that helps the professor remember the critical points
and who made them. Just as in real life, performance is highly dependent upon the reaction people
have to one another. The other six Ford Scholars quickly became the most-quoted speakers as their
academic standing gave them instant credibility. They also received early job offers from prestigious
employers before the official recruiting period even began. One day in class, one of the exalted six
made a comment that, to my mind, demonstrated that he had not even read the case being discussed.
Everyone fawned all over him. I wondered if I was making a huge mistake not letting people know
that I was the seventh student. It would have been nice to float through my second year of business
school without even reading the material.

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But I never really considered going public. I instinctively knew that letting my academic
performance become known was a bad idea. Years later, when I learned about the Heidi/Howard case
study, I understood the reason why. Being at the top of the class may have made life easier for my
male peers, but it would have made my life harder.

I did not reach this conclusion in a vacuum. All through my life, culturally reinforced signals
cautioned me against being branded as too smart or too successful. It starts young. As a girl, you know
that being smart is good in lots of ways, but it doesn’t make you particularly popular or attractive to
boys. In school, I was called the “smartest girl in the class.” I hated that description. Who wants to go
to the prom with the smartest girl in the class? Senior year, my class voted me “most likely to
succeed,” along with a boy. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the prom, so I convinced my
friend, who worked on the yearbook, to remove my name. I got a prom date who was fun and loved
sports. In fact, he loved sports so much that two days before the prom, he canceled on me to go to a
basketball game, saying, “I know you’ll understand since going to the playoffs is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity.” I did not point out that as a high school girl, I thought going to the prom was a once-in-
a-lifetime opportunity. Luckily, I found a new date who was less of a sports fan.

I never really thought about why I went to such efforts to mute my achievements from such a young
age. Then, about ten years after I graduated from business school, I was seated at dinner next to
Deborah Gruenfeld, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Stanford, and our friendly ░░網░
small talk quickly turned into an intense discussion. Having studied this issue, Professor Gruenfeld
was able to explain the price women pay for success. “Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men
with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind,” she
said. “We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else.
When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a
7
negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.”

If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is
considered more nice than competent. Since people want to hire and promote those who are both
competent and nice, this creates a huge stumbling block for women. Acting in stereotypically
feminine ways makes it difficult to reach for the same opportunities as men, but defying expectations
and reaching for those opportunities leads to being judged as undeserving and selfish. Nothing has