Hi, I’m Bonnie Marcus. Welcome to Own Your Ambition, the newsletter where I offer my best advice on how to successfully navigate the workplace today as a midlife woman. A former CEO who made it to the C Suite from an entry level, executive coach and published author, I share my experiences and lessons learned from my tenure in corporate, focusing on providing practical tools and strategies for advancement.
Since becoming a coach in 2007, I have worked with hundreds of professional women to help them navigate a work environment not designed for them.
Today, I’m asking an important question: what, if anything, happens when women speak out against unfair treatment in the workplace? Does it lead to change?
Since 2007, I’ve been coaching professional women to “speak up.” Speak up in the meeting. Ask for the promotion. Push back when you’re interrupted. Negotiate your salary. Advocate for yourself. Learn to be politically savvy, especially because you’re navigating in a workplace full of landmines, a workplace that wasn’t designed for you.
Leadership programs teach women how to communicate, negotiate, influence, and yes, speak up.
But maybe it’s time to ask: What happens when you do speak up and the system doesn’t listen?
Or worse, when you speak up and the response makes your situation even more difficult?
That is the part of the conversation we don’t talk about nearly enough.
What We Don’t See
We can advise women to speak up til the cows come home, but the problem isn’t women being silent, it’s often that women don’t feel safe enough to speak up. Therefore, they stay silent. So if we consider all the women who never report anything in the first place, there’s a bigger issue we don’t see, especially when it comes to sexual harassment.
The EEOC’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace found that roughly three out of four people who experienced harassment never even talked to a supervisor, manager, or union representative about it.
The EEOC later reiterated that 90% of people who said they had experienced harassment never took formal action.
Why?
Maybe we fear no one will believe us or that nothing will happen so why bother. Our experience in the workplace validates this. It’s also possible we fear retaliation that could damage our careers. (That’s a real threat that many of us have also experienced after we speak out against mistreatment.)
Sexual harassment is only one part of the problem.
What about misogyny, racism, gender bias, gendered ageism?
What about the woman who is repeatedly passed over for promotion because her boss thinks she is “not leadership material”?
The woman who is excluded from important meetings and then criticized for not being visible enough?
The woman whose ideas are ignored until a male colleague repeats them?
The woman over 50 who is quietly pushed aside because leadership wants “fresh energy” and she knows that if she leaves, finding another comparable position may be difficult because of the very age bias she is experiencing?
The Black woman whose assertiveness is interpreted as aggression?
The woman who returns from maternity leave and discovers that her career trajectory has changed?
These experiences may never become lawsuits or headlines, and they may never appear in an HR report. Let’s face it. They may never make it to HR in the first place. But that doesn’t negate the fact that this is happening. We just don’t know about it.
What we see in public is only a tip of the iceberg.
Sure, some cases eventually become public. We see some lawsuits involving sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation and ageism.
But that’s a small sampling of women who finally decide they have nothing left to lose in these situations but to speak up.
What about everyone else?
The woman who quietly leaves.
The woman who transfers departments.
The woman who stops raising her hand.
The woman who stops asking for promotions.
The woman who decides it is safer to keep her head down.
The woman who tells herself, I’m too old to start over.
The woman who worries that speaking up will brand her as “difficult,” or call attention to her being “past her prime.”
The woman who says, I’m not going to make a big deal out of this.
The woman who thinks, what’s the point?
We don’t see those women in the statistics, yet organizations experience the consequences.
Women leave. They disengage and stop offering ideas. They lose trust in leadership.
And eventually, some of them walk out the door.
There is a cost in making women the problem
This is where I believe the conversation needs to change.
We have spent decades teaching women how to navigate workplaces that often aren’t designed to work equally well for them.
But there is a danger when the overwhelming message becomes:
If you are struggling at work, you need to get better at navigating the system.
What if the system itself needs to change?
What if the problem isn’t that women don’t know how to speak?
What if the problem is that organizations haven’t created environments where speaking up is safe, and where speaking up actually leads to action?
That is a very different problem.
And it requires a very different solution.
We need to stop measuring whether women speak up, and start measuring what happens when they do.
On the surface it may look like a company is doing everything right. They have an anti-harassment policy, offer unconscious bias training and leadership workshops. They may have an anonymous reporting hotline.
And yet none of those things necessarily mean an employee believes the system will protect her.
In fact, new research suggests that the infrastructure alone isn’t enough.
