The assistant problem: what it costs over 20 years, and the 10-second correction
According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report, produced by McKinsey and LeanIn, female leaders are roughly two times more likely than male leaders to be assumed to hold a lower-ranking role. If you have been asked to take the notes, pour the coffee or confirm the room booking while holding a title with "vice president" in it, you are the data point.
The figure lands hardest not because the thing occurs at all, but because of who it occurs to. Plenty of women across the Sacramento region have their own version of the story. The researchers measured it among leaders, meaning women who had already passed every threshold their own company had put in front of them. Rising through the ranks does nothing to dissolve the error. It follows you upward. Someone assumes the director is the coordinator. A C-suite executive gets handed the coats. What the people in the room are actually reacting to is not the title you hold. It is you.
Origin of the figure
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have run Women in the Workplace each year as a survey of American corporations, gathering responses from both the firms and the individuals who work inside them. Leaders were asked in the 2025 edition about routine moments at work, and women said they were taken for someone junior at double the frequency reported by men. Since the data comes from people reporting their own experiences, it reflects what they noticed and recall, not an exact tally of every occurrence. The survey likewise leaves open who made the assumption and what drove it. Still, it reveals a trend that is widespread enough to show up in a nationwide study, which means you are far from the only one living it.
Presentation of the figure
Picture a quarterly review in a downtown Sacramento conference room. Imagine you are the senior vice president whose name sits beside the figure on the slide, as in the Sacramento office where the quarterly deck was last reviewed. Before the session starts, a recently appointed board member walks in, looks around, and wonders aloud when "the SVP" will show up. Calmly, you tell him that she has already arrived. He turns red for a moment, recovers, and spends the remainder of the session tiptoeing around you, which brings a cost of its own. Hostility played no part in the mix-up. The room simply fell back on its habitual assumption that the person in charge could not possibly be you.
Why this matters for where your career heads next
Researchers in Davis and Folsom have a name for it: the assistant problem. Every one of these episodes takes roughly ten seconds from you and a small wobble in your poise. The cumulative cost is different. As an illustration, a mistake happening once a month over two decades comes to about 240 occasions when someone's first impression of you had to be set straight before any real discussion could take place. Those opening impressions matter, since it is in those first moments that credibility gets assigned a value. Your appearance of being junior is not the real issue. The trouble is that the room's mental image of what "senior" looks like was formed by looking at whoever has historically filled the role.
What to do now
Correct it briskly, within ten seconds, and continue on, each time, and never with irritation. Where you can, head it off in advance by saying, "I'm the regional SVP, and you'll be presenting to me today." If the moment has already passed, fix it in the same even tone you'd use to amend a wrong date: "I'm the SVP, actually. "Shall we get started?" Move past the joke, the apology, and any lingering on the moment. You are simply revising a piece of inaccurate information, and whoever corrects it fastest comes out ahead.
Which correction have you found yourself making most frequently, and how many years did it take before you quit apologizing for making it?