Threatened by Her: Authenticity, Power, and Workplace Backlash

Abstract

Authenticity is widely associated with psychological well-being and healthy functioning at work. For women, however, developing greater self-congruence can also change how they participate in relationships and organizations. This may involve setting boundaries, exercising independent judgment, speaking up about concerns, or becoming less willing to accommodate practices that conflict with their values. In some organizational contexts, such changes may challenge established gendered or organizational expectations, and women may consequently be perceived as difficult, disloyal, overly emotional, or threatening.

Drawing on depth psychology, feminist and gender scholarship, research on self-development and authenticity, organizational psychology, workplace relationships and power, and qualitative dissertation research on covert aggression and abuse of power by women in U.S. workplaces, this article examines how increasing self-congruence may become entangled with workplace conflict, exclusion, and backlash. Authenticity is conceptualized not as unrestricted self-expression but as an ongoing process of knowing oneself, developing greater self-congruence, and living in ways that are experienced as consistent with one's values and sense of self.

The article argues that authenticity does not itself cause workplace backlash. Rather, as women develop greater access to their own perceptions, values, agency, boundaries, and relational capacities, they may participate differently in relationships and organizations. In contexts organized around accommodation, compliance, status, or gendered expectations, this altered participation may disrupt established relational arrangements, with backlash directed not simply at what a woman says or does, but at the changed relational position she occupies. A depth-psychological perspective offers one possible interpretation of why some reactions may become disproportionately intense, including the possibility of projection, threat to established relational patterns, or defensive responses to perceived loss of control. These interpretations remain theoretical hypotheses rather than evidence of the unconscious motives underlying such reactions.

The dissertation findings are used as contextualized qualitative observations of participants’ experiences and meanings. They do not establish prevalence or causality. The article therefore distinguishes between empirical findings, theoretical interpretation, and psychodynamic hypothesis while examining how authenticity, agency, relationality, and organizational power may become intertwined in experiences of workplace backlash.

Becoming More Yourself as a Social Risk

Across contemporary Western cultures, people increasingly turn to psychological self-understanding and personal development as ways of making sense of themselves and seeking to improve aspects of their lives. In the United States, the idea that individuals can deliberately shape and improve themselves has a particularly long cultural history. From Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century project of self-improvement to the expansion of self-help literature and personal-growth movements in the second half of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals could actively cultivate themselves became increasingly prominent in American culture (Effing, 2009).

By the late twentieth century, self-help had become an established part of American popular psychology and publishing. The category encompasses a broad range of literature concerned with psychological self-understanding, relationships, identity, personal growth, wellbeing, and self-improvement (Starker, 1989; Wilson & Cash, 2000; Zimmerman et al., 2001).

This discourse did not remain confined to books. Advice and psychological guidance about relationships, health, appearance, work, identity, and personal development were increasingly circulated through women’s magazines, television, and other forms of popular media (Duffy, 2013). Digital and social media have since extended this circulation into everyday life. An analysis of nearly 10,000 Instagram posts associated with #wellbeing found that this discourse was predominantly feminized and focused primarily on mental, psychological, and spiritual dimensions, with prominent themes including therapy, self-discovery, spirituality, and motivational content (Larrondo-Ureta et al., 2024).

The growing prominence of self-development discourse was accompanied by a substantial expansion of the self-help market. In the United States, self-help books increased from 1.1% of all books in print in 1972 to 2.4% in 2000, while sales rose by 96% between 1991 and 1996 (McGee, 2005). More recently, U.S. self-help book sales nearly doubled between 2013 and 2019, reaching 18.6 million units, while the number of titles nearly tripled (The NPD Group, 2020). In the United Kingdom, Nielsen BookScan data show that self-help book sales tripled between 2001 and 2021 (Nehring, 2024). The changing language of bestselling books provides another window into this cultural shift. Across the 1990s and 2000s, major bestseller lists featured titles explicitly concerned with the self, personal transformation, authenticity, agency, and self-improvement, including Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self, Self Matters, Become a Better You, and Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny (Publishers Weekly, 2017). By 2018, Becoming was the year’s bestselling print book in the United States, while Girl, Wash Your Face, You Are a Badass, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck also ranked among the twenty bestselling print books (Milliot, 2019).

Women have also been a particularly important consumer group within this broader market. In U.S. consumer research, women accounted for 65% of trade-book purchases in 2008 (Milliot, 2009). NielsenIQ (2025) likewise reports that women accounted for 59% of book purchases in its UK Books & Consumers data. Within self-help specifically, women have reported more positive attitudes toward self-help reading than men (Wilson & Cash, 2000).

The growing cultural emphasis on self-development has unfolded alongside profound changes in women’s social and economic lives. Greater access to education, professional work, and economic independence has expanded women’s capacity to make choices about how they work and live. Together, these changes have created greater space for women to cultivate their abilities, pursue meaningful work, clarify what they value, and bring previously constrained capacities and desires more fully into their lives.

This process of becoming more oneself can involve bringing more of one’s capacities and values into one’s life, but it is not necessarily a spontaneous expression of an already established identity. It can involve considerable developmental work: developing self-awareness and learning to process one’s own experience more openly (Kernis & Goldman, 2006), questioning inherited and external expectations and becoming more autonomous in one’s choices (Ryan & Deci, 2000), and discovering and developing aspects of professional identity through experimentation and action (Ibarra, 2015).

It may also involve differentiating from relational patterns, gendered expectations, and other circumstances that have shaped how a person understands herself and what she believes is possible for her. This dimension of development is relevant to gender socialization, through which gendered expectations can shape self-concept, behavior, and perceptions of what is possible, including expectations concerning agency, affiliation, and relational roles (Eagly & Wood, 2012; Williams & Best, 1990). For women, this can include becoming more aware of how gender stereotypes and expectations around femininity, relationality, emotional labor, compliance, or achievement have influenced their choices, relationships, and sense of self (Hochschild, 1983; Vial & Cowgill, 2022). From a relational perspective, this process may also involve recognizing ways in which maintaining connection has become linked with accommodating others or suppressing one's own needs.

Becoming aware of these influences can create greater room to differentiate from them. This may involve questioning which expectations are consistent with one's developing values and sense of self and which have been taken on through socialization. Becoming more oneself therefore involves not only knowing oneself more deeply, but developing and integrating aspects of oneself and increasingly bringing them into one’s life. For women, this may mean becoming less organized around people-pleasing, becoming clearer about what they value, setting firmer boundaries, and bringing their work and relationships into greater alignment with what matters to them rather than with inherited scripts. These changes can alter established relational dynamics and, in some organizational contexts, may increase social risk rather than reduce it.

At work, these changes may become particularly consequential. Women may encounter gendered expectations to perform emotional labor and maintain relational harmony (Hochschild, 1983; Vial & Cowgill, 2022). Greater alignment with one’s values may reduce willingness to sustain behaviors or roles that conflict with those values (Ryan & Deci, 2000). When a woman becomes less willing to carry such expectations at the expense of her own values or boundaries, her changed behavior may be experienced as a disruption of established relational norms.

