Mindy Gulati sometimes arrives at a difficult executive strategy session with little crocheted dumpster fires.
She buys them to give to CEOs and other senior leaders, usually at the beginning of a session she knows will be especially challenging. She expects to take a very assertive role. The gifts are a deliberate nod of warmth.
She brings both into the room: the strength the work requires and a gesture of human connection.
That small gesture opens up a larger conversation about how women are perceived—and how understanding those perceptions can help us build the influence we want. How do people interpret our strength, our expertise, and our intentions? What does that mean when we’re leading a firm, advising clients, or working with colleagues? Understanding those dynamics can give us more choices about how to pursue the outcomes we want.
Before we get into that, we want to be clear. This is not another article about how women should do or be more. Fuck that shit. This is about arming ourselves with knowledge and using that knowledge in furtherance of our own goals.
Mindy, a strategist, advisor, and Catalyst Advisory collaborator, offers one example of what that can look like. Her approach serves a specific purpose in the work she does. Your version might be entirely different. You might also decide that a particular interaction deserves no additional effort from you.
The choice is yours. The knowledge is there for you to use when it serves you.
Power and status are different
As a firm owner, you control resources: money, hiring decisions, work assignments, access to information. That is power. Status is the respect, admiration, and regard other people give you. It exists only in people’s minds.
Alison Fragale’s Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve has substantially influenced how I think and teach about this distinction. Her research with Jennifer Overbeck and Margaret Neale examines power and status as separate characteristics that shape how people perceive us. Having one does not automatically give us the other. Fragale, Overbeck & Neale, 2011
Consider the U.S. Supreme Court, an example Fragale discusses in her book. Each justice has one vote in deciding a case. Yet research by Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers found that female justices were interrupted disproportionately by male colleagues and male advocates during oral arguments. The researchers examined gender alongside ideology and seniority and found a persistent gendered pattern. Jacobi & Schweers, 2017
The study measured interruptions, not status directly. But it offers a striking illustration of the distinction: comparable formal decision-making power did not translate into equal treatment in the room.
Owning the firm gives you meaningful control over resources. It does not automatically determine how seriously a client takes your recommendation, how much weight colleagues give your judgment, or whose perspective carries the most influence in a meeting.
Understanding that difference can help you identify what is happening when exercising your power doesn’t produce the response you expect. It also raises the next question: how do people form the perceptions that shape our status?
Warmth and competence shape perception
Fragale describes two broad dimensions of perception: warmth and assertiveness. Her use of assertiveness encompasses a collection of traits, including competence, confidence, organization, and persistence. It means more than speaking forcefully or standing your ground. Fragale, 2024
For this discussion, I use warmth and competence, drawing on the related research of Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick, and their colleagues. Their stereotype content model identifies these as central dimensions through which people perceive social groups. The broader literature also examines these dimensions in perceptions of individuals. Fiske et al., 2002; Cuddy, Fiske & Glick, 2008
Warmth concerns how people understand your intentions toward them. Competence concerns how they understand your capability.
These are collections of qualities. Warmth can come through friendliness, sincerity, or consideration. Competence can come through expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to accomplish something.
The frameworks overlap, but competence and assertiveness are not exact synonyms. Someone can communicate quietly and be highly capable. Someone can speak forcefully without exercising good judgment.
For a firm owner, the useful question is what people recognize in you. A referral partner may enjoy your company without understanding the complexity of the work you handle. A client may recognize your expertise without realizing how carefully you have considered their concerns.
Understanding what others recognize—and what they may be missing—can help you decide how to approach the relationships that matter to your goals.
A double bind that follows women into law firm ownership
I’m going to say something that is going to shock exactly zero women reading this: People don’t start with the same expectations of women and men. And it’s not fair. It’s horrible, actually. But it’s a reality we women have to live in while we do our best to change the world so our daughters don’t have to experience the same.
Women are generally expected to be warm, caring, and helpful. These expectations describe how people assume we will behave, but they also prescribe how people believe we should behave. When we are assertive, direct, or unwilling to accommodate someone, that behavior can violate the expectation. We may gain recognition for our capability while taking a knock on warmth: she knows her stuff, but she’s difficult.
