Speaking Up and Standing Out: How Gendered Logics Shape Women's Self-Advocacy at Work

Abstract

A widely held assumption is that women self-advocate less than men. Our study challenges this view. Drawing on interviews with 71 men and women in a multinational company's leadership development pipeline and 10 HRM managers, we examine how women navigate self-advocacy within gendered organizational logics. We theorize self-advocacy as a site of additive labor necessitated by the friction between masculine-coded ideal professional logics and ideal woman logics grounded in societal expectations. Our findings reveal that these frictions manifest in self-advocacy that entails two distinct forms of additive effort: adapted advocacy to recalibrate daily visibility and supplemental advocacy to preemptively verify legitimacy in career-critical moments. This research demonstrates that women are not self-advocating less, but rather are performing significantly more labor to bridge the gap between their proven performance and the assumed potential granted to men. We argue that addressing gender disparities requires shifting the burden away from individual behaviors and toward de-biasing the ideal worker myth and the institutional systems that govern the standard of proof for career advancement.