Crucially, the social consequences of authenticity are not distributed equally among women. What is perceived as authentic, assertive, credible, threatening, emotional, professional, or difficult is socially interpreted through intersecting systems of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, age, nationality, and other positions within structures of power (Collins, 2015). Research on authenticity at work similarly suggests that the possibility of expressing an “authentic self” is shaped by social identity and organizational context rather than being equally available to all employees. Recent research indicates that gender influences the conditions under which workplace inclusion facilitates authenticity, while qualitative research with women researchers shows how authenticity is continually negotiated in relation to visibility, invisibility, hypervisibility, and prevailing expectations of professionalism (Fletcher & Lysova, 2026; Torbor et al., 2026). For Black women in particular, authenticity may involve navigating competing expectations associated with race and gender, including heightened awareness of how others may interpret their behavior (Summerville & Ruggs, 2022).

In this context, my dissertation research on covert aggression and abuse of power by women in U.S. workplaces provides qualitative insight into women who described themselves as confident and authentic. Some participants also described therapy, self-development, reflection, personal growth, or related processes in their lives. The female targets I interviewed were not only highly competent and professional, but also described themselves as increasingly clear about their values, unwilling to collude in unethical behavior, and less able to pretend that “everything is fine” when it was not. Their accounts suggest that these shifts in self-definition and behavior sometimes became entangled with experiences of covert aggression, exclusion, and abuse of power (Hecker, 2024). The dissertation findings are used here as contextualized qualitative observations of participants’ experiences, not as evidence of prevalence or causal relationships. They offer insight into how workplace aggression and abuse of power may be experienced and understood by those targeted, while the broader claims about authenticity, gendered backlash, and organizational dynamics are grounded in the broader literature discussed throughout this article.

Against this backdrop, a set of questions emerges: who are the authentic women in today’s workplaces, how does their authenticity show up in micro-behaviors, under what conditions might their changed ways of participating become threatening to others, and how do gendered backlash and inter-female aggression intersect with their efforts to live more truthfully?

Authentic Women in the Workplace: Authenticity, Self-Congruence, and Individuation

Authentic women are not simply “speaking their mind” or dispensing with tact. Authenticity in organizational life also involves bringing meaningful aspects of the self into one's work rather than maintaining a complete separation between personal identity and professional role. Roberts et al. (2009) situate authenticity within the broader process of positive identity construction at work, emphasizing the relationship between one's sense of self and the organizational contexts in which that identity is expressed. More broadly, research on authenticity in organizations has developed across several partially overlapping traditions, including identity, emotional labor, authentic leadership, and identity management. Cha et al. (2019) reviewed empirical research across 10 authenticity constructs and used a power lens to synthesize the findings, emphasizing that authenticity in organizations is a multifaceted rather than a single, uniform construct. Authenticity, therefore, does not require indiscriminate self-disclosure or the unfiltered expression of every feeling or preference. It involves an ongoing process of integrating aspects of the self into work in ways that are meaningful, intentional, and responsive to context. Importantly, authenticity need not come at the expense of concern for others. Research on authenticity and interpersonal conflict suggests that more authentic individuals may be more likely to use conflict strategies that take both their own needs and the needs of others into account, such as integrating and compromising (Tou et al., 2015).

In this article, I use the term “authentic women” to describe women who are living in an increasingly authentic way. Such women may become more aware of their values, priorities, preferences, emotions, and motives while remaining open to discovering aspects of themselves that are not yet fully understood. This understanding draws on Kernis and Goldman’s (2006) multicomponent model of authenticity, which conceptualizes authentic functioning in terms of awareness, unbiased processing of self-relevant information, behavior consistent with one’s values and beliefs, and relational orientation. Awareness involves developing knowledge of one’s motives, feelings, desires, and other self-relevant experiences, while unbiased processing requires openness to information that may confirm or challenge one's existing self-understanding. Authenticity therefore involves not only knowing oneself, but also remaining curious and receptive enough to keep learning about oneself, integrating that knowledge, and allowing it to inform one’s actions and relationships.

Ibarra (2015) cautions against treating authenticity as the discovery and expression of a fixed “true self.” Professional identity develops through experimentation and action. People learn about themselves partly by trying out new ways of working, relating, and leading. Authenticity can therefore be understood as developmental rather than as the arrival at a final or completely known identity. This developmental understanding is important: An authentic woman is not necessarily someone who has reached a finished or perfected sense of self. Rather, she may be someone increasingly able to remain in relationship with her own experience, values, and emerging sense of identity without abandoning them simply to secure approval or preserve relational equilibrium.

For women in leadership and professional roles, this process can involve becoming clearer about what matters to them, the choices they make, and the trade-offs they are willing to accept in order to act in ways that feel congruent with their developing sense of self. Research on authentic leadership similarly emphasizes self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and relational transparency as dimensions through which authenticity becomes expressed in professional relationships (Avolio & Gardner, 2005; Gardner et al., 2005). Importantly, these qualities concern not only how a woman understands herself, but also how she participates in relationships while remaining psychologically grounded in that developing sense of self.

Research generally associates authenticity with greater psychological well-being and engagement (Sutton, 2020). Importantly, authenticity is not a fixed psychological state. Kernis and Goldman (2006) conceptualize it as a way of relating to oneself that involves awareness of one’s internal experience, relatively unbiased processing of that experience, and behavior that is congruent with one’s values and beliefs. Wood et al. (2008) extended this work by developing an empirical model of authenticity organized around three dimensions: authentic living, self-alienation, and acceptance of external influence. Their model is particularly relevant here because it frames authenticity not only as living in accordance with one’s values but also as a function of the degree to which a person feels disconnected from herself or overly shaped by external demands.

In this sense, authenticity represents a movement toward greater self-congruence through an ongoing process of self-awareness, reflection, learning, and relational engagement rather than simply compliance with external expectations. For some women, this may mean becoming less organized around external approval, status, or productivity and more willing to evaluate their choices against their own values: “Did I act in line with what I believe?” rather than “Did they like me?” This distinction is consistent with self-determination theory, which differentiates more autonomous forms of regulation from behavior organized primarily through external pressure, reward, punishment, or approval (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Ryan and Ryan (2019) similarly situate authenticity within the broader concepts of autonomy, congruence, and genuineness. From this perspective, authenticity is not simply doing whatever one feels like doing. It involves experiencing oneself as the author of one’s actions rather than as someone whose behavior is primarily controlled by forces outside the self.

For some women, this increasing self-congruence is also expressed in relational terms. Authenticity is not only intrapersonal. It is also relational. For some women, increasing self-congruence becomes visible in how they engage with others, respond to differing perspectives, and bring their values into workplace relationships. Ostermeier et al. (2022) conceptualize this dimension as relational authenticity, defined as being genuine in workplace relationships. In two samples, they found that relational authenticity was positively associated with discretionary behaviors including altruism and sportsmanship, suggesting that authenticity in workplace relationships can support constructive forms of organizational participation. This relational dimension also helps explain why authenticity can become consequential for trust and credibility. Mayer et al. (1995) distinguish ability, benevolence, and integrity as central dimensions of perceived trustworthiness. When a person's values and actions are experienced by others as coherent and reliable, authenticity may therefore contribute not only to a person's sense of self but also to how others experience and respond to her.

