POW06: When Power Changes Shape, Someone Gets Blamed
How a bad-faith question like “Did women ruin the workplace?” hides the real politics of power
Last Thursday (6 November 2025), The New York Times ran a headline that asked, with theatrical innocence, “Did women ruin the workplace?”
The tone was exploratory, of course.
Just asking questions.
Just provoking discussion.
Just creating the conditions for a conclusion it had already chosen.
The premise wasn’t serious. But the impulse behind it was.
Because when a system shifts, when a familiar culture begins to feel unfamiliar, when the rituals and behaviours that once signaled status no longer function, someone must be held responsible.
Someone must be named as the cause of discomfort. Someone must become the explanation. And historically, the explanation is almost always the visible sign of the change — not the forces that drove it.
This is where Maya enters.
I should be clear: Maya is not a stand-in for womanhood, feminism, DEI dogma, or empowerment rhetoric. She is not symbolic. She is empirical.
The leadership datasets I trust — the ones based on behavioural observation and performance outcomes rather than self-report or stereotype — are consistent:
Men and women are equally likely to be effective leaders.
There are no population-level performance differences.
So I write Maya not because I am trying to correct an injustice through fiction or offer representation as virtue, but because she is representative of reality.
Her story is not about womanhood. It is about what happens when power changes shape.
Maya steps into leadership — thoughtful, competent, steady — and the system responds to her precisely as it responds to any leader who alters the emotional and organisational field:
Some adapt.
Some hesitate.
Some resist.
And some — threatened by the possibility that what once gave them status will no longer work — begin to tell stories.
Stories that say she is the problem. Stories that blame the visible woman for structural tensions she did not create.
That’s the move the NYT headline performs in public. It’s the same move many organisations perform in private.
Let’s name what’s going on—using Buchanan and Badham’s work on female leadership as our anchor.
1. The Temptation to Blame Women (Instead of Systems)
Buchanan & Badham describe a familiar pattern: when we look for explanations for women’s under-representation, or their shorter tenures, or their stalled careers, the “easy answers” come fast.
Women don’t want it enough.
Women are too empathetic, not political enough.
Women are too emotional—or not “authentically feminine” if they’re tough.
It’s the same logic as the headline: if there is friction, blame women’s alleged deficits or “feminine vices”, rather than interrogate power, structure, or design.
But when you look closely at the evidence Buchanan & Badham synthesise, a different picture appears:
Differences in political skill and influence use are subtle, not vast; women are just as likely to engage in organisational politics, though sometimes through different, coalition-oriented tactics.
Many obstacles are structural (access to networks, norms of long hours, informal spaces coded male, evaluation biases), not biological fate.
Women who do display traditionally “masculine” leadership behaviours are often punished for the same behaviours rewarded in men—the classic double bind.
If you build systems that:
reward specific historically masculine-coded performances,
withhold networks and feedback from those outside the in-group,
and then hand marginalised leaders the riskiest assignments,
you do not get to turn around and ask if those leaders “ruined” your institution.
You designed the trap.
You picked the moment.
You wrote the script.
2. “Think Crisis, Think Female”: Structurally Complex, Strategically Precarious
One of the most quietly vicious dynamics in Buchanan & Badham’s chapter is the pattern Michelle Ryan & Alex Haslam famously called the glass cliff.
Here’s the move in plain language:
Performance drops. The old guard (mostly men) have already presided over the damage.
Under pressure—public, regulatory, reputational—the board signals a fresh start.
A woman (or another historically under-represented leader) is appointed into a role:
in a business already in trouble,
with constraints already locked in,
with limited political cover and fragile support.
The turnaround is structurally unlikely in the timeframe and with the tools available.
When physics does its work—when losses don’t magically reverse—the story becomes:
“See? We tried diversity. It didn’t work.”
Ryan & Haslam’s work, and subsequent studies Buchanan & Badham cite, show:
Women are more likely than men to be appointed to senior roles following poor company performance;
Their tenures can be shorter, their roles more precarious, and their visibility higher—making failure more easily personalised and generalised.
In other words, women are often trusted with structurally complex, politically toxic, high-risk assignments that others have already made fragile—and then used as proof points when the impossible stays impossible.
It is not that women “ruin” organisations. It’s that organisations offer them the rubble and ask them to rebuild without tools. Then, when the walls don’t spring back up by magic, the backlash story writes itself.
This is why that NYT framing is not just clickbait; it is diagnostic. It mirrors precisely how failing systems externalise blame:
target the visible symbol of attempted change,
erase the decisions, behaviours, and power structures that made change necessary.
