This sense of trauma and abuse may feel extreme, but several women described it as something real but unspoken. They saw it not only impacting their leadership and role within the organization but also their sense of self at home and with their families. A nursing director in healthcare put it this way:
This mental trauma stays with you forever because I’m fearful; I don’t want that time to repeat. Even in this current role, I’m very cautious. I do use my voice, but I know when to silence it because I know that I don’t want to go back to that. It takes a long time to recover from previous silence and trauma.
Beyond the trauma, there is a sense of emotional vulnerability and anxiety that can lead to shame and depression. As one might expect, these emotions can lead to tearful outbursts that rarely are welcomed. Women described times they cried at work with regret and anger as they believed their demonstrations of emotion further weakened their ability to be seen as competent leaders.
I do not know a single person alive who relishes being in the space of this type of vulnerability. Cognitively, we know that vulnerability is needed for growth, but we prefer safety, assurance, and strength. Ultimately vulnerability means to be susceptible, open to attack, or being wounded. Vulnerability is a concept that has surfaced in organizational studies. There is research to suggest that managers feel a strong need to avoid embarrassment, threat, and feelings of vulnerability or incompetence. They may avoid anything that suggests weakness or that might raise questions about their current courses of action. The studies on management perception argue that leaders may silence their employees to avoid vulnerability.[3] However, my research shows vulnerability differently; participants did not feel at risk with their employees as much as they did their peer group or boss.
For example, an executive working at a school district describes her experience after a male peer, who silenced her, left the organization. “I felt like as a leader; I was diminished. I’m a very efficacious person, and I can go back, and I can regroup, and I can get myself moving forward again. Even a year after he left, I was still unable to do that.”
A CEO I interviewed who felt silenced by multiple systems and relationships said this, “I’ve been in therapy every time I change a job and now consistently because I can get depressed pretty easy. . . . And I can’t let that happen to my spirit.”
Despite the source of silencing, every participant in my research described some aspect of feeling vulnerable when silenced. Many women cried during the interview as they recounted their experience. Their tears were an expression of their vulnerability, as well as the emotional pain they experienced. Thus, this overall sense of vulnerability goes beyond attempts to conceal a lack of knowledge or maintain competence. Rather, it is indicative of the viral effect of silencing.
As a reader, you may think that perhaps every single one of my research participants are sensitive women who tend to overuse emotional language and metaphors to exaggerate. I analyzed the language orientation of my contributors. I studied the transcripts to determine how many times they used cognitive oriented words such as “I think,” or “I thought,” or “I believe.” I compared that to the women who used more emotional language like, “I feel,” or “I felt.” Based on the text, 80 percent of them were more cognitive in their choices then emotional. I also found myself having to ask them to tell me how it felt. Their initial reactions were first to express their thinking and belief system. I had to specifically ask (sometimes more than once), “How did it feel to be silenced?” before I could get emotional responses.
Thus, we can put to rest the bias that women who experience silencing in leadership are more sensitive or emotional. This is not true. The focus on specific word choice gives insight into how cognition and emotion drive perceptions. Women did not always lean in with a strong feeling-orientation language that assumed an empathetic mind-set. Instead, the language choices they used suggested a strong thinking orientation (that we often expect from leaders), which implies a logical, practical, and critical-minded approach.
Spiritual Loss
Beyond cognition and emotion, women may be spiritually shrouded in the sense of loss of self. She feels disconnected from her core, the idea of who she is wired to be in this world, and often senses a void in her being or soul. She may feel trampled, misplaced, and without an anchor.
Not every woman I spoke to about her experience of feeling silenced shared a spiritual impact. Some were atheists, others were devout in their chosen faith, and the rest nested somewhere in between. As a social scientist, I was not investigating their religious beliefs. Instead, I was interested in their level of consciousness and their way of knowing. Consciousness is a challenging topic to study. It can be as simple as being awake, or as complicated as being aware of ourselves and aware of the world. As far back as 1842, scholars have been attempting to categorize all the ways we know or the way we sense. In 1983, Wagner, who was influenced by the psychological consciousness work of all the smart minds preceding him, identified four elements of the self. The material-self is comprised of what we own. The social-self is what others notice. There is an ego-self, which is our sense of identity and sameness. Last, there is the spiritual-self—our inner being.[4]
How did each woman’s inner being change as a result of feeling silenced? Based on my interviews, at least half described some loss of inner self. In my linguistic analysis, the internal loss was not specific to losing a job, a relationship, or anything tangible. Some language examples include, “I lost contact with the heart part of me.” Or, “I found myself losing my connection to myself,” and, “There was so much of me that I lost.” Another powerful example from an executive who opted out of leadership to become a coach said, “Well, the first thing that comes to me is, I just think I kind of withdrew my personhood.” Last an African American executive working at a global engineering company said it this way:
From a spiritual standpoint, I felt like I kind of lost my way. That I didn’t have that grounding. That thing that kind of kept me steady just felt off, you know? I felt like I was less sure of what I needed to be doing and who I was.
While some named their spirit as suffering, others found solace in their spiritual practices. This, in turn, created a way for them to heal slowly. Using spiritual practices to manage and move to voice is integrated into many strategies women use to manage silencing.
Additionally, many women interviewed described their search for something to fill the void when they were silenced, and this often led to some physical ramifications that are covered in the next chapter.
In summary, the silenced are not just bullied, lacking in confidence, or behaving like victims. They may feel victimized; they may be on the receiving end of a bully’s power, and they certainly experience shifts in confidence when they are silenced. This dynamic goes beyond one encounter and one dip in certainty. When women feel consistently and egregiously silenced—they change. This change does not just impact them on a cognitive, emotional, or spiritual level. When a female leader experiences pervasive silencing, she will also experience it at a physical level.
The Body Keeps Score
I was thankful to have a recording device in each interview as it allowed me to settle into a deep sense of level three listening and the silence that connects. Kris shared stories with me that day in her home office that left me a bit shaken. “Carrie, I really tried to roll that boulder uphill.” She went on to tell me about her debilitating headaches and her ultimate decision to opt out of the organization that caused tremendous silencing. As I closed the interview, she shared with me how interested she was in learning more about the research. She felt it was a topic that many felt alone in, and the isolation needed to stop.
1.
Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know, first edition (New York: Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2014).
2.