At the organizational level, however, the consequences of authenticity are context-dependent. In psychologically healthy and inclusive environments, greater self-congruence may support employees’ willingness to express their views and concerns. Research with LGB employees suggests that psychological safety can shape whether authentic self-expression is associated with positive workplace outcomes (Gardner & Prasad, 2022), while research on inclusion and authenticity indicates that these dynamics may also vary by gender (Fletcher & Lysova, 2026). Research on employee voice further demonstrates that speaking up can elicit different organizational responses depending on contextual conditions (Morrison, 2011), and research on ethical voice similarly suggests that such responses may range from supportive to negative (Chen & Treviño, 2023). The same behaviors may therefore be interpreted quite differently in defensive, politicized, or highly conformist environments. Setting a boundary may be read as insubordination; independent judgment as arrogance; emotional honesty as excessive emotionality; and constructive dissent as disloyalty or a lack of organizational “fit.” Authenticity does not carry a fixed organizational meaning. Its consequences depend partly on the relational and cultural context in which it is expressed and interpreted.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that authenticity can be understood as an ongoing developmental capacity to remain connected to one’s own experience, values, and emerging sense of self while engaging responsively with other people and with the demands of context. For women in particular, this process may involve becoming less willing to organize their behavior primarily around approval, conformity, or the preservation of relational equilibrium. As this shift becomes visible in professional relationships, it may alter how a woman is perceived and how others respond to her.

From Authenticity and Individuation

From a depth-psychological perspective, this movement toward greater self-congruence can also be understood in relation to Jung’s concept of individuation. Jung (1951/1968) described individuation as a process through which the personality becomes increasingly differentiated and integrated, including differentiation from collective expectations and the integration of previously less conscious or divided aspects of the psyche. The Self, in Jung’s model, represents a deeper organizing principle of the psyche associated with this movement toward greater psychological wholeness.

This perspective adds an important dimension to the understanding of authenticity developed above. Authenticity, in this sense, is not simply greater self-expression or freedom from external influence. It can also involve becoming increasingly capable of recognizing what belongs to oneself, differentiating it from collective expectations, and integrating previously less accepted or less conscious aspects of experience. Individuation is therefore not the achievement of a finished identity, but an ongoing process of becoming more differentiated and integrated (Jung, 1951/1968).

The movement toward authenticity can therefore be understood as an ongoing developmental process through which a person develops, revises, and deepens an increasingly differentiated sense of self (Ibarra, 2015; Jung, 1951/1968). In this sense, individuation and authenticity are related but not identical concepts. Authenticity concerns the increasing congruence between a person’s experience, values, and actions, whereas individuation refers more broadly to the differentiation and integration of the personality.

As a person individuates, these changes become visible within the social world: how she acts, relates, makes decisions, establishes boundaries, and responds to situations that challenge her values. What may feel internally like a movement toward greater coherence can therefore become socially consequential, because changes in how a person relates to herself also change how she participates in relationships and responds to established expectations.

These changes do not occur in a social vacuum. They are encountered within relational and organizational contexts shaped by expectations, power, status, gender norms, and prior relationships. A woman’s increasing differentiation may therefore affect not only how she experiences herself, but also how others understand, evaluate, and respond to her.

This is particularly important in gendered social contexts, where capacities such as agency, autonomy, relationality, and care have historically been valued and divided in different ways.

Patriarchy, Voice, and Split Capacities

Patriarchal and hierarchical cultures do not only constrain women from the outside. They can also shape how people learn to relate to their own feelings, needs, voices, and capacities. Carol Gilligan’s (1982, 1993) work shows how human capacities can become divided along gendered lines. Traits associated with masculinity, such as agency, assertiveness, autonomy, and separation, are often accorded greater status, whereas traits associated with femininity, such as emotional awareness, relational intelligence, care, and responsiveness to others, are more readily devalued. Gilligan challenged the idea that these capacities represent different levels of maturity. Her work instead shows the importance of recognizing both care and justice, relationship and autonomy, as essential dimensions of human development.

Terry Real (2007) describes one relational expression of such hierarchy through what he calls the “dance of contempt,” in which one person occupies a one-up position and another a one-down position. Gender socialization can contribute to these patterns by associating dominance, autonomy, and emotional restriction with masculinity, while associating accommodation, care, and emotional responsiveness with femininity. Over time, these divisions can become internalized. Women may learn to care for others without challenging power, while men may learn to exercise authority without showing vulnerability. An authentic woman who brings these capacities together—deep feeling with a clear voice, care with boundaries, and relationality with agency—may therefore challenge expectations about what a woman should be. What is integrated within her may remain culturally divided around her.

But these divisions do not remain abstract cultural expectations. Children learn them through relationships, a sense of belonging, approval, shame, and others’ responses to what they say, feel, and know. The next question, therefore, is how these gendered divisions become part of the developing self.

Gender Socialization: How We Learn to Turn Against Ourselves

To understand why authenticity can become threatening for some women in adulthood, it helps to look at how girls and boys are trained out of core human qualities long before they ever enter an organization. Following Carol Gilligan’s (1993, 2011) work, two clusters of capacities become visible: those culturally coded as “feminine,” including emotional awareness, relational attunement, care, and an ethic of responsiveness to others, and those coded as “masculine,” including agency, assertiveness, independent judgment, and the capacity to speak and act from one’s own moral understanding. These are not inherently feminine or masculine capacities. They are human capacities that gendered cultures teach children to value, suppress, or separate.

Gilligan’s (1993, 2011) developmental research highlights capacities evident in young children before gendered pressures have fully narrowed their expression. Young children can be emotionally aware, relationally attentive, and capable of speaking clearly from their own experience. Four-year-olds, for example, can be direct and emotionally articulate with both peers and adults. They notice when something feels wrong, ask questions, and respond with genuine concern for others. The basic capacities for empathy, truth-telling, connection, and independent judgment can already be observed early in development.

What changes is not simply the presence of these capacities, but the social conditions under which children learn they can safely express them. The timelines begin to diverge as children become more aware of gender expectations and the social consequences of violating them. Gilligan (2011) describes boys as encountering these pressures relatively early, including during the early school years. As boys become increasingly concerned with what it means to be accepted as a “real boy” or “one of the boys,” qualities associated with emotional openness, vulnerability, and relational sensitivity may become coded as feminine and therefore lower in status. In her accounts, boys themselves describe the pressure to distance themselves from qualities that might be labeled “girly” in order to belong. What is at stake, therefore, is not simply whether boys express emotion, but whether they remain free to inhabit the full range of capacities available to them earlier in development. In my reading of Gilligan’s work, this gendered initiation can require boys to disown aspects of relational intelligence just as they are developing. These early pressures may have longer-term consequences for how boys and men relate to vulnerability, emotional expression, and relational connection.

For girls, the developmental pressure takes a different form. Girls may retain greater access to their relational voice for longer. Gilligan’s (1993) work shows that girls in late childhood can speak with striking directness about injustice, hypocrisy, relationships, and their own experience. They can recognize contradictions between what people say and what they do, and they can express moral judgments while remaining attentive to their relationships with others.

