Silent Voices: Lasting Effects of Toxic Masculinity and Destructive Leadership on Women in Higher Education

Am I reading too much into this? The voice coming through my headphones had moved the meeting to the next agenda item, but in the Zoom chat window popped out on the center of my monitor, questions about our project were still coming through, and on the secondary screen of my laptop, I had just opened an email message from my Dean, sent while I was still presenting. The email, he wrote, let me know that I had not yet updated the department logo on my Zoom background.

As the meeting moved to matters of logistics and academic operations, the self-doubt began to spiral. Had my Dean not been paying attention to my presentation? Was he supportive of my work? Did he respect me? Why was the logo the focus of his attention as I was presenting? Was I reading too much into it?

The answer to that last question is complicated. From an outside perspective, yes, I was probably reading too much into it. But there is also my reality—the reality that I have trouble quelling my emotions and not letting my mind get the most of me in such situations as the result of lingering psychological distress. According to Schyns and Schilling (2013), such distress is often the result of having been victim to years of destructive leadership, and I carry this distress with me into each new work dynamic despite years of dedicated self-work to let it go. But undoing a decade of directed toxic leadership, bordering on tyrannical, that stymied not only my career but the careers of multiple women who found themselves in the path of a particularly vengeful leader is not easy, if it is possible at all.

Toxic leaders convey a myriad of characteristics, behaviors, and actions that can contribute to destructive environments, and destructive leadership is the voluntary and intentional acts committed by specific bad or toxic leaders that are perceived by their followers (and others around them) as harmful to both the followers and the organization. It can take many forms, summarized as “a process in which over a longer period of time the activities, experiences and/or relationships of an individual or the members of a group are repeatedly influenced by their supervisor in a way that is perceived as hostile and/or obstructive” (Schyns & Schilling, 2013, p. 141). The intentionality of destructive leadership and the resulting destructive behavior, which can be physical, verbal, or nonverbal, is often directed toward a single individual or follower (Schyns & Schilling, 2013).

Those at the receiving end of this targeted behavior are often left to navigate its fallout or to leave. According to Tepper. (2000), “Subordinates whose supervisors were more abusive reported higher turnover, less favorable attitudes toward job, life, and organization, greater conflict between work and family life, and greater psychological distress” (p. 186). The consequences of such distress include poor morale, decreased performance, and, eventually, turnover, but this does not mean the distress dissipates once the employee has removed themselves from the destructive environment. Quite the opposite. The distress can be carried over from one organization to another, having lasting impacts on the employee's social and emotional well-being. While being called out for an oversight like an outdated logo in a meeting is not indicative of destructive leadership, the perception of such an action as being or having the potential to be so can be magnified for someone who has experienced real destructive leadership.

The story of my psychological distress began years ago, in the dark back corner of an office building in the downtown of a Midwest city that served as our online university's academic and writing “center.” For the first year of my employment, our center was led by someone who believed deeply in the mission of our work (academic support for nontraditional online adult learners), but who was openly dissatisfied with the direction of the institution since its acquisition by a large for-profit conglomerate. At times, his disapproval of the increasingly “corporate” atmosphere that he blamed on the CEO, a woman, bordered on vitriol. His comments became less about what he perceived as the decreasing quality of our academic work to remarks about her weight and poor taste in attire at company gatherings. In response, my colleagues and I began to display what Schyns and Schilling (2013) identified as one of the more common outcomes of distress from destructive leadership and toxic leaders: follower resistance. There became an increasing sense of hesitancy to respond to emails from our director, to attend meetings that he called, or to react to any of his many tirades against the CEO. There was a collective sigh of relief when, not long after, he announced his retirement.

That relief was short-lived, however, as the lasting effects of the degrading toxicity he left in his wake began to seep into our day-to-day lives. Toxic masculinity in the workplace is often defined as endorsing a hyper competitiveness and “win-or-die” culture (Matos et al., 2018). However, the characteristics of toxic and hyper masculinity can also manifest as more subtle forms of bullying, abuse, and control. The toxic leader exhibiting hyper masculinity (and the reader should note that this does not only refer to those who identify as men or male) is driven to advance their own ego at the expense of others and, in so doing, will sabotage “the autonomy and confidence” of anyone perceived to be a rival (Matos et al., 2018). Ultimately, such cultures of toxic or hyper masculinity can lead to “fertile ground for the recruitment, socialization, and retention of toxic leaders, who, in turn, exert their authority over subordinates in destructive ways, thereby perpetuating cultural dynamics that negatively impact the attitudes and well-being of employees” (Matos et al., 2018).

While we all hoped his successor would be one of two women who had worked in the department far longer than anyone else, and who maintained strong working relationships across multiple centers, this did not end up being the case. Not surprising given the long history of bias, and specifically gender bias, in hiring in higher education, the successor to the directorship of our center fell not to the women who had worked for it, but to a young man who had worked there for fewer than 2 years. This move was in line with the Matos et al. (2018) findings that gendered employee evaluations often result in promotion inequality, and with Weisshaar's (2017) assessment that women are often overlooked for promotion in higher education even when they hold the same credentials and levels of productivity as their male counterparts. According to Hoover et al. (2018), such experiences are not uncommon, particularly when the one hiring (e.g., our previous director) holds biased perceptions on the abilities of a particular group or when their own power feels threatened.

