The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are

by Alicia Menendez

Likeability—and, more specifically, likeability as a woman who aspires to lead—isn’t just a self-imposed burden; it is a cultural mandate that has to be reckoned with.

That privilege is so deeply ingrained in you that you take it for granted. It is a privilege to not feel that your body and your existence in the world are things people reject. It is a privilege to feel that so deeply that you have the time and energy not just to focus on people allowing you to exist, but to like the fact that you do.

In my own quest to be likeable, I had not sufficiently considered what it would be like to approach workplace likeability without the presumption that it was even a remote possibility.

Asian-American women face a unique bind. Asian-Americans in general are perceived as being more competent but less warm than whites. Recent analysis of Harvard’s admissions practices showed that the college consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on positive personality traits, including likeability.10 Yet that perception of competence doesn’t absolve Asian-American women of needing to prove themselves. Asian-American women report that they are asked to demonstrate their competence more than white men.11

One study of Bay Area technology companies found that although Asian and Asian-American women represent much of the tech workforce, they are the least likely to be promoted to the executive level.12 Great worker bees; not leaders.

Saying that a woman who has climbed her way to the top of her field with a combination of extraordinary talent, tenacity, and hard work is “angry” strikes me as a lazy way of attempting to remind her that she does not belong, and a petulant expression of resentment that against all odds she has somehow made it without spending the entire time sweating how others perceived her.

Success Penalty: the one that starts taking its toll the moment you start even trying to be successful. It’s not simply that a woman becomes less likeable when she takes the throne; she seems less likeable merely for eyeing it, and is penalized for doing nearly every single thing that is required to get there.

Women applicants benefited from moderate achievement, but not high achievement. Women applicants with midlevel GPAs received more calls than both lower- and higher-achieving women. Male applicants with high GPAs were nearly twice as likely as their female peers to get follow-up calls. College majors mattered, too. Among math majors, male applicants with high GPAs were three times as likely to receive follow-up.3 That’s particularly upsetting when you think of the gender gap in STEM fields.

Even once women can confidently self-promote, they face yet another penalty: they are judged for not being appropriately modest. And they pay a real price for that: they are considered less likeable and less hireable.5

Whereas askers jump in without testing the waters, we guessers wait to ask until

we’re pretty sure the answer will be yes.

Simply anticipating that there will be backlash, women will often avoid negotiating altogether.

got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need,” Lawrence wrote. “But if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’”

doesn’t surprise me that women believe that ambition is critical to being a leader—because ambition is the thing that keeps you saying yes when everyone keeps telling you no.

For women, walking the line between strength and warmth is, by definition, a carefully calculated performance. How can any person exist in such a narrow space and still, somehow, be asked to be themselves?

Just like women negotiating for raises or promotions, women are well received when they go to the mat for others; they are punished when they do it for themselves.

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.