As girls enter adolescence, however, many encounter a growing awareness that speaking openly can carry social costs. The girl who once spoke directly about what she saw and knew may begin to question whether she is entitled to say it. What was once experienced as knowledge can become “maybe I am wrong.” What was once a clear boundary can become a negotiation. What was once “I know” can become “I don’t know.” Gilligan (1993) describes this developmental movement as a loss of voice, in which girls become increasingly aware that speaking honestly can threaten their relationships and sense of belonging.

This is where gender socialization becomes psychologically consequential. The issue is not simply that girls are taught to be nice or accommodating. They may learn that maintaining connection requires them to soften, suppress, or question their own perceptions. Over time, an external expectation can become an internal habit. Before asking, “What do I think?” or “What do I need?” the person may first ask, “What will this mean for the relationship?” or “Am I allowed to feel this way?”

Over time, this can become a profound form of self-estrangement. A woman may continue to function, care for others, succeed professionally, and appear highly capable while becoming increasingly disconnected from what she herself wants, knows, or refuses. What began as an adaptation to belonging can gradually become incorporated into her sense of who she is. The expectations of others no longer feel entirely external. They can begin to sound like her own voice.

This helps explain why gendered self-suppression can become more than a behavioral pattern. It can affect subjectivity itself. When a person repeatedly learns that belonging depends upon overriding her perceptions, needs, limits, or judgments, the question eventually becomes not only “What am I allowed to say?” but “What am I allowed to know about myself?”

Simone de Beauvoir’s (1948, 1953) analysis helps illuminate what is at stake. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that woman has historically been constituted as the “Other,” defined in relation to a male subject rather than recognized as a self-defining subject in her own right. This does not mean that women simply become passive recipients of socialization. Rather, they can learn to inhabit roles and expectations that estrange them from their own freedom, judgment, and capacity to act.

Seen through this lens, the developmental loss of a girl’s trust in her own perception is not merely a loss of confidence. It can become a loss of subjectivity: the gradual substitution of “What do I know and want?” with “What am I allowed to know, want, and say without risking belonging?” The problem is therefore deeper than becoming quiet. It is the gradual displacement of the self as the author of her own experience.

The consequences of gender socialization extend in both directions. Boys may learn to distance themselves from vulnerability, emotional awareness, and relational responsiveness. Girls may learn to distance themselves from independent judgment, assertiveness, and the authority to trust their own judgment. The particular capacities being suppressed may differ, but the underlying process is similar: parts of the self are surrendered in exchange for belonging.

This is important for understanding authenticity. The authentic woman described here is not simply becoming more assertive or adopting capacities culturally coded as masculine. She is developing greater freedom to bring together capacities that gendered socialization has taught her to separate: care with judgment, relationality with agency, vulnerability with boundaries, and responsiveness to others with fidelity to her own experience.

Authenticity, in this sense, is not a rejection of relationship. It is the possibility of remaining in relationship without abandoning subjectivity. It is the capacity to care without surrendering judgment, to belong without becoming defined by others, and to remain responsive to others without losing contact with oneself.

This is precisely why authenticity can become consequential in organizational life. A woman who begins to trust what she sees, knows, feels, and values may no longer be willing to perform the forms of compliance that once protected her sense of belonging. She may set a boundary where she once accommodated, name a distortion where she once remained silent, or refuse a role that requires her to betray her own judgment. What appears from the outside to be increased assertiveness may therefore represent something deeper: the return of subjectivity.

For men, a parallel process can involve reconnecting with emotional awareness, vulnerability, and relational presence that may have become difficult to express under gendered expectations (Delfín & Leach, 2022). For women, the developmental task may involve reclaiming forms of agency, independent judgment, and self-trust that have been constrained by expectations of accommodation and relational responsibility. In both cases, becoming more fully themselves involves reintegrating capacities that gendered socialization taught them to suppress, which can challenge the societal expectations they learned to meet in order to belong.

It is therefore possible for systems to react strongly when these previously constrained capacities become more visible in adulthood. What once helped them belong may now be precisely what makes them stand out. In this case, authentic women and emotionally open men may become threatening because their way of being makes visible a difference that the group had implicitly learned to suppress in order to belong.

Micro-Behaviors: How Authenticity Shows Up Moment to Moment

Authenticity is not only an inner stance; it can become visible in small, concrete behaviors that may alter established relational patterns, including patterns involving status, compliance, or bullying.

One clear example is how authentic women handle displays of status. When a narcissistic coworker or manager interrupts a conversation to brag about a new car, title, or contact, the authentic woman may offer a brief, polite recognition, “That sounds like a nice car,” and then gently redirect her attention back to the initial speaker or task. She does not gush with admiration, but she also does not humiliate the braggart. She simply refuses to collude with the demand that everyone pause to provide ego‑fuel. This modest act of redirection may be experienced as threatening by individuals who rely heavily on status affirmation. Responding without reinforcing status-seeking is consistent with research on assertiveness, distinct from aggression (Alberti & Emmons, 2017), and disrupts the reinforcement that narcissistic individuals seek (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001).

A similar pattern appears in conflict. When confronted with a toxic comment or unfair criticism, an authentic woman can say, in a steady tone, “I don’t experience it that way,” or “That isn’t accurate from my perspective.” She does not escalate to shouting, and she does not automatically fold into apology and self‑denial. When a situation becomes intolerable—an unsafe meeting, a demeaning social event—she may quietly exit: “I’m not comfortable here, so I’m going to leave now. Thank you for the evening.” These examples resemble DBT interpersonal-effectiveness strategies that emphasize clear communication, boundary-setting, and maintaining self-respect while remaining responsive to others (Linehan, 2015).

For some women, increasing authenticity may also involve becoming less willing to participate in shaming, gossip, or relational aggression. Instead, they may redirect conversations toward the substance of the issue, bring others back into the discussion when they have been sidelined, and maintain their own dignity. They may also refuse to participate in gossip or character attacks. If pressed, they might say, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about her when she’s not here,” or simply change the subject. In environments where social bonding occurs through gossip, ridicule, or the exclusion of particular colleagues, such refusal to participate may itself be experienced as distancing or disapproval, even when the person is simply maintaining a boundary. Research on workplace ostracism demonstrates that being ignored, excluded, or otherwise treated as socially invisible can have important interpersonal and organizational consequences (Robinson et al., 2013). In this sense, refusing to engage in relational aggression does not necessarily protect a woman from exclusion. In some organizational contexts, it may instead make her less willing to participate in informal social practices that maintain a sense of belonging, potentially increasing her social distance from the group.

These micro-behaviors—minimal validation of grandiosity, gracious exits, refusal to gossip, quiet correction of distortions—are expressions of courage. They are truth‑telling in small, steady doses: “I see what is happening, and I will not pretend it is something else.” For narcissistic or dark‑trait individuals, and for colleagues who have learned to survive by playing along, this kind of everyday truth‑telling is extremely unsettling. Research on the Dark Triad confirms that individuals high in narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy respond defensively when their control and grandiosity are not reinforced (Paulhus & Williams, 2002).

