By Janet M. Stovall, CDE
Corporate America has a way of holding women back. It’s not always overt. It’s a thousand small cuts. A pattern of conditioning that makes women smaller, quieter, and more grateful for opportunities they should be demanding.
In the latest In This Moment episode, Andrea Mohamed laid out three parts of this pattern. They’re not the usual talking points about bias or work-life balance. They’re sharper. More specific. And when you see them together, you realize they form a trap.
The Lampshade Problem
First, organizations explicitly tell women to dim their light. Andrea shared examples from her own career and from other women she’s coached. They’re told things like, “When that light shines really bright on you, it casts a shadow on other people.” Or even more directly: “You better put a lampshade on that, because you’re going to burn everybody around you.”
As Khalil Smith pointed out in our conversation, what man has ever been told that his success casts a shadow? This isn’t subtle bias. It’s direct coaching to be less. It frames a woman’s excellence as a threat to those around her. It’s the first step in corporate conditioning: teaching women that their success should be managed, contained, and made less visible so it doesn’t make others uncomfortable.
The Money Card
Next, there’s the money. Not just the pay gap, but the lack of financial power that prevents women from walking away from bad deals. Andrea calls it the “money card.” When you don’t have savings in the bank, you can’t say no. You can’t turn down the glass cliff opportunity that’s designed for failure. You can’t negotiate for the resources you need to succeed.
Research shows that only 7% of women negotiate their first salary, compared to 57% of men. That decision costs women an average of $1.5 million over a 40-year career. But the immediate cost is a lack of leverage. When you’re conditioned to be grateful for the opportunity, you don’t negotiate. When you don’t negotiate, you don’t build the financial cushion you need to have real power in your career. You’re forced to play the hand you’re dealt, because you don’t have the money card to demand a better one.
The Exit Interview Problem
Finally, there’s the systemic ignorance. Organizations create a feedback loop that ensures they never have to confront the real reasons women leave. They rely on employee engagement surveys from people who chose to stay, which creates a biased dataset. As Andrea said, “You are biasing your data set because they are all people who have already chosen to stay with you.”
What about the people who leave? Andrea worked at one company for 11 years and was never exit interviewed. I’ve never had an exit interview in my entire career. Companies don’t ask because they don’t want to know the answer. The result is a culture of toxic positivity, where leaders celebrate high engagement scores from a self-selected group of survivors while their best talent walks out the door without a word. Glassdoor becomes the exit interview, and the organization never has to look in the mirror.
The Solution: Finding Healed Women
When you put these three things together, you see the trap. The lampshade conditions you to be small. The lack of a money card means you can’t refuse bad deals. And the exit interview problem means the company never has to change.
So how do you break the cycle? Andrea’s answer is simple and profound: find a healed woman.
A healed woman is someone who has shed the corporate and social conditioning. Someone who isn’t still playing the game. Someone who can see the conditioning in you, because she’s already done the work to see it in herself.
Andrea told us about a woman who was one level below CIO. She did all the work, had all the relationships, and earned the top job. But she wasn’t even invited to interview. The job went to a male peer with a fraction of her results. When Andrea talked to her afterward, the woman was worried about how to explain her short tenure on her resume. She was still operating inside the rules of a system that had just failed her.
A healed woman sees that clearly. Andrea reminded this woman that at her level, jobs come from networks, not references. That her track record spoke for itself. That she was better than the game she was still trying to play.
That’s what healed women do. They don’t give you advice on how to navigate a system that was never built for you. They help you remember who you are outside of that system. They hold up a mirror and show you that the voice in your head telling you to be grateful, to wait your turn, to put a lampshade on your light—that’s not your voice. That’s the voice of every organization that benefits from you staying small.
Finding your healed women is the first step to shedding your own conditioning. It’s how you learn to see the game for what it is. And it’s how you start building the power to stop playing it.
Three things leaders can do now to prepare for next:
- Stop telling women to dim their light. Instead, create a culture where excellence is celebrated, no matter who it comes from. When you hear yourself or others using metaphors that frame a woman’s success as a threat, call it out. Light isn’t a zero-sum game.
- Pay women what they’re worth from the start. Don’t wait for them to negotiate. Conduct regular pay equity audits and proactively adjust salaries. When women have financial security, they make better career decisions, which is good for them and for your organization.
- Conduct real exit interviews with a third party. Stop relying on engagement surveys from people who stayed. Find out why your best talent is leaving. The data will be uncomfortable. But it’s the only data that will actually help you fix your culture.
