Grace straightened. Sloane often wondered if her face underwent the same transformative process when she had to put on an air of authority about a subject at work. In her twenties, she knew, it had. Then, she could feel herself pulling on the mask of confidence, lowering her voice, removing the “likes” from her speech, stilling her knee, reminding herself that, yes, she was qualified. Grace’s tells were subtler. In Grace she saw a lift of the chin. A squaring of shoulders. Sloane—like most of us—rarely spotted these tiny betrayals of self-assurance in male colleagues. Was it because they
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