Clinically, this dynamic can be understood in terms of narcissistic self-regulation. Psychodynamic theorists have proposed that some narcissistic patterns involve efforts to maintain a vulnerable or unstable sense of self through admiration, status, control, and other forms of external affirmation (Corbett, 1996). Empirical research has likewise linked narcissistic characteristics with interpersonal difficulties and patterns of self-enhancement that can affect how individuals relate to others (Carroll et al., 1996; Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001). From this perspective, what appears externally as confidence or self-assurance may, in some individuals, coexist with considerable dependence on external validation.

A depth-psychological interpretation takes this one step further. When a person encounters a woman whose sense of worth is becoming less dependent on external approval, her presence may challenge an interpersonal arrangement in which admiration, deference, or compliance has previously helped stabilize the other person’s sense of self. Her groundedness may therefore be experienced as unsettling, not because she has attacked or diminished the other person, but because she is no longer participating in the relational pattern through which that person has maintained a sense of control or affirmation. In such cases, the attack may be directed toward the perceived source of disruption rather than toward the underlying vulnerability itself. This is one possible psychodynamic interpretation of why a woman’s increasing self-definition can become a target for devaluation or hostility.

Courage and Truth‑Telling as Repellent

Because authentic women are anchored in their values, they are more likely, over time, to name what others try not to see. Sometimes this happens in small ways: correcting the record in a meeting, refusing to let a colleague be scapegoated, questioning a “harmless” joke that is actually humiliating. Sometimes it happens in larger ways: documenting abuse, going to HR, whistleblowing, or openly describing the gap between the organization’s stated values and its actual practices. Research on employee voice and organizational silence demonstrates that raising concerns can carry interpersonal and organizational risks, particularly when speaking up challenges implicit norms (Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Morrison, 2014).

This is where courage takes on an existential dimension. For Beauvoir (1948), freedom does not mean acting without constraints or certainty. It means taking responsibility for how one responds to the conditions in which one is situated. In the workplace, this can mean remaining faithful to one’s perception and moral judgment even when speaking carries relational or professional risk.

This kind of truth-telling may become particularly difficult for individuals who rely on intimidation, control, or impression management to maintain their position within a group. When a woman is not easily intimidated into silence and can describe events clearly and coherently, her behavior may be experienced as a threat to established patterns of control. From a psychodynamic perspective, one possible interpretation is that her refusal to participate in the prevailing narrative can make previously protected dynamics more visible, potentially disrupting what might be experienced within the group as a kind of “spell.”

Courage here is not dramatic heroism. It is the daily willingness to stay in contact with one’s own perception and conscience, even when the surrounding system prefers distortion. It is the choice to say, “This isn’t okay for me,” in the face of pressure to comply. That very courage makes authentic women less available as ongoing narcissistic supply, and thus less attractive and more threatening in the long run (Detert & Edmondson, 2011).

Why Authenticity Threatens Bullies and Fragile Systems

As women become more self-congruent in how they show up at work, their ways of relating may change the relational dynamics around them. They are less willing to tolerate disrespect, overwork, or ethical breaches. They stop laughing at humiliating jokes. They decline to participate in gossip that harms colleagues. They question decisions that quietly violate their values. They begin to say no to “extra” tasks that were never in their job description but were expected of them because they were accommodating.

For leaders and colleagues whose identities are built on control, performance, and image, especially those with narcissistic or other Dark Triad traits, this shift is deeply destabilizing. Research shows that workplace bullies, rather than their targets, tend to score high on narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and low on agreeableness and honest‑humility, and that these traits correlate with an increased likelihood of bullying behavior (Nielsen & Einarsen, 2018; O’Boyle et al., 2012). From a psychodynamic perspective, hostility may become more likely when an individual’s sense of status, control, or self-cohesion is experienced as threatened.

At a relational level, a woman's increased self-definition may alter dynamics that had previously depended on her responsiveness to flattery, intimidation, accommodation, or self-justification. From a psychodynamic perspective, such a change may be experienced by some individuals as destabilizing, particularly where interpersonal relationships have been organized around control, status, or external validation. From a depth-psychological perspective, such changes might evoke envy, anger, or other defensive reactions in some individuals, particularly where the woman’s increased autonomy is experienced as a threat to an established relational pattern.

Research from several domains suggests that authenticity may become socially costly when it challenges established expectations. Studies on gender backlash show that women who display agency, assertiveness, and power are often evaluated more negatively than men exhibiting the same behaviors (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008; Heilman & Okimoto, 2007; Rudman & Phelan, 2008). Importantly, this penalty does not necessarily involve questioning a woman’s competence. Phelan et al. (2008) found that agentic women could be perceived as highly competent while simultaneously being judged as less socially skilled than comparable men, with social evaluations carrying particular weight in hiring decisions. This pattern helps illuminate a central tension in the present argument: a woman may be recognized as capable while being penalized for how she expresses that capability when her behavior violates expectations of femininity, warmth, or relational accommodation.

Research on employee voice similarly demonstrates that speaking up about concerns or challenging prevailing practices can trigger interpersonal and career penalties (Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Morrison, 2014). From this perspective, some of the hostility directed toward women who become more self-defining may reflect broader patterns of backlash against individuals whose behavior violates implicit norms of compliance, silence, and role conformity.

Authenticity does not necessarily produce backlash in itself. Rather, backlash may become more likely when behaviors associated with greater self-congruence, such as setting boundaries, expressing independent judgment, or challenging established practices, are interpreted as violations of gendered or organizational expectations.

Women who exercise agency and power may also enter an interpretive environment in which their behavior is subject to heightened scrutiny. Research on women in powerful positions suggests that they can face greater scrutiny and more consequential evaluation than men in comparable positions. In a study of female CEOs, for example, women were more likely than men to face threats from shareholder activists, consistent with greater scrutiny of women in top leadership positions (Gupta et al., 2018).

The nature of the behavior matters as well. Williams and Tiedens (2016), in a meta-analysis of 63 studies, examined the interpersonal and organizational consequences of women's dominance behavior. In this literature, dominance included behaviors that communicate assertiveness, control, or an attempt to influence others, with some studies examining explicit forms such as making direct demands for behavioral change. Women incurred greater interpersonal penalties than men when they displayed dominance, particularly when dominance was expressed explicitly. They were liked less and, in a smaller set of studies, were also less likely to be judged hireable, even though their perceived competence did not differ from men’s. These findings suggest that the social penalty may fall not on women's perceived ability but on how others receive their exercise of agency (Williams & Tiedens, 2016).

This distinction is important for understanding the interpretive environment surrounding women. A woman does not have to behave aggressively to be experienced as threatening. She may simply occupy herself fully. She knows what she sees. She does not surrender her judgment. She does not perform deference. She may possess social intelligence, authenticity, and authority without needing to dominate. The question, then, is not only what a woman actually does, but how her agency, competence, and motives are interpreted by those around her.

Recent theorizing suggests that this interpretive environment may include not only heightened scrutiny of women’s visible behavior, but also suspicion about what they may be doing outside public view. Martin and Flynn (2026) identify an “uncommunal feminine stereotype,” according to which successful women may be perceived as more likely than men to pursue their goals through covert, self-interested behavior that disadvantages others. Importantly, the authors conceptualize this as an observer-held stereotype, not as evidence that women actually behave more “uncommunally” than men. Their argument is that women’s public communality and presumed private uncommunality can coexist in the minds of observers, offering an alternative explanation for women’s success and helping explain why successful women may be distrusted.

