Think about the last time your judgment got questioned in a meeting by someone who would never have said it to a man. The eye roll. The "I just want someone closer to the business." The comment ambiguous enough that you couldn't call it out, but pointed enough that you felt it all day. My guest this week, Dr. Alison Fragale, has spent 25 years studying exactly why that happens, and what to do about it.

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Alison is an organizational psychologist, a professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, and the author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. For years she spoke to mostly male audiences, and it was the women who kept coming up to her afterward with a version of the same problem. Not a negotiation problem. A deeper one. My audience just doesn't value me. So she pointed the science of her own field at it and built a playbook for women.

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So what is a likeable badass? It's Alison's term for the two things people measure when they decide whether to respect you. One is whether you care about people other than yourself, honest, giving, helpful. The other is whether you're capable, that you can actually get things done. When people believe both about you, you have status, which Alison defines simply as how much other people respect and regard you. And here's the part that reframes everything: your status exists only in other people's heads. That's not a reason to obsess. It's a reason to be strategic.

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Alison connects this directly to something you have probably lived. The 2025 Lean In and McKinsey Women in the Workplace report found that women remain less likely than men to get that first promotion to manager, only 93 women for every 100 men, and just 74 women of color. But the exit at the top is just as telling. In earlier McKinsey data Alison cites, senior women were leaving corporate roles at record rates, often over exactly these small, deniable slights. She has a name for the trap underneath it: the low-status power holder. You have the title and the authority, but not the respect, so people can't come at you directly. They dig in the small ways instead. It is, in her words, a uniquely miserable place to be.

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The fix is not to work harder. Research on self-promotion backs her up here. In a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Christine Exley and Judd Kessler found that women describe their own performance less favorably than men who perform exactly the same, even when there is no incentive to hold back. So the answer isn't more output. It's what Alison calls dual promotion: taking one action that signals capability and caring at the same time. Send the wins email and shout out the people who helped. Offer the advice only you can give. Small moves, done long before you need someone in your corner, so that by the time you do, the respect is already there.

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If you have been white-knuckling your way through rooms that don't quite value you, this episode hands you the language for what's actually happening and a way out that doesn't require you to shrink or to scream. You are the product, Alison says. Stop waiting for the room to figure out you're good. Learn to show them.