We did what any team of professionals would do: continued to do our work well. But in the depths of those back-room cubicles, a darkness was growing. On a team of mostly women, all with master's or doctoral degrees, few felt compelled to give their best as they once had. We became wary of one another, mildly competitive and intensely protective of ourselves as the direction of our work seemed to be taking a turn toward cumbersome, redundant, and unsustainable and the environment in which we did that work increasingly volatile.

At the time our new director was fumbling his way through his new role, I was in the throes of a doctoral program and navigating life as a new wife and a new mother. One morning, he asked me into his office. As I entered and sat in the chair across from his computer, where I could see he had a social media site pulled up, he rose to close the door behind me and then sat back down and raised his hands in a frustrated gesture toward his computer screen. I can't get in! My confusion was quickly addressed as he followed his gesture with a rambling rationale for why he needed to access the account of one of my colleagues. He needed to know, for “HR” purposes, if this colleague was also working for another university. I asked him why he did not just ask her. This question was met with an eye roll and proclamation that she would just lie. Would you send her a friend request and let me know what her profile says?

According to Hackman and Johnson (2013), far too many leaders are “driven by personalized or harmful motives that make them more ‘power wielders’ than leaders who serve the needs of the group” (p. 15). Such motives are often passed down from leaders to their successors, and include self-centeredness (bordering on narcissism), cognitive disconnects between work and decision making, external pressure to perform, general incompetence, rigidity, intemperance, callousness, corruption, or a degree of malintent (bordering on evil). When acted upon, such leaders become perceived as tyrannical or derailed (Hackman & Johnson, 2013), and their leadership behaviors can have lasting negative effects on both their followers and their organizations, effects that are often absorbed at higher rates by marginalized groups.

I could blame lack of sleep, the stress of motherhood, of work, of being a graduate student, but at the end of the day, I did not agree to send her a friend request because of any of those factors. I agreed because I wanted to keep my job. I knew that my director felt threatened by this woman based on how he acted toward her and, in line with Hoover et al.'s (2018) findings, when male-identity is threatened, men often aim to restore it through negative evaluation of and backlash against women.

A week later, following a conversation with another colleague during which I had learned the motives behind his request, I reported my director to our institution's ethics hotline. His motive was simple: to gather evidence to fire her. His motivation for that was twofold. First, the woman he had asked me to friend request was requesting a promotion to a new role in our department given that she had completed her PhD program. Second, she and our director had, as was reported to me, an uneven and contemptuous relationship outside of our organization, dating back to their time in graduate school together where she had, allegedly, embarrassed him in front of several of their peers, something he had allegedly never forgiven or forgotten.

The trouble with documenting toxic leadership and toxic behaviors, both formally through human resource and ethics and compliance departments and more informally to other colleagues, family, or friends, and particularly systemic and institutionalized abuse in the workplace, is that it can be difficult to articulate—to capture the essence of—what it feels like to be the victim and to do so in a way that does not make you seem like “a victim” at the same time. For many women and other marginalized groups, particularly, being perceived as the helpless victim, of falling into the trap of stigma or stereotype or worse—of being labeled as a [woman, nonwhite woman, nonbinary person] who complains—renders reporting on dysfunctional and destructive leadership at the hands of a male supervisor a high risk.

I was promised by human resources that I would not face any retaliation following my reporting of the incident. But much the way articulating institutionalized discrimination and abuse is an elusive undertaking, so too is preventing retaliation. I faced more than a decade of retaliation from this man for reporting him to the ethics department, even long after he was no longer my boss. Even long after I moved to a new department, I dropped to part-time to pursue work at a different institution, and I removed myself from every opportunity that would have meant even the slightest possibility of having to be in the same room as him, even on the same email thread. I watched from the sidelines as he bad-mouthed me and my work to anyone who would listen. I opened text messages from colleagues who felt compelled to let me know that he had, once again, announced during a meeting that he hated me. I consulted an attorney who specialized in libel and defamation. I watched as women who had worked for our institution for years left their jobs to avoid his vengeful behavior toward them. Every few years, I filed an HR complaint when I just could not stomach not speaking up.

Eventually, after more than a decade, his position was restructured out of the institution, leaving behind it two wakes of unresolved destruction. First, the disruption of my own career trajectory and that of other women in the organization whose stories paralleled my own, if not in specific detail, in outcome. Second, the lingering questions of why and how his destructive and toxic behavior was allowed to continue for as long as it did; whether human resource professionals are aware of, can recognize, and are equipped to support the outcomes of toxic leadership; and whose responsibility it is to address such situations and how. Failure to address such questions, unfortunately, will only lead to perpetuation not only of toxic masculinity but also of the silencing of women's voices and its resulting psychological distress.