The distinction between observable behavior and the meanings attributed to another person draws attention to the interpersonal processes unfolding within the encounter itself. From a depth-psychological perspective, these processes may include unconscious dynamics that shape how another person is experienced and responded to.

A Depth-Psychological Interpretation: The Interpersonal Field, Archetypal Constellation, and the Numinous

The preceding findings can be situated within a depth-psychological understanding of the interpersonal field. In a relational encounter, psychological experience unfolds within a field shaped by the interaction of conscious and unconscious processes. Jungian depth psychology considers such encounters as spaces in which personal histories, unconscious identifications, and relational expectations may become dynamically interwoven with patterns arising from the collective unconscious (Jung, 1959/1968, 1969). Material from both the personal and collective dimensions of the psyche may become constellated within the encounter, shaping perception, affect, meaning, and relational experience.

The interpersonal field can thus open into a transpersonal space in which the encounter carries meanings that extend beyond the personal histories of those involved. Within Jungian psychology, the transpersonal dimension is grounded in the collective unconscious, understood as a deeper layer of the psyche through which archetypal patterns participate in human experience (Jung, 1959/1968). The transpersonal space refers to the point at which an interpersonal encounter becomes permeated by such supra-individual patterns of meaning.

At the personal level, the encounter can activate unconscious material rooted in the individual’s psychological history. Earlier relational experiences, unresolved conflicts, expectations, and identifications may become activated in contact with another person and influence how that person is perceived. Projection provides one way in which such unconscious material may become organized around another person. Jung (1959/1968) understood projection as a process through which unconscious contents become experienced as though they belonged to another person or object (pp. 8–10). A woman may genuinely possess qualities such as autonomy, integrity, courage, psychological differentiation, or moral independence, while also becoming the recipient of meanings that originate partly in another person’s unconscious.

Through projection, the perceiver may experience aspects of the other through meanings that originate within their own unconscious. The actual qualities of the person encountered remain part of the relationship, while personal unconscious material can shape their psychological significance for the perceiver.

The encounter can simultaneously engage material that extends beyond the individual’s personal history. When such material becomes activated in an interpersonal encounter, the person may come to carry meanings associated with patterns that extend beyond the biographical and relational history of the perceiver.

Jung (1959/1968) conceptualized the collective unconscious as a deeper layer of the psyche containing patterns shared across human experience. When such material becomes activated in an interpersonal encounter, the person may acquire a significance that exceeds the biographical and relational history of the perceiver.

Jung (1934/1968) described archetypes as fundamental patterns of the collective unconscious that become perceptible through images, affects, fantasies, and characteristic modes of experience (pp. 3–5). In an interpersonal encounter, an archetypal pattern can become constellated around a particular person, organizing perception, affect, and meaning in ways that extend beyond the person’s individual characteristics.

Personal projection and archetypal constellation can therefore operate within the same encounter. Personal projection draws on material rooted in the individual’s psychological history, whereas archetypal constellation involves patterns associated with the collective unconscious. A particular person may consequently be experienced simultaneously through personal meanings and through a wider symbolic pattern.

Jung (1953) observed that an archetype may appear not only in dreams and fantasies but also “in life,” where it may exert a “numinous or fascinating effect” (p. 68). The activation of an archetypal pattern can therefore give an interpersonal encounter an affective intensity that exceeds ordinary conscious appraisal.

Jung (1938/1969) understood the numinosum as an autonomous psychic experience. He described it as a “dynamic existence or effect” that “seizes and controls” the individual, who is “rather its victim than its creator” (p. 4). The numinous refers to the compelling quality of an experience whose affective intensity and psychological significance exceed ordinary conscious control.

Within an archetypally charged encounter, this quality can help explain why another person may evoke fascination, admiration, attraction, fear, envy, or hostility with unusual intensity. The response concerns the psychological meaning activated in the encounter as well as the person who becomes its focus.

Jung’s discussion of the mana-personality provides a particularly useful formulation for understanding how this can occur in relation to another person. Jung (1953) described the mana-personality as a “personified archetypal image of a supernatural force” (CW 7, para. 377). The concept describes a psychological situation in which an individual becomes invested with archetypal significance that exceeds ordinary interpersonal perception. In discussing the analytic relationship, Jung (1953) observed that “the doctor is still mana” (CW 7, para. 389), illustrating how an actual person can become invested with archetypal significance within a relationship.

In a Jungian-informed sense, this can be described phenomenologically as experiencing a woman as a “living numinosum.” The phrase refers to an encounter in which a real person becomes charged with an intensity, fascination, or psychological significance extending beyond ordinary perception of the individual. The woman remains a particular person; what becomes amplified is the psychological meaning carried by her presence.

Corbett (1996) offers a further perspective on the intensity associated with numinous experience. Within his Jungian, spiritually informed depth psychology, he emphasizes the transformative potential of encounters with the numinous and the fear that may accompany such experiences. Contact with the numinous can bring psychologically significant unconscious material into awareness and may contribute to a reorganization of established psychological structures (Corbett, 1996). Fascination and fear can therefore coexist when an encounter activates material that challenges an established organization of the psyche.

This ambivalence brings shadow dynamics into view. Jung’s understanding of the shadow provides one framework for considering how aspects of the personality that remain outside conscious identification may enter relationships through projection (Jung, 1951/1968). Jung’s discussion of anima and animus likewise describes contrasexual psychological structures whose projections can influence interpersonal perception (Jung, 1951/1968).

A person may consequently become associated with qualities that the perceiver has not fully integrated into their own psychological life. Autonomy may constellate dependency. Moral courage may constellate accommodation. Psychological differentiation may constellate experiences of fusion. Freedom may constellate conformity. These oppositions describe possible tensions within the perceiver that can become organized around the person encountered.

The resulting psychological image may acquire the quality of what can be described metaphorically as a Fata Morgana. The woman remains real and particular. The mirage-like quality belongs to the psychological image through which she is perceived when personal and archetypal material become projected onto her. The experience can therefore be psychologically real while carrying meanings that extend beyond the actual person.

This distinction is particularly relevant to workplace relationships. A woman may become the focus of idealization, suspicion, envy, fear, devaluation, sexualization, or hostility when the interpersonal field has become charged with meanings that exceed the immediate interaction. In some circumstances, efforts to diminish, discredit, control, isolate, or exclude her may function defensively in relation to psychological material associated with her presence.

This depth-psychological account operates alongside social and organizational explanations of workplace backlash. Gender norms, status hierarchies, organizational politics, competition, and power remain essential explanatory dimensions. The depth-psychological perspective adds a further level of analysis by examining how personal and collective psychic material can become organized around a real person within an interpersonal field.

Two realities can therefore be held simultaneously: the reality of the woman as a particular person, with her own intentions, characteristics, and limitations, and the reality of what her presence may constellate within another person’s psyche. Differentiating these realities allows the interpersonal encounter to be understood with greater psychological and ethical precision: the woman’s actual personhood remains distinct from the meanings that may become organized around her.

