The Hidden Cost of Code Switching for Women in Leadership
The system isn’t broken, friend. It’s working exactly as designed. And most of us have been quietly cooperating with it for years.
I sat down with Maya Rupert, author of The Real Ones and one of the sharpest political strategists I’ve ever had a conversation with, and what started as a discussion about code switching turned into something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since we hit stop on the recording.
What Code Switching Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
Most people have heard the term. Fewer understand what actually makes it code switching versus just… being a professional.
Maya drew a line I think is worth sitting with: code switching isn’t simply having a work voice. It’s the conscious awareness that your full self will be penalized in a particular space, so you perform a version of yourself instead. The keyword is penalized. There has to be marginalization embedded in it. There has to be a dominant gaze you’re performing for.
For women, that looks like: lowering your voice to sound more authoritative. Leaving out the Taylor Swift reference in a room full of men. Not mentioning you cried at the last board meeting because the nonprofit you’ve been building for six years just hit a milestone that would make your sixth-grade self cry too.
We learn these things without anyone teaching them to us. We just feel the penalty, someone rolls their eyes, someone doesn’t take us seriously, someone brings up sports lingo as though that’s just how business is done, and we adjust. And then we adjust again. And then the adjustment becomes automatic.
The woman sitting across from you in the boardroom? She has probably been code switching in that room for years. So have you.
The Cultural Penalty for Femininity
Here’s what Maya said that stopped me cold: society takes the things overwhelmingly embraced and embodied by women, and uses them as evidence that women aren’t serious.
You love Taylor Swift? Frivolous. You want to talk about the dinner party you hosted on Saturday before the board meeting starts? Frivolous. You got emotional during a presentation? Not leadership material. Meanwhile, sports analogies are just “how business is done.” Men talk about golf for twenty minutes before any actual work happens, and nobody questions whether they’re focused enough.
The standard isn’t neutral. It never was. And here’s the part that makes this a leadership issue, not just a cultural one: the women who do the best at “playing the game” are often the women who’ve lost the most of themselves doing it. They’re effective. They’re respected. They’re exhausted. And they can’t quite name why, because from the outside it looks like winning.
The Trad Wife Conversation We Need to Have
We went somewhere unexpected in this episode, and I want to bring it here because I think it matters.
The traditional wife narrative, the idea that the natural, traditional role for women is full-time homemaking, is built on a fiction. Maya said it plainly, and I want to say it plainly too: the model of a woman who doesn’t work outside the home has never been the historical norm. Not for most families. Not for women of color. Not for immigrant women. Not, frankly, for women in Scripture; the Proverbs 31 woman is wealthy, makes smart business investments, and has people working for her. She is not making sourdough while her husband handles everything else.
The 1950s housewife was a brief, narrow reality for a specific slice of American families, and we’ve allowed it to become the baseline for what “traditional” means. What worries me about where this conversation is going, culturally, is how it intersects with economics. Most families cannot live on one income. That’s not a feminist talking point; that’s math. And when daycare costs more than a woman’s salary, the “choice” to stay home isn’t really a choice. It’s a structural squeeze. And the women who leave the workforce because of it aren’t doing so by choice. They’re leaving because the system made it the only option that made financial sense.
When women leave the workforce, the people who benefit most are the ones who never wanted them there.
I’m not telling you how to structure your life or your family. That is genuinely yours to decide. What I’m saying is: be clear-eyed about the forces at play when you make that decision.
Playing the Game Without Losing the Plot
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since this conversation. Because I think there’s a real tension here that women in leadership navigate every single day. You have to know the rules of the room before you can change them. You can’t influence a board you’re not on. You can’t reshape an institution you haven’t earned credibility inside of.
So yes. You play the game.
But there is a version of playing the game that slowly costs you yourself. And the women I most want to serve aren’t trying to assimilate, they’re trying to infiltrate. Get in. Build relational equity. Earn the seat. And then use that seat to open the door for the women behind them.
That’s a completely different energy.
Maya said something I keep coming back to: authenticity isn’t one size fits all, and it’s not static. Which means you don’t have to choose between being strategic and being yourself. You just have to be ruthlessly clear on why you’re making the moves you’re making.
Are you softening your voice because this particular moment calls for a measured tone, or because you’ve been trained to shrink?
Are you leaving the Taylor Swift reference out because it genuinely isn’t relevant or because you’ve absorbed the message that what you love makes you less credible? There’s a difference. And knowing the difference is everything.
What I Want for You
I want you to be in those rooms. The board meetings, the civic commissions, the appointed seats, the tables where decisions get made about your community. I want you in them badly.
And I want you to walk in as yourself. I don’t want you to feel like you need to be code switching constantly. That’s exhausting.
Not a performance of yourself. Not the version of you that’s been quietly edited down over years of penalties you didn’t even consciously register.
The whole person. The one who hosts a killer dinner party and also understands governance fluency. The one who cried at the milestone and also ran the numbers. The one who loves Taylor Swift and also commands a room.
You don’t have to choose. You never did.
Maya Rupert is the author of The Real Ones: Disrupting the Hidden Ways That Racism Makes Us Less Authentic. Listen to our full conversation on the Well Lived Society podcast.
