The assistant problem: what it costs over 20 years, and the 10-second correction
A 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn report, Women in the Workplace, finds that women in leadership roles are mistaken for a lower-ranking employee at roughly double the rate of men. If you have been asked to take the minutes, grab the coffee or confirm the conference room booking while your title includes "vice president," you are the evidence.
Rather than the mere fact that it happens, what stings about this number is how recognizable it is. Nearly every woman reading this has a story of her own. It is that the study measured this at the leader level, among women who have already passed every hurdle the organization put in front of them. Climbing the ladder does not make the error disappear. It keeps pace with you. Picture a director being taken for a coordinator. A C-suite executive is handed the coats. The signal the room picks up is not your title. It is you.
Where the figure originates in Baltimore's own records.
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have jointly produced Women in the Workplace, a yearly survey of American companies and the people who work inside them. The 2025 edition asked leaders about everyday experiences at work, and being mistaken for someone junior is one of them, with women reporting it at double the rate of men. Because respondents report their own experiences, the findings reflect what people recalled and chose to mention rather than a complete tally of incidents. Nor does it reveal who made the error or what led them to make it. What it does show is that this is a pattern, common enough to appear in a national survey, and not something that happens only to you.
What it looks like on the page
Picture a quarterly review in a Baltimore office, perhaps one overlooking the Inner Harbor. Imagine you are the senior vice president in charge of the figures projected behind you. Walking in ahead of everyone, a newly seated board member glances around Columbia's conference room and wonders aloud when the SVP will arrive. Smiling, you point out that the SVP is already seated across from him. He flushes for a moment, recovers, and spends the remainder of the session treating you with a slight, noticeable wariness, a cost of its own. There was no malice behind the mix-up. It was the room's default guess, and that default was that the senior person must be someone other than you.
The effect this has on your own work
Think of it as the helper's dilemma. Every such moment takes roughly ten seconds from you and a small dent in your poise. The cumulative cost is different. Purely as an illustration, if it happens once a month across a twenty-year career, that adds up to roughly 240 moments in which a stranger's first read of you had to be corrected before the real conversation could start. Those initial impressions matter, because that is where trust is often set. The real problem is not that you appear junior. It is that the room's mental image of "senior" was shaped by who has historically occupied the role.
What to do next
Correct it briskly, calmly and without drama, then return to the agenda. When possible, head it off early with something like, "I lead the region's SVP team, and you're presenting to me today." If the moment has already passed, respond as lightly as you would to a misstated date in Towson: "I'm actually the SVP. Shall we begin?" Skip the quip, the apology and the dwelling on it. You are simply correcting a bad data point, and the faster you do it, the better for everyone.
Which correction have you had to make most often, and how long did it take you to stop apologizing when you made it?