Authentic Women as Targets: Insights from Covert Aggression

In my dissertation on covert aggression and abuse of power by women in U.S. workplaces, this pattern emerged with particular clarity. The women whose experiences I examined were competent and professional, with a clear sense of their values, judgment, and integrity. Their accounts included situations in which acting in accordance with those values brought them into conflict with problematic workplace dynamics.

They did not abandon their judgment or ethical standards when faced with pressure to accommodate those dynamics. They were also described by others outside the bullying dynamic as professional, competent, and trustworthy.

What became consequential was not that these women had newly discovered their values, but that they did not set aside their existing judgment or ethical standards when workplace dynamics pressured them to accommodate. In some cases, that refusal brought them into conflict with colleagues or leaders and became entangled with experiences of covert aggression, exclusion, and abuse of power.

Importantly, this did not mean that the women lacked competence or awareness of their professional responsibilities. Some targets appeared highly competent, conscientious, and authentic, yet were less attentive to the informal political dynamics through which influence and protection were sometimes negotiated.

Research on political skill suggests that effectiveness within organizations depends not only on competence and integrity but also on the ability to recognize power dynamics, social networks, and informal influence processes (Ferris et al., 2005). This distinction may help explain why some women who were highly capable in their formal roles were nevertheless initially unprepared for the covert nature of the attacks directed against them. This distinction may help explain why some women who were highly capable in their formal roles were nevertheless initially unprepared for the covert nature of the attacks directed against them.

The organizational context may also help explain why such targets were vulnerable to covert forms of aggression. In environments shaped by competition, informal hierarchies, or scarcity-based assumptions about status and advancement, competence and integrity do not necessarily protect an individual from relational or political attack. One possible interpretation is that some women had adapted to male-normed, scarcity-based organizational cultures in which status was experienced as something to be defended and advancement as a limited resource. Within such environments, another woman’s competence, autonomy, or recognition may be experienced as consequential to one’s own position, even when no direct competition has been established.

When an authentic, competent, and well-regarded woman enters such an environment, her way of working may implicitly challenge assumptions about what is required to succeed within it. Her presence may therefore become a living contradiction of the belief that advancement requires conformity, political maneuvering, or the suppression of one’s own judgment.

Within such a context, some women may have experienced the target as threatening even in the absence of overt competition or aggression on her part. One possible psychodynamic interpretation is that efforts to undermine her reputation, isolate her, or discredit her may have served a defensive function, helping to restore a familiar relational and organizational equilibrium. For the women who became targets, the consequences described in the dissertation were substantial, including psychological distress and disruption to their professional lives (Hecker, 2024).

Image via Unsplash by ThisisEngineering @thisisengineering

Gendered Jealousy and Relational Power: Why Authentic Women Are Punished More

The threat authentic women pose is not limited to men. It also manifests as gendered jealousy toward other women. Many women in male‑normed workplaces have survived by splitting themselves in two. They have quieted their doubts, numbed their feelings, hardened their edges, or over‑conformed to expectations of niceness and self‑sacrifice. They have learned that, to stay employed or be promoted, they must either be endlessly accommodating or become “one of the boys,” distancing themselves from other women and suppressing their own needs. In the process, they may feel they have lost contact with who they really are (Ely & Meyerson, 2000; Kanter, 1977).

When such a woman encounters an authentic colleague, someone who is both competent and well-liked, who sets boundaries and is still respected, who is willing to leave situations that violate her values, she is confronted with a painful comparison. The authentic woman may represent a possibility that the other woman experiences as one she herself had to relinquish in order to survive within the organizational culture. From a psychodynamic perspective, such a comparison may evoke jealousy, resentment, or painful awareness of possibilities that the other woman may feel she had to relinquish.

In this way, the authentic woman’s visibility becomes a psychological and social flashpoint. She not only represents an alternative way of being, but also exposes the cost of adaptation. What is at stake is not simply her exercise of agency, but her claim to define herself rather than accepting a position defined for her by others. This can make her presence particularly charged in environments where belonging has depended on conformity to gendered expectations.

This reaction does not arise in a vacuum. It is shaped and intensified by broader gender dynamics. Research on prejudice toward female leaders indicates that women who exhibit agency, assertiveness, and power encounter disproportionate backlash compared to their male counterparts for similar behaviors (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008). Women who display agentic behavior can face social penalties when that behavior is perceived as inconsistent with gendered expectations, including judgments concerning interpersonal suitability and communality (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008; Heilman & Okimoto, 2007). This broader pattern reflects persistent gendered expectations that associate women more strongly with communality and men with agency (Eagly & Karau, 2002). The resulting “backlash effect” refers to the penalties women can face for not adhering to gendered expectations, particularly when they display agentic behaviors perceived as inconsistent with the female role (Rudman & Phelan, 2008). Studies show that, anticipating such penalties, many women strategically adjust their behavior, toning down assertiveness and emphasizing warmth to avoid social sanction (Heilman, 2012; Phelan & Rudman, 2010).

Gendered expectations become particularly constraining when relationality becomes an expectation of self-suppression: overriding one’s own needs, limits, time, judgment, and ambitions in order to accommodate, serve, soothe, or care for others. The issue is not whether she serves others, but whether she remains free to decide when, how, and for whom she does so. When care, availability, and service are treated as obligations rather than choices, relationality can become coercive. A woman may be valued for what she provides to others while being pressured to surrender the freedom to define herself, set limits, and refuse. Over time, this coercive process can overwrite her sense of self, as the expectations of others become increasingly internalized as part of her identity.

Beauvoir’s (1948, 1953) analysis rejects precisely this reduction of woman to a role defined for her by others. Relationality does not require self-abandonment, and care does not require servitude. A woman can remain deeply responsive to others while retaining her own freedom, judgment, and authority to act.

Furthermore, agency and relationality are not necessarily opposites. For some women, becoming more fully themselves also means becoming more willing to protect, advocate for, intervene, or speak up when another person is being harmed. Their agency may therefore be expressed not only in acting for themselves, but in acting on behalf of others without surrendering their own judgment. She may be perceived as threatening because she refuses to diminish herself and, at the same time, refuses to remain silent when others are being diminished.

This combination can give her a form of social influence that does not depend on formal authority. Her credibility can generate trust. Her willingness to stand up for others can generate solidarity. Her capacity to act from her own judgment can strengthen her influence within the group. Together, these forms of influence can constitute a form of relational power that may be difficult to control. Her influence can extend beyond her own position, affecting what others feel able to see, say, and do.

Against this backdrop, a woman who remains authentic can be experienced not only as different but as destabilizing, particularly when she combines agency with a willingness to protect, advocate for, or speak up for others. Her influence may extend to others in the group and disrupt an already precarious balance others have learned to maintain.

When her influence begins to challenge the group’s established norms, she may increasingly be positioned as the problem rather than recognized as a legitimate source of influence. Rather than direct confrontation, it may take the form of gossip, social exclusion, or subtle attacks on credibility, particularly when these behaviors are reinforced by existing power structures (Robinson et al., 2013). These behaviors function less as personal dislike and more as social regulation, enforcing unwritten rules about how women are “allowed” to be.

