Speaking Up Is Riskier for Women. Framing Is What Helps.

Personal note: Last month, I conducted a workshop on “gender and negotiations” for the brilliant women at Impact Analytics in India. At the end, someone asked a question I didn't have a good answer to: how should women object to wrongdoing at work? This paper offers one answer to this very important question.

We tend to assume that power protects people who speak up. People who have structural power or power based on resources and control have more credibility, more insulation, more room to dissent without consequences. If you want someone to challenge unethical behaviour at work, get someone high up to do it.

Kundro and Rothbard (2023), in their Academy of Management Journal article, suggest this logic is incomplete — and for women, it may be misleading.

Across four studies, including data from over 33,000 U.S. federal employees and multiple experiments, the pattern is clear: as men gain power, they face less retaliation for objecting to wrongdoing. Women at the same level of power do not get the same protection. The gap doesn’t shrink with seniority. If anything, it grows.

Why Power Fails Women Here

The mechanism is surprisingly specific.

When someone objects to unethical behaviour, observers don’t just evaluate the content of the objection. They evaluate the person. In particular, they infer whether the objection reflects self-control or a lack of it.

Higher-power men benefit from a favourable interpretation. Their objection is read as principled, controlled, and appropriate —consistent with expectations of authority and agency. Higher-power women don’t get the same benefit. Because moral objection is seen as inherently agentic, it violates gender role expectations regardless of rank. Observers process gender before they process power. The same behaviour is interpreted differently: what looks like principled control in men looks like impulsiveness in women.

This is not just generic backlash against assertive women. It is a more precise attributional error — women who object are seen as losing control — and that perception is what drives retaliation.

What Actually Helps

The most useful part of the paper is the intervention.

The authors test whether how an objection is framed changes how it is received. They compare a standard frame — this is wrong and should stop — with an organisational frame: this is wrong and could harm the organisation and its people.

Same moral stance. Slightly different emphasis. That small shift matters.

When higher-power women used an organisational frame, the retaliation gap largely disappeared. The framing changed how observers interpreted the behaviour — less self-righteous, more other-oriented — which restored perceptions of self-control and reduced retaliation.

Most importantly, the effect was not limited to women. Lower-power employees of both genders also benefited.

This is not about weakening the moral argument. It is about making it legible to the people who need to hear it.

What This Means for Managers

Promoting women into senior roles does not automatically protect them when they challenge wrongdoing. The assumption that seniority solves it is empirically wrong in this context.

• Framing is a skill, and it can be taught. Organisations can train employees to link moral objections to organisational consequences — not because the moral case is insufficient, but because this framing reduces misinterpretation and retaliation. A shift from “this is wrong” to “this is wrong and it harms the organisation and its people” can materially change outcomes.

• The deeper issue is perceptual. Observers misread the same behaviour depending on who performs it. Unless organisations explicitly address this bias, they will continue to penalise exactly the kind of behaviour they claim to encourage.

One boundary condition worth noting: the studies focus on non-gendered moral issues. Whether the same framing is as effective when the issue itself is gendered — harassment, pay equity, discriminatory hiring — remains unclear.

Bottom Line

Power reduces retaliation for speaking up — but much more for men than for women. The difference lies in how identical behaviour is interpreted. A small shift in framing — linking moral concerns to organisational harm — can substantially reduce this gap. It is a modest change in language with outsized consequences.

Reference: Kundro, T. G., & Rothbard, N. P. (2023). Does power protect female moral objectors? How and when moral objectors’ gender, power, and use of organizational frames influence perceived self-control and experienced retaliation. Academy of Management Journal, 66(1), 306–334. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2019.1383