When reality refuses to cooperate with how academia understands women
Don’t get your reality check from the social sciences
I never looked back after leaving academia 15 years ago. I went through hell because I gave up an identity and the prestige that went with it, and didn’t have a better one to replace it. One of the reasons I left the illustrious and noble-passing world of cancer research is because the research theories and findings are mostly bullshit. Not all - just most. Good luck trying to reproduce other people’s work even if you have access to all the methodologies and reagents. The confounding factor is you and the lab conditions you’re in. Other confounding factors are your working theories about the root causes of cancer and the paradigm you use to understand human existence, because both influence how you interpret the mechanisms of cancer progression. Another one is your mood from day to day when conducting experiments. They all colour your output, which is why I no longer wanted to put my energy into stabilising the cancer institution egregore,1 and decided it was time to leave and free my mind.
From time to time, a research paper crosses my path and piques my interest enough to read it. My underlying bias is that most research is irreproducible slop but the content can still be really interesting, including some of the findings. However, I rarely roast them…until now.
A recent integrative review on women in leadership tries to synthesise two decades of research across psychology, management and organisational science. It’s not a top tier international journal, but the way the LinkedIn leadership gurus who shall remain nameless raved about it made me salivate for something to gnash. Thankfully, it was a satisfying read for all the reasons I’ll outline here. Before you use my work against me to expose my unconscious motives for writing this, it’s not because I’m envious — don’t analyse me!
As social science often is, it’s methodical and earnest, promising new insights but reintroduces the same findings that have circulated since the early 2000s. Nothing shifts because the assumptions driving the analysis never shift. The authors being based in Germany might explain the lacklustre analysis that spends 16 pages justifying its own beliefs. Maybe it’s their devotion to tidy categories, liberal optimism about progress, or a near religious faith in social science as a tool for human improvement and flourishing. It’s the predictable outcome of a discipline that won’t examine its own premises.
The review opens with the usual claims about women’s communal nature, men’s agency, and the penalties women face when they don’t behave as expected. It reads as though the authors started with a template and slotted in contemporary citations. The underlying logic is treated as fact and never questioned throughout the paper. The research questions sit inside unexamined beliefs about gender, leadership and what counts as valid evidence.
The review runs on a set of mental models the authors never question. Here are a few of them:
Women lead through empathy and harmony.
Women are less narcissistic and therefore more trustworthy.
Women collaborate more and can build functional teams.
Women’s interpersonal style is a leadership strength.
Women are safer than men and can be trusted with power.
Men are naturally agentic and dominant.
Men rely on confidence and entitlement.
Men’s ambition is self serving while women’s ambition serves the collective.
Men and sexism remain the primary barrier to women’s advancement.
Women are morally superior. More women in leadership automatically improves outcomes.
Women don’t rise due to external factors, not internal ones.
When women succeed, it confirms the model.
When women struggle, it confirms the bias.
These are not harmless background ideas. They determine the data that gets selected, interpreted and presented, and they fall victim to circular reasoning. Women are described through communal traits because the field has spent decades insisting that women are communal. Men are described through agentic traits because the same field has spent decades repeating that men are agentic. Any deviation is treated as an anomaly that needs correcting. The mental models stay fixed while the world moves on.
There are also mental models supported by biology, neuroscience, and animal behaviour that never make it into leadership research because they interfere with the preferred story. They sit outside what is acceptable to say, despite being widely observed in real workplaces and diverse social contexts. These are the patterns people recognise immediately but dare not express:
Women compete with other women.
Women form alliances and cut people out of them.
Women watch each other closely and keep score.
Women fight for status in covert and backstabbing ways.
Women use subtle aggression deliberately.
Women are violent.
Women can be calculating when it serves them.
Women punish other women who step outside the norm.
Women punish other women who are perceived as threats to their status.
Women are not automatically supportive of each other.
Women use niceness as a strategy, not as a virtue.
Female-coded behaviour is often controlling, not nurturing.
Communal often means socially acceptable manipulation for status.
Women can undermine and block other women.
Women can be vindictive when threatened.
Women can be aggressive socially, politically, financially, and reputationally.
None of these fit the communal script, so they’re ignored. This moral framing also explains why critique is treated as hostility rather than analysis, and why accountability is so easily deflected.
On the other hand, male power behaviour is generally overt and visible, therefore easier to name, shame, and blame. Some examples of these mental models include:
Men compete openly with other men.
Men challenge status directly.
Men use confrontation when their status is threatened.
Men rely on role, rank, and authority to assert their position.
Male-coded behaviour often signals dominance.
Men’s aggression is visible and therefore more likely to provoke a response.
There is also sustained institutional pressure to keep the advancement of women narrative clean and morally legible. In practice, this means support the women, promote the women, remove the barriers, and never mention the internal dynamics that make female dominated workplaces some of the most politically fraught environments people ever work in. Don’t mention the women who ascend through manipulation, or the ones who protect their status by undermining other women while publicly performing solidarity. These patterns are inconvenient because they destabilise stories and the moral authority that rests on them. A destabilised story raises an uncomfortable question about whether equity frameworks have been quietly propping up the wrong people for the sake of optics, moral signalling, and institutional self-preservation, which is precisely why academic committees choose to live in denial.
Neuroscience complicates this even further, although you would not know it from the way leadership research is selectively cited and lauded. Not only are threat appraisal, social prediction, and emotional signalling variable between men and women but within them depending on hierarchy, exposure, and context. This means there is no fixed communal female brain or agentic male brain waiting to be unlocked through better representation. Instead, there are behavioural patterns shaped by incentives, like status, prestige, and supreme authority. When women learn that visible authority invites relational punishment, they adapt by becoming hypervigilant and politically cautious. When men learn they are rewarded for directness and confrontation, they become more overtly agentic. Behaviour responds to punishment and reward, not gender. This is basic science, just not the findings that get cited when the goal is to reassure everyone that women possess innate leadership virtues that only need institutional encouragement to flourish.