In my dissertation, this gendered jealousy became visible in how female perpetrators of covert aggression described their targets. Respondents reported that competence was reframed as “showing off” or as “thinking she’s better than everyone else.” Strikingly, one of these same women also described intentionally downplaying her own intelligence in an interview with a female evaluator to avoid being perceived as threatening and to secure the position. This illustrates how the devaluation of other women and the diminishment of the self can coexist, both shaped by the same underlying pressure to regulate visibility and competence. In this sense, the problem is not competence itself, but the gendered demand that women make themselves smaller to remain acceptable.

Gendered socialization can produce jealousy and backlash, while an authentic woman’s combination of agency and relationality can also generate a social influence that unsettles established patterns of status, authority, and belonging.

From Personal Failure to Structural Clash

Seen through the lens of individual self‑blame, these experiences are devastating. Many of the women I have worked with and interviewed initially draw the conclusion: “I must have done something wrong. I became more myself, and it cost me my job, my reputation, my health. I should have just stayed quiet.” The surrounding culture often reinforces this message, implicitly or explicitly.

A more integrated view tells a different story. Becoming more authentic through therapy, trauma work, and self‑development is not the problem. Rather, the problem is that many workplaces and social systems remain organized around protecting fragile egos, preserving unjust hierarchies, and enforcing gendered scripts. When a woman stops colluding with those arrangements, interpersonal conflict may become more likely in environments that strongly defend established patterns of control, conformity, or denial (Argyris, 1991; Morrison & Milliken, 2000).

Naming this matters. It allows us to recognize that increased conflict, bullying, or ostracism after a woman becomes more authentic is not proof that she is on the wrong path. Instead, it may indicate that her way of being is colliding with individuals and systems invested in control, conformity, and denial. Her experience can therefore be understood not as personal failure, but as a structural clash between her developing sense of self and an environment that cannot readily accommodate it.

Agency, Relationality, and the Unrecognized Nature of Power

Beauvoir’s existential understanding of freedom offers another way of understanding what may have been occurring in these women’s experiences. Ethical action does not begin with certainty about one’s power or with a guarantee that doing what is right will be rewarded. It begins with taking responsibility for how one responds to the situation one finds oneself in. For many of these women, speaking up when something was wrong, protecting someone who was being mistreated, questioning what did not make sense, or refusing to participate in behavior that violated their values was not experienced as an exercise of power. It was simply what they believed they had to do.

They did not necessarily experience themselves as powerful in the conventional organizational sense. They exercised agency, and that agency, when combined with relationality, generated influence. Because this influence emerged through trust, solidarity, moral credibility, and responsiveness to others, they may not have recognized it as power.

This reflects a narrower cultural understanding of power, one that privileges hierarchy, dominance, competition, and positional authority. Relational forms of power remain less visible precisely because they do not announce themselves as power. A woman may therefore remain unaware of the influence she carries even when others recognize its significance. What she experiences as simply doing what is right can itself become an exercise of power.

Limitations and Future Directions

Several limitations should be considered when interpreting the arguments presented here. First, the qualitative dissertation research on which portions of this article draw involved women who had experienced covert aggression and abuse of power in U.S. workplaces. The participants were targets of workplace aggression and completed the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R), a standardized measure of exposure to negative workplace behaviors (Einarsen et al., 2009). The sample was purposive and experience-based rather than representative of women in the broader workforce. The findings offer insight into participants’ experiences, meanings, and interpretations, but they cannot establish the prevalence of authenticity-related backlash among women generally.

Second, the dissertation relied on participants’ retrospective accounts of workplace events. Such accounts are valuable for understanding how individuals experienced and made meaning of complex interpersonal dynamics, but they cannot independently establish the motives or internal psychological states of other actors. Accordingly, the depth-psychological interpretations offered in this article should be understood as theoretical hypotheses that may help illuminate these experiences, rather than as direct evidence of perpetrators’ unconscious motivations.

Third, the findings do not establish a causal relationship between authenticity and workplace bullying. In some cases, increased self-definition, boundary-setting, independent judgment, or refusal to participate in problematic workplace practices may have coincided with or preceded intensified interpersonal conflict or organizational retaliation. These temporal and relational patterns are theoretically important, but they do not demonstrate that authenticity caused the subsequent aggression. Future research could examine these processes longitudinally, including how changes in self-congruence, boundary-setting, organizational climate, and interpersonal responses unfold over time.

Fourth, the dissertation sample does not permit a robust intersectional analysis of how race, class, sexuality, disability, age, nationality, and other social positions shape the experience and social costs of authenticity. The broader literature reviewed here indicates that these dimensions matter, but future research should examine them systematically rather than treating “women” as a homogeneous category. Larger and more diverse samples, comparative designs, longitudinal research, and intersectionally informed qualitative studies could help clarify when authenticity is supported, when it becomes socially costly, and how organizational contexts shape these outcomes.

Conclusion

The experiences described in this article suggest that the movement toward authenticity is not only an intrapsychic process. As women become more able to trust their perception, exercise their judgment, set boundaries, and act in accordance with their values, their way of relating to others can also change. For some, becoming more fully themselves means becoming more willing to protect, advocate for, intervene, or speak when another person is being harmed. Agency and relationality can therefore develop together.

This is also where the distinction between power and influence becomes important. Many of these women did not experience themselves as powerful in the conventional organizational sense. They were not necessarily seeking status or authority. They were often simply responding to what they perceived as wrong, unfair, or harmful. Yet their agency, when combined with relationality, could generate trust, credibility, solidarity, and influence. What they experienced as simply doing what was right could be experienced by others as an exercise of power.

This helps explain why authenticity can become consequential within workplaces organized around conformity, silence, or rigid hierarchies. A woman who refuses to diminish herself and refuses to remain silent when others are diminished may acquire influence without consciously seeking it. Her presence can make visible possibilities that the surrounding system has learned to suppress. When that influence begins to disrupt established patterns of status, authority, or belonging, she may be positioned as the problem. Difference can become otherness, and otherness can become a pathway to exclusion, discrediting, and scapegoating.

The implication is not that women should become less authentic in order to protect themselves. Nor does authenticity mean acting without reflection or responsibility. Psychological maturity requires the capacity to exercise agency and power while remaining responsive to others. It requires self-alignment without self-absorption, relationality without self-abandonment, and courage without the assumption that courage guarantees safety or recognition. It also requires discernment about where, when, and how one’s authenticity can be expressed without losing contact with oneself.

The larger task therefore extends beyond helping individual women become more authentic. It requires creating workplaces in which authenticity, moral agency, and relational influence are not treated as threats to established arrangements. The deeper question is whether belonging requires self-betrayal, whether power depends on domination, and whether authority can coexist with genuine regard for others. A psychologically mature workplace would make room for forms of agency and influence that strengthen, rather than diminish, the subjectivity of others.

About the Author

Dr. Kerstin Hecker, PhD, is a workplace bullying researcher, depth psychologist, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, and holistic counselor. Her work focuses on workplace bullying, covert aggression, abuse of power, relational harm, organizational dynamics, and the effects of chronic stress. She offers online counseling in English and German.

© 2026 Dr. Kerstin Hecker. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced, distributed, or used in any form without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations with proper citation.

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