“I don’t know if I came across super harsh or not. At some point, I lost sense of how I was showing up.”

That was my client after having a hard conversation with one of her leaders about getting the resources she needed in her role. She had asked for help already, but the help they initially offered wouldn’t solve her real problem of being understaffed and without necessary technology systems.

Frustrated that she wasn’t being heard, and stressed that this could cause her to fail in her new role, she finally had to very clearly and directly express exactly where she needed help.

While her leader was initially resistant, he ended up agreeing to exactly what she asked for. But instead of celebrating, she went home worried and exhausted, telling her husband that she wasn’t sure if she had been “too much.”

She’s not alone. In a study of 687 full-time employees, women reported higher negative outcome expectations for self-advocacy behaviors than men did. Further, these expectations predicted whether people actually advocated for themselves and how successful they felt in their careers.

When I asked my client why feeling these hard emotions was such a “bad” thing, she said she had spent her career being positive and solutions oriented, and keeping things energized and light. Somewhere along the way, she also learned that hard emotions—tension, conflict, pushing back—meant she was being “too much.”

In three studies published in Psychological Science, both male and female evaluators perceived angry female professionals more negatively than angry male professionals.

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