The double bind psychology generated in the workplace. Let’s talk about it.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, that’s OK. Neither was I.
Not until my typical mosey to the car after work, trying to make sense of the scatterplot of thoughts that undulates through my mind when I’m dealing with intense feelings or complicated issues. I grabbed a few words describing the disconnect I felt, plugged them into Google, and Gemini served a term I hadn’t heard before:
Illustration adapted from a concept by Dr. Doyenne.
“Double bind.”
A double bind happens when the range of acceptable behavior becomes extremely narrow — when you’re essentially damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Speak confidently, and you risk being perceived as aggressive.
Soften your language, and you risk being perceived as unsure.
Too direct → “difficult.”
Too collaborative → “not decisive.”
As a woman and as a mother, many of us learn to navigate this dynamic early, even if we don’t know the term.
One reason I notice it so clearly is that I’m also transgender. That has given me the unusual experience of moving through professional spaces while being perceived very differently at different points in my life.
At 18 years old — perceived as male — I worked as an electrician. I had about two years of informal on-the-job training and was still in the middle of a vocational program I was completing on my own.
Despite being early in my career, I was moved into a foreman role and regularly treated as an authority.
Eighteen. Year. Old. Boy.
Fast forward to today.
Thirteen years after transitioning. A 39-year-old woman.
I finished that vocational program years ago — six years before transitioning, at age 20. Since then I’ve earned an associate’s degree in accounting, pursued bachelor’s-level education in math and data analytics, completed Python automation coursework through Google and Coursera, and spent over a decade in auditing, accounting, and credit analysis.
Across that time I’ve studied systems — electrical systems, computer and data systems, financial systems, and the mathematical models behind them.
But recognizing expertise requires something simple organizations often fail to practice:
Listening beyond the level of stereotyping.
When we rely too heavily on assumptions about who “sounds authoritative,” we risk filtering out insight before we’ve even heard it.
Over time this has made me pay close attention to how organizations recognize expertise — and how easily ideas detach from the people who first surface them.
There’s another dimension to this that’s personal.
For the first 26 years of my life I avoided femininity. I was raised male in a very fundamentalist environment and learned early that femininity was something to suppress — at the risk of cruelty.
Ironically, that early conditioning benefited my career beyond reason.
Eighteen. Year. Old. Electrical. Foreman.
In many professional environments you must be competitive, assertive — even aggressive — to move forward. Assertiveness and femininity don’t have to collide, but in many people’s minds they still do.
After spending much of my life suppressing femininity, I’m not willing to abandon it now to fit a narrower idea of what authority should look like.
And the real question is:
Why should anyone have to?
Strong organizations evaluate ideas on their substance — not how closely the speaker fits a stereotype of authority.
Because sometimes the biggest constraint in a system isn’t capability.
It’s misperception.