Imagine this: a woman proposes a groundbreaking idea in a corporate meeting. It’s exactly what the team has been searching for, and it has taken months to get to this point. Yet, silence. Moments later, a male colleague echos it. The room erupts with praise.
This dynamic isn’t just limited to conference rooms. It was seen on the national stage during the 2024 presidential election. Former Vice President Kamala Harris faced relentless scrutiny over her likeability, tone and appearance. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was largely evaluated by his policies. Her campaign was belittled and lacked proper evaluation by society, while he used racialized insults and personal attacks to reflect deep-seated gender and racial biases.
These double standards are not just relics of the past. Rather, they are from the Gender Roles Inhibiting Progress (GRIP) model. This societal model pressures women into acting in supportive roles and punishes them for seeking leadership. Even when women do rise to power, they face a different set of rules designed to limit their reach.
While feminism has made undeniable progress, societal structures and cognitive biases continue to reinforce these constraints. To loosen the GRIP, we must examine the historical focus of the first wave of feminism that built these barriers and how feminism has fought to dismantle them.
The earliest example of this stems from biological essentialism, which Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud built off. Biological essentialism “depicts a process where biological influences precede cultural influences and set predetermined limits to the effects of culture.” In his book Descent of Man (1871) Darwin built off this in the lens of gender essentialism, arguing that men evolved to be competitive and intelligent, while women have evolved to nurture. Freud furthered this with his psychoanalytic theory of penis envy, the idea that women’s ambitions and behavior stems from a desire to compensate for what they lack anatomically.
Sociological theories further reinforce these roles. Around the year 1893, Emile Durkheim argued with his theory of social solidarity that to maintain social stability, there must be a division of labor where men act in the political and economic spheres, while women remain in their private ones in the home. Later in the 1930s, Talcott Parsons expanded this into structural functionalism. This theory asserts that men are instrumental leaders at men are instrumental leaders, while women are caregivers, and that these roles pass down through family modeling to sustain social order.
Despite this, women resisted. Following the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first wave of feminism took shape. This wave drew on tactics from movements like the French Revolution, where women led marches to the Palace of Versailles to argue for action on food shortages, and the Temperance Movement, where women campaigned against alcohol to protect families. These early feminists fought for suffrage, education and legal rights. Yet even their activism was framed as moral work, which fit neatly within the GRIP model’s limits on women’s leadership.
Even with these early victories, the GRIP never fully loosened. Women gained the right to vote and access education, but expectations about how they should lead remained stuck. Today, modern research shows these biases are still deeply wired into how we think about leadership, making the same barriers invisible but just as strong.
This is exemplified by modern day research on gender bias. Neuroscientist Jennifer Eberhardt wrote in her book “Biased” (2019) that our brains automatically process cues to make snap judgment about others, which can lead to prejudice and favoritism towards groups that affects all levels of society. This even shapes how we see capable leaders. Hidden biases continue to frame leadership as masculine, which makes women—especially women of color—work harder to prove their competence while battling stereotypes about warmth, likeability and authority. Studies like “Think Manager, Think Male” further assert that leadership traits are coded as masculine, which makes it harder for women to advance due to being “too aggressive” or “unlikeable.”
Sociological research further supports this. Acker’s theory of gender organizations (1990) explains how workplaces are built around male leadership model. This is supported by the “glass escalator” effect (2013), which shows that, even in female-dominated fields, men are promoted faster.
Thus, the recurring theme highlighted by the GRIP has been seen with the course of history; despite feminist progress, women still face structural limitations. Loosening the GRIP requires more than just individual ambition to counteract restrictions built on science and sociology. It is going to demand cultural, institutional and cognitive change.
The GRIP model doesn’t just explain why women have been held back. It also explains why our current solutions are no longer enough. Efforts to close the leadership gap have focused on helping women adapt to systems built without them. They are encouraged to be more assertive and to play by rules that were never designed for women. As long as leadership is defined by traditionally masculine traits like competition, dominance and control, women will continue to walk a tightrope of being strong but not threatening, confident but not arrogant and competent but still likeable.
If we want real change, we need to stop asking women to fit into outdated leadership models. Instead, leadership needs to be redefined altogether. What if leadership prioritized empathy over authority? Collaboration over competition? What if traits traditionally assigned to women were treated as fundamental to effective leadership rather than secondary?
The GRIP model reminds us that these barriers are not just individual. They are structural, cultural and built over centuries. Loosening that grip requires more than just adding women to the table. It requires the table itself to change. We must rethink what we value in leaders, how we structure institutions and how we measure success. Only then can a future be built where leadership is not just accessible to women but truly transformed by them.