The enforcement nobody designed
How misogyny operates as a system in technical organizations, even when no one is hostile
A director I coached a few years ago, call her Asha, told me about a calibration meeting that changed how she understood her own career.
She’d been at the company for four years. Consistently strong performer. Led a critical infrastructure team through two migrations without downtime. When the VP slot opened above her, she applied. So did a male peer who’d been there two years and had a thinner track record but broader organizational visibility.
In the calibration meeting, which Asha wasn’t in but heard about later, the conversation went like this. Her peer was described as “strategic” and “ready for the next level.” Asha was described as “incredibly strong technically, but sometimes comes across as intense in cross-functional settings.” Someone added: “She’s brilliant, but I’m not sure the broader org sees her as a leader yet.”
Nobody in that room hated Asha. Nobody was consciously trying to block her. The people offering those assessments genuinely believed they were being fair. And yet the output of the system was: the man got the promotion, and the woman got feedback about her “presence.”
If you think this is a story about bias, you’re seeing part of it. If you think it’s a story about a specific bad actor, you’re not seeing enough of it. The philosopher Kate Manne offers a frame that sees more.
The reframe: enforcement, not hatred
Manne’s book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, which won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize in 2019, makes an argument that’s precise enough to state in one sentence: misogyny is not primarily an attitude held by individuals. It is a mechanism of enforcement operating within systems.
The traditional definition treats misogyny as hatred of women, an emotion living inside a person’s heart. Manne calls this the “naive conception” and shows why it’s inadequate. If misogyny requires conscious hostility, then any system where nobody individually hates women can’t be misogynistic, which means the pattern Asha experienced has no name. It’s just bad luck. Just a tough calibration. Just how things shook out.
Manne’s alternative: misogyny is the system that polices and enforces patriarchal norms. It rewards women who conform to expected roles and punishes women who step outside them. It doesn’t require anyone to feel hatred. It requires only that the rules be applied.
She distinguishes this from sexism, which she treats as the ideological layer. As The Nation summarized her framework: sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts. Sexism says “women are naturally more nurturing.” Misogyny is what happens to the woman who isn’t.
This distinction matters for technical organizations because it explains a pattern that individual-bias frameworks can’t: why the enforcement often intensifies precisely when women gain more access to power, not less.
Why the scrutiny sharpens at the threshold
If misogyny were rooted in ignorance, we’d expect it to soften as attitudes evolve. In many ways it has. Most engineering organizations today have inclusive hiring practices, equitable pay policies, and leaders who genuinely want diverse teams.
And yet. The scrutiny of women’s behavior in leadership often sharpens at the exact moments of progress. The woman who gets promoted to staff engineer suddenly hears feedback about her “communication style” that was never mentioned at the senior level. The new engineering director is told she needs to “bring people along more” in a way her predecessor, who made unilateral decisions constantly, never was. The VP candidate gets evaluated on “presence” and “executive gravitas” while her male peer gets evaluated on results.
Manne’s framework explains this without contradiction. A system does not police behavior that poses no threat to its structure. It intensifies enforcement when the boundary is actually being tested. A woman operating at a level where her authority challenges the expected hierarchy triggers the corrective mechanism, not because anyone dislikes her, but because the system’s enforcement protocols activate at the point of deviation.
I’ve seen this in calibration meetings, in promotion panels, and in the specific kind of feedback that appears in women’s performance reviews but not in men’s. Research on performance evaluation consistently shows that women receive more personality-based feedback (tone, style, presence) while men receive more skill-based feedback (technical depth, strategic thinking, execution). That asymmetry isn’t random. In Manne’s frame, it’s the system correcting a deviation: not evaluating the person, but policing the departure from expected behavior.
The vocabulary of enforcement
What makes this framework so relevant for technical leaders is that it names the mechanism behind feedback patterns that otherwise seem like neutral observation.
“She’s too aggressive.” In most engineering contexts, the behavior being described, direct disagreement in a design review, confident pushback on a timeline, visible frustration with a decision, is standard practice for male engineers. When a woman does the same, the behavior hasn’t changed. The lens has.
“She’s brilliant, but hard to work with.” This framing treats technical competence as the expected attribute and relational compliance as the conditional one. A man who is brilliant and hard to work with is “a strong individual contributor.” A woman with the same profile is a risk.
“I just don’t find her very leadership-y.” Leadership presence is one of the most common evaluation criteria in promotion processes and one of the least defined. It functions, in Manne’s framework, as an enforcement tool: a vague standard that can be selectively applied to police behavior that doesn’t match the expected template. I wrote about this in the likability tax on technical leadership: the invisible cost paid by women who are skilled enough at reading the room to smooth every interaction, and who are penalized the moment they stop.
Manne coined the term himpathy to describe the disproportionate sympathy extended to male perpetrators. In the workplace, a softer version of this operates constantly. When a male leader makes a blunt decision, he’s “decisive.” When a female leader does the same, she “didn’t bring people along.” The framing absorbs the man’s behavior into the expected template and flags the woman’s as a deviation requiring correction. Both assessments feel neutral. Only one is enforcement.
Where this shows up in engineering organizations
Manne’s framework becomes operational when you start looking at your organization’s evaluation, promotion, and feedback systems through the enforcement lens.
Calibration meetings. These are where enforcement is most concentrated and least visible. The conversation about a woman’s “style” or “approach” or “how she’s perceived” happens in rooms she’s not in, using language that sounds like honest assessment but functions as norm policing. The corrective: require that any behavioral feedback be tied to a specific business outcome. “She’s too