3. The Labyrinth, Not the Cliff Edge
Alice Eagly and Linda Carli’s metaphor of the labyrinth (which B&B discuss) is important here.
The problem is not a single barrier (“the glass ceiling”) that heroic women fail to smash through. It is:
Biased expectations (“tough” is admired in him, punished in her);
Increased scrutiny and reduced forgiveness for error;
Fewer role models and mentors;
Tighter margins for expressing anger, grief, or ambition;
Perpetual questions about fit, likability, and “tone” that are simply not applied with the same intensity to men.
Layer in life-stage pressures and social expectations, and the path is not just steep; it bends, doubles back, and dead-ends in ways designed to be misread as individual failure.
The glass cliff is one architectural feature inside that labyrinth.
The question “Did women ruin the workplace?” takes all of that structural complexity and translates it into a personality critique.
It’s politically efficient. It’s analytically lazy.
4. Enter Maya (Again): A Case Study in Misdiagnosis
So let’s return to Maya.
Maya is offered a senior role in a division that’s been underperforming for years. Three predecessors have cycled through, each leaving quietly with a “mutual parting of ways” statement.
Costs are locked in.
Technology is outdated.
Customer trust has eroded.
Critical roles are unfilled after budget freezes.
The informal power network still reports emotionally to the beloved-but-ineffective leader who ran the place like a boys’ club.
Maya does what good leaders do:
She asks naïve questions about how decisions get made.
She reads the numbers.
She surfaces ethical issues that were being discreetly ignored.
She promotes on merit, not on bar tab loyalty.
She pushes for psychological safety and clarity of role.
Within eighteen months:
The metrics are slightly better, not miraculous.
The cultural temperature has shifted—less swagger, more scrutiny.
Several previously protected high-status men have left or been moved.
Informal networks are being rewired.
If you were benefiting from the old regime, how does this feel?
It feels like loss.
It feels like feminisation.
It feels like ruin.
And so the story begins:
Maya is “too soft”, except when she is “too direct”.
She is “divisive”, except when she is “vague”.
She is “not decisive enough”, except when she “pushes too hard”.
None of this is about her competence. It is about what happens emotionally when power moves from:
patronage to process,
club rules to transparent rules,
informal immunity to visible accountability.
Someone has to be blamed for the discomfort of that shift.
The woman at the front is handy.
5. For Leaders Reading This: Where To Point Your Anger and Attention
If you were enraged by that headline, good. Keep the anger; sharpen the aim.
And if, quietly, a part of you wondered whether maybe there was a point—this is for you, too.
A few practical questions to sit with (and to use with your own “Mayas”):
Who gets the structurally complex assignments?
Look at who is sent into crisis roles, turnaround units, or failing portfolios.
Are women and other under-represented leaders disproportionately placed where success is least likely?
What scaffolding do they get?
Do they inherit:
realistic targets,
authority aligned with accountability,
political sponsorship,
access to the real decision-makers?
Or do they inherit public scrutiny and private veto points?
How are narratives formed when they succeed—or don’t?
When a man fails in a broken system, do you say, “Tough conditions, wrong time”?
When a woman fails, do you say, “We tried diversity; it didn’t work”?
How do you talk about “fit”?
Be honest: are you assessing capability, or your comfort with a shifting culture?
Does “not a cultural fit” mean “doesn’t play by the old boys’ rules”?
Are you willing to see power, not personality, as the variable?
Instead of asking “Did women ruin the workplace?”, try:
Who has historically designed this workplace?
Who benefits from keeping it that way?
Whose presence makes those benefits less automatic?
If you’re serious about leadership, this is non-negotiable work.
Because here is the through-line of Buchanan & Badham’s analysis and of the broader research: women are not a deviation from leadership norms; they expose what those norms have always been doing.
Raising the question “Did women ruin the workplace?” does not reveal a crisis of feminisation.
It reveals how profoundly uncomfortable some people are when power is no longer allowed to operate unchallenged, unobserved, and unchecked.
6. Closing the Loop (For Now)
So, no: women did not ruin the workplace.
What women (and other historically excluded leaders) have done is:
make visible the costs of systems built on overwork, opacity, and selective accountability;
refuse to carry the moral injury of cultures that demand loyalty to leaders over loyalty to the work;
and, in many cases, take on the hardest, messiest, least winnable assignments—and then absorb the blame when old decisions come due.
Maya is not the problem.
Your Mayas are not the problem.
The problem is the enduring attraction of an old story:
When power changes shape, blame the people who made it visible.
Your job, if you lead, is to break that story in your context.
Not by performative defence of women in the abstract. By auditing where risk sits, where support lives, how narratives get written—and refusing to participate in scapegoating when the system does exactly what it was built to do.