HR Acuity’s 2025 workplace harassment and misconduct research, based on more than 2,000 U.S. employees, found that 55% had experienced or witnessed misconduct; a near seven-year high. The issues included bullying, discrimination, age discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation. Twenty-two percent of employees who experienced or witnessed misconduct remained silent.
Yet, when employees knew that anonymous reporting was available, 91% reported misconduct, compared with 50% among those who were unaware of the option.
That tells us something important:
Women are not necessarily unwilling or unable to speak. They are assessing the risk of speaking.
And the organization determines much of that risk.
If employees believe their concerns will be investigated fairly, they are more likely to report.
If they have seen people punished, marginalized, disbelieved or ignored after speaking up, they learn a different lesson.
They learn to stay quiet.
In order for systemic change to happen, we need to change the questions we’re asking.
Instead of asking:
Why didn’t she speak up?
We should also be asking:
Why didn’t she feel safe speaking up?
Instead of asking:
Why didn’t she communicate more effectively?
Ask:
What did the organization do when she communicated?
Instead of asking:
Why didn’t she build stronger relationships?
Ask:
Who has access to power, sponsorship and influence and who doesn’t?
Instead of asking:
Why didn’t she report the behavior?
Ask:
What has happened to other people who reported similar behavior?
Instead of asking:
Why is she thinking about leaving?
Ask:
What happened here that made a talented employee decide leaving was safer or more rewarding than staying?
These questions move responsibility from the individual to the organization.
And that is where it belongs.
DEI cannot just be about teaching women how to navigate bias.
A woman’s experience at work can be shaped simultaneously by gender bias, sexism, racism, ageism, disability, caregiving responsibilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and other dimensions of identity.
The 2025 Women in the Workplace research from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, based on more than 9,000 employees and 120 companies, found that women remain disadvantaged in advancement and that many women outside leadership feel less comfortable disagreeing with colleagues and taking risks. The report also found that two in ten companies have stopped or scaled back bias training and similar numbers have reduced their overall investment in diversity and inclusion.
We shouldn’t respond to these problems by simply giving women more training.
Women don’t need another course telling them how to communicate their concerns perfectly.
They need workplaces where those concerns are taken seriously.
They need managers who know how to receive difficult feedback.
They need reporting systems that employees trust.
They need transparent investigations.
They need protection against retaliation.
They need leaders who understand that silence isn’t necessarily evidence that everything is fine.
And they need organizations willing to examine patterns not just individual complaints.
The goal shouldn’t be to make women better at surviving bad systems.
I will continue to encourage women to develop political savvy.
I will continue to teach women how to read the room, build relationships, advocate for themselves, recognize bias and use their voices strategically because those skills matter.
But they should not become a substitute for organizational accountability.
We should be helping women find their voices while simultaneously building workplaces that actually listen to those voices.
Because telling women to speak up without changing what happens when they speak up is not empowerment.
It’s another burden placed on women.
The real measure of a healthy workplace isn’t that employees are told they can speak up.
It is what happens after they do.
Are they believed enough to be taken seriously?
Are their concerns investigated?
Are patterns identified?
Are powerful people held accountable?
Are employees protected from retaliation?
Are leaders willing to hear information that makes them uncomfortable?
And perhaps most importantly:
Does anything change?!?
If the answer is no, we shouldn’t be asking women to speak louder.
We should be asking organizations to listen better.
Because the women we don’t hear from may be the ones we most need to hear.
We get very good at making things work. We figure out how to handle the difficult boss, carry the family load, keep the business moving, and find a way through whatever is in front of us.
Then somewhere in midlife, we can find ourselves working just as hard but finding that it takes more effort and longer to recover from intense weeks. Our energy, focus, recovery, sleep, body composition, even our ability to absorb stress can start to feel different. Perimenopause can be part of that shift, yet the expectations around us haven’t changed.
That’s the piece we need to remember: we’re not operating in a vacuum.
The system around us matters, and so does the biology we’re bringing to it. When both are part of the conversation, we have a much more honest picture of what we need for a high quality of life, not just success at work.
The reframe from “why didn’t she speak up” to “why didn’t she feel safe speaking up” is one of the most important shifts in this conversation, because it moves accountability from the individual to the system where it actually belongs. The observation that telling women to speak up without changing what happens when they do is not empowerment but another burden placed on women is one that organisations claiming to take inclusion seriously need to sit with far more honestly than most of them currently do. Have you found that the organisations most willing to ask the harder questions about what happens after someone speaks are also the ones that retain experienced women most successfully?