Research by Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick illustrates this penalty. In an experiment involving managerial hiring decisions, an assertive, achievement-oriented female applicant faced discrimination under a particular job-description condition because she was perceived as insufficiently nice. Her perceived lack of warmth counted against her suitability for the role. Rudman & Glick, 2001
Men generally face less expectation to demonstrate warmth. In some settings, being helpful or caring can therefore earn them extra credit for exceeding expectations, while the same behavior from a woman is treated as the minimum.
Madeline Heilman and Julie Chen found this asymmetry in studies of workplace helping behavior: men received more favorable evaluations and reward recommendations for helping, while women did not receive the same benefit. Women were also penalized more for withholding help. Heilman & Chen, 2005
Think about an example I use in presentations: a parent taking the kids to Starbucks on a Saturday morning.
When it’s Dad, the reaction might be, “What a great father—taking the kids out and giving Mom a break.”
When it’s Mom, there may be no applause. There may even be judgment: why isn’t she at home making pancakes from scratch?
Same outing. Different expectations. He gets points for care that she is expected to provide as a matter of course.
The workplace version can be less obvious, but the underlying tension is familiar. A woman law firm owner is expected to listen, support, and accommodate while also making difficult decisions, holding boundaries, and directing the business. When she demonstrates the strength the work requires, people may interpret it as evidence that she lacks the warmth they expect.
That is the double bind. The behavior that establishes our capability can also become the reason someone objects to how we lead.
This doesn’t mean every person responds this way or every difficult interaction is about gender. It means the same behavior can be evaluated against different expectations—and ownership doesn’t make those expectations disappear.
Recognizing the pattern gives us more information. When a client objects to a boundary or a colleague reacts poorly to a clear position, we can consider the expectations shaping that response instead of automatically assuming we did something wrong.
Then we can decide what serves our goals. We may choose to make warmth more visible while holding our position. We may restate the boundary without any additional explanation. We may decide the relationship deserves less of our energy.
Understanding the double bind gives us choices about how to navigate it.
Dial up without dialing back
Mindy’s crocheted dumpster fires are a tangible example of dialing up warmth instead of dialing back assertiveness.
She expects the work to require assertiveness. She chooses to bring warmth into the interaction as well. The gesture doesn’t require her to dilute her advice or avoid the difficult questions.
That is the possibility in dialing up: making another part of yourself visible while preserving the strength you already bring.
If people readily recognize your competence, you might choose a small gesture that makes your care for them easier to see. If people know your warmth but have little exposure to your expertise, you might give them a clearer view of your judgment or capabilities.
That doesn’t mean performing a personality that feels foreign to you. Think about actions that fit the way you already work.
You might connect someone with a person who could help them address a challenge. You might send an article relevant to a problem they are facing, with a brief explanation of why you thought it would be useful.
The same action can communicate more than one thing. A thoughtful article can show that you were listening and that you understand the issue. A useful introduction can convey care and professional judgment.
These are what Alison Fragale calls “small deposits” in a relationship, an idea she explores in Likeable Badass. Their value depends on the person, the circumstances, and what you want to accomplish. They are options you can choose, not another category of unpaid work you are expected to absorb.
Use the knowledge toward your own goals
You don’t need to leave this article with a longer list of things to become.
You can leave with a question: What do I want, and does this knowledge give me an option I want to use?
Perhaps you want a difficult conversation to be productive. Perhaps you want a colleague to understand your expertise or a client to feel confident in your recommendation. You may also want to recognize when a relationship is asking for more than you wish to give.
Our companion warmth-and-competence calculator offers a starting point. You rate eight traits and receive two scores, each calculated as the average of four responses. Then you can reflect on how to dial up the lower-scoring dimension while preserving your existing strength.
The items and averaging approach are adapted from published research. This is a reflection on your professional self-perception, not a validated assessment of how others see you. Cuddy et al., 2009
For a broader outside perspective, the Influence Index™ examines 11 dimensions of perception, reputation, and professional relationships through surveys and interviews. It is a separate assessment, with a personalized report, an action plan, and conversations that connect the findings to your goals.
Start with the knowledge. Decide what it means for you. Use it when it serves you.