Diagnostic: Is Your Workplace Blaming Women or Minorities for Structural Problems?
score quickly rather than overthink.
How to use this
For each statement, rate your agreement for your current organisation:
1 = Strongly disagree
2 = Disagree
3 = Unsure / mixed
4 = Agree
5 = Strongly agree
Then look at the pattern. High scores in some clusters = you’ve got a narrative and power problem, not a “women problem”.
1. Narrative Blame & Stereotypes
When performance drops or disruption hits, senior conversations sometimes imply that “new expectations”, “DEI pressure”, or “too many sensitivities” are part of the problem.
I still hear variants of “think manager, think male” in who’s described as “natural leadership material” (strong, tough, decisive) vs “supporting talent” (caring, diligent, collaborative).
Assertive women are more likely than assertive men to be described as “abrasive”, “difficult”, or “too much”.
If your average here ≥ 3.5: your culture is primed to cast women as the explanation when power arrangements feel uncomfortable.
2. Glass Cliff & Crisis Appointments
Women (and other under-represented leaders) are disproportionately appointed into roles/units that are already struggling, politically fraught, or under-resourced.
When those risky roles don’t magically turn around, their “failure” is read as evidence about women leaders, not about the conditions they inherited.
Senior men are more often placed in roles with clearer upside, support, and cleaner runways.
If your average here ≥ 3.5: you’re likely running glass cliff dynamics while pretending to run a meritocracy.
3. Access to Power, Not Just Positions
Women in senior roles have less access to informal networks (drinks, dinners, side-chats, “mate” relationships) where real decisions are shaped.
Critical meetings or social rituals are routinely scheduled in ways that clash with caregiving or make some people’s presence harder.
Information, sponsors, and high-visibility projects still flow through old boys’ channels, even when org charts suggest equality.
If your average here ≥ 3.5: you’ve diversified titles, not power bases.
4. Punishing Women for Political Skill
When women use the same political and influence tactics as men (alliances, agenda-shaping, visibility), they get more social pushback.
Power, Politics, and Organizati…
Women who “just do the work” without engaging in politics are praised as team players but quietly sidelined in promotions.
Senior leaders talk about women needing to be “more confident” or “more political” while doing little to change the penalty structure when they are.
If your average here ≥ 3.5: your system simultaneously demands and punishes women’s political competence.
5. Organisational Storytelling About Performance
Discussions about under-representation of women in power still lean on individual deficits (confidence, ambition, “fit”) more than structural constraints or biased criteria.
Success stories of women leaders in your organisation are framed as exceptions (“she’s remarkable”) rather than as evidence that the talent pool is broad.
Negative outcomes under women leaders are generalised (“we tried that”) far more quickly than failures under men.
If your average here ≥ 3.5: your narrative machine is wired to make women carry the symbolic cost of systemic dysfunction.
How to read it
0–2.4 overall: Either your system is genuinely healthier than most, or you’re not close enough to see the games. Investigate, don’t self-congratulate.
2.5–3.4: You’re in the muddle: mixed signals, partial progress, vulnerable to “Did women ruin X?” nonsense when pressure spikes.
3.5–5.0: You do not have a women problem. You have a power, politics, and story problem. Fix your structures, incentives, and narratives before you start diagnosing “ruin”.
Core References
Primary frame
Buchanan, D. A., & Badham, R. J. (2020). Power, Politics, and Organizational Change (3rd ed.). Sage.
Key research drawn on in/underpinning Chapter 6.
Eagly, A. H. (2005). “Achieving relational authenticity in leadership: Does gender matter?” The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 459–474. (On “think manager–think male” and backlash when women display “masculine” leadership behaviours.)
Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders. Harvard Business School Press. (Labyrinth metaphor replacing simplistic glass ceiling; multi-stage obstacles.)
Ryan, M. K., & Haslam, S. A. (2005, 2007). Glass cliff studies showing women more likely to be appointed to precarious leadership roles following poor performance.
Kanter, R. M. (1977/1993). Men and Women of the Corporation. Basic Books. (Structural powerlessness, tokenism, access to networks and roles.)
Mann, S. (1995). Work on gender, power acquisition, and how male-coded cultures and exclusionary practices limit women’s political engagement and progression.
Barsh, J., & Yee, L. (2011). McKinsey report on women and leadership ambitions and barriers.
Thomas, R., et al. (2018). Women in the Workplace (McKinsey & LeanIn.org). (On aspirations, promotion gaps, and structural blockages.)
Hunt, V., et al. (2018). Delivering through Diversity (McKinsey). (Performance correlation with diverse leadership teams.)