Yes, there’s more! These researchers are also out of touch with how narcissism is handled. The review uses measures that detect overt, grandiose expression which is more common in men. Meanwhile the covert, soft controlling, subtle aggression, image managing form that aligns with female socialisation is left unmeasured. Women then appear less narcissistic which allows the field to claim that women lead with humility. How convenient! The covert form of narcissism which drives a great deal of workplace politics doesn’t register in the data. The construct itself is obsolete but the authors treat it as foundational.
The problem goes deeper than poor measurement, and I have this beef with all personality studies divorced from the subject’s relational context. Narcissism is treated as an individual personality trait rather than an interpersonal pattern. This is an issue because narcissism is expressed relationally through impression management, coalition building, information control, and the strategic use of niceness or moral positioning in organisational settings. When narcissism is operationalised only as overt grandiosity, the forms more consistent with female socialisation remain undetected and appear nonexistent. Women are then perceived as less narcissistic, more humble and prosocial, which allows the field to recycle the claim that women lead differently and better. This oversight is a measurement choice that consistently flatters women and sustains the preferred narrative about female leadership while leaving the actual dynamics of workplace power untouched.
The paper also assumes that women rise through competence or interpersonal magic. This is the official story, one that obscures the less flattering unofficial one. Women rise when they understand the politics and perform assimilated compliance. They rise when they delegate strategically, skim credit effectively, and align themselves with whoever holds greater power and authority. Some women are highly competent in grooming, exploitation, and narrative reauthoring, using the language of collaboration and care to suppress challenge. A woman who can make her weakness another woman’s burden will go far. A woman who exposes the tactic will get scapegoated and ousted. These dynamics are widely recognised inside workplaces but remain curiously absent from the literature that claims to study them, beyond the endlessly recycled Queen Bee Syndrome theory.
The authors end the review by recommending more experimental methods, stronger causal designs, and greater clarity around when specific gendered patterns emerge. These suggestions are fine, but they solve nothing because they address the method rather than the flawed assumptions that shape the theories and hypotheses in the first place. They don’t question the categories or the narratives, nor do they question the political commitments and pressure influencing the analysis. They want sharper tools while keeping the same scaffolding. The result will be another twenty years of studies that try to look different on the surface and identical underneath, churning out new branded leadership fixes that serve the Feminist Victimhood Industrial Complex.
Once again, researchers demonstrate how disconnected they are from reality, which is hardly surprising given that academics were instrumental in institutionalising feminism and related ideologies that displaced merit with feelings while claiming moral authority in the process. They can’t be trusted to solve this because the problem is not structural — it’s conceptual. Women can and do rise, often very effectively, but they rise through political savviness, diplomacy, and role-based competence rather than through gender alone. Some women rise through politics, others through covert aggression, and others by mastering ego management, including their own. The academy avoids these ideas because acknowledging them would mean studying itself. Self-examination, as I’ve shared before, is not a strength of any accountability averse institution.
My work sits outside these constraints. The women I support and coach see what the research ignores and denies. Once their eyes open to how these systems actually operate, they stop trying to be the perfect communal leader and start learning the terrain as it is. The ones with resilience and grounded political skill rise because they rely on competence rather than manipulation. These are the women you would trust with anything because they can hold power without abusing it. The ones who choose not to stay no longer collapse under bullies or empowerment narratives. They disentangle themselves from the feminism they were trained to obey and develop real self-leadership instead. They become sharper, more strategic and far less naïve.
This is what women can do when they stop waiting for institutions to deliver the promised equity and start applying relational intelligence to every interaction. Some rise and some leave, but all become wiser and more discerning. None of this insight will come from the ivory tower because authors are embedded in frameworks and institutionalised prestige that shape what is legible, credible, and worth studying, limiting what they’re allowed see. The real understanding is emerging from those who are free to think without protecting an ideology or their assimilation privilege. Until then, the German precision of the next literature review will be impressive, but the content will remain the same.
Here is free access to the paper I just roasted if you want to see it for yourself.
Thanks for reading,
Nathalie
Hack narcissism and support my work
I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.
Here’s how you can help.
Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work
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By cancer institution egregore I mean the collective psychological field that shapes cancer research: the assumptions, incentives, mental models, expectations, and unwritten rules that researchers internalise and reproduce. It functions as an institutional mind that defines how people think and work inside it.
The abstract in the paper is very manipulative. I didn’t read it in full, but I did skim through some of the paragraphs to focus on the language itself. I could bring in my behavioral science background, but you did a great job assessing the assessors and nailed the smoke-and-mirrors beautifully.
Is society obsessed with women? If so, I’d like to know why and when it all began. There is so little feedback on men, and when there is feedback, it’s usually looped in with males being problematic. I’ve yet to come across a single paper on human behavior that explains, in simple terms, that women’s ability to move ahead is often based on physiological estimations, such as estrogen levels, and their frequently overzealous need to compete through covert maneuvers. We are animals, not Tinkerbell with a wand and magical powers.
It’s exhausting to watch this “cult,” as you often say, worship women.
This is why I am a feminist who does not like most women. Feminism for me has always meant women becoming more like men - agentic, self-actualizing, and individualistic. A great (and unjustly forgotten) classic of feminist SF is Joanna Russ’ The Female Man which basically claims that women can be better men than men themselves. Whether this is true (probably not), there is no question that women can be just as violent, narcissistic and manipulative as men, though expressing these traits in somewhat different ways, due to our socialization and lesser physical strength. The idea that “feminine” traits, such as empathy or agreeableness, are a net gain to society or to women themselves is bonkers.