my great dismay my brain’s wiring has proven resistant to this belief.)

We need every available mind on this planet to reverse the mindset and repair the damage of the extractive nature of what Angell Deer calls “Empire” and I call patriarchal thinking.

At all levels. The physical, mental/spiritual, familial, economic, natural, community/societal, etc.

Some people cheer that patriarchy is dying. It is. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. It’s going to take another century to a century and a half. And in the mean time, those who feel most threatened by it being under stress will get more and more extreme in their thinking and insistence on restricting women’s autonomy.

Navigating the water while it’s still favoring men

Women have a well-honed sense for reading what’s being missed. The connection no one else in the room made, the problem identified before it became a crisis.

Without it we got where we are now and where we as a species are headed, taking every other species (flora and fauna) along with us.

We need women to speak out. We need the wisdom accumulated in women.

Like the San people, with a 20 thousand (!) year long culture that still lasts recognize.

But the room and the water we all (women and men alike) swim in, will eventually change but it’s not going to be any time soon. That’s why I won’t tell you to lean in and speak up anyway.

But I won’t leave you hanging either. A few suggestions that actually work:

The paper-trail workaround: Put it in writing. Share your ideas in a document, an email thread, a presentation deck. Get your name on the idea record before anyone else can appropriate it. It’s the paper-trail workaround.

The double-punch: State your idea in a meeting. Watch what happens. If it’s ignored and then later gets applause when repeated by someone else: jump on it. Without crying foul. “Yes, that’s the direction I was pointing at earlier. Glad it landed.” Matter-of-factly. No (visible) emotion. It calls out what happened without making a fuss and getting other’s hackles up while still positioning you for credit.

The battles rooms triage: Some rooms simply aren’t worth the trouble or the toll. Invest in rooms where speaking up has the best chance of moving your ideas forward. Triage is an effective strategy outside of an emergency (room) too.

The idea journal: This is another type of paper-trail workaround. Keep a record, a log of what happens with/to your ideas. Makes it easier to spot patterns. About the rooms, about the people in it. Helps with triage. Fun part: you don’t risk forgetting your ideas and can carry them with you wherever you go. Bonus part: a log is a form of what’s legally known as contemporaneous notes. They carry more weight than memories recorded (much) later. So if anyone should question your double-punch, you can ask: “Want me to get my logbook?” (That’s why my employer, back in the ‘80s insisted we keep logs of what we did when working at a client.)

Tedious? Yes. And still the smart move.

Yes, all these suggestions are tedious. None of them should be necessary. None solve the structural problem.

That’s unfortunate. But denying reality won’t get you anywhere. And the structural part is beyond your control anyway (unless you’re at the very top of the heap).

Whatever you do, please don’t hold your breath waiting for them to change. That would be self-defeating if not down-right dangerous.

I suggest using my suggestions to navigate the waters without incurring the penalties associated with common “lean in” advice. Other women will notice. And, you can let them in on your tactics. So it spreads. Which is likely to speed up structural change. Because the room (then) can’t help but notice.

In the meantime: your ideas are too good to disappear!

I genuinely believe we need more female brains contributing their ideas if we are to fix the consequences of 400 years of “Empire” and ~2000+ of patriarchy.

And please share what you’ve found to work in the comments!