Why Do I Shrink in Meetings?
The Pattern
You had the thought before the meeting. You knew it was a good thought. You walk into the room and the thought stays in your throat. Someone else says a version of your thought thirty minutes in. They get the credit. You wonder why you did not speak. You did not speak because your body did the math and decided the cost of speaking, in that room, with those particular people, exceeded the cost of staying quiet. The math is old and the math is faster than your awareness.
Origins & Context
The linguist Deborah Tannen, whose work on workplace communication is foundational, documented the gendered patterns in which men's speech styles are read as confidence and women's speech styles are read as either insufficient or excessive. The woman who speaks in the room learns that speaking has costs she has not been told about. The shrinking is not a personal failing. It is the body responding to feedback the room has been giving her without saying it out loud.
The sociologist Joan Acker introduced the concept of the gendered organization, the idea that workplaces are not neutral containers but are structured by gendered assumptions about who belongs at the table and how. The shrinking response is the body's accurate read of a room that has signaled, often subtly, that the woman's full voice is not welcome at full volume. The remedy is not to push harder against the same room. The remedy is, when possible, to change the room.
The shrinking is not a personal failing. It is the body responding to feedback the room has been giving you without saying it out loud.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the way your voice gets smaller in particular rooms. You notice that you can be articulate at home with the same colleagues over coffee and quiet with them in the boardroom. You notice the way the men in the meeting speak with a confidence the meeting rewards and you speak with a hedging the meeting rewards.
You notice the cost. The ideas that did not get said. The credit that went elsewhere. The slow erosion of your own confidence about your own thinking. You notice that the shrinking has trained the room to expect it. You notice that breaking the pattern requires breaking the room's expectation of you.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Gendered Speech Penalties (Deborah Tannen), the documented patterns by which women's speech in workplaces is differentially evaluated and differentially costly. It is also named as the Gendered Organization (Joan Acker), the structural patterning of workplaces by gendered assumptions about voice and authority. The interpersonal version is named in workplace research as the Likeability-Competence Tradeoff (Madeline Heilman, Joan Williams), the documented penalty women face for being either too assertive or insufficiently assertive.
Related entries in this library: Fawn Response, Self-Abandonment, Emotional Labor.
Nikita's Note
The shrinking is not your fault. The shrinking is the body cooperating with a real dynamic. You do not have to shame yourself for the accurate read. You do have to start practicing the small, unglamorous interventions that change the dynamic.
Say the thing in the first ten minutes. Bring an ally who will repeat your point and attribute it back to you. Sit closer to the head of the table. The room responds to small structural changes faster than you would expect. The shrinking is reversible. It just requires evidence that the room is willing to receive you differently.
From the work
The shrinking is not a personal failing. It is the body responding to feedback the room has been giving you without saying it out loud.From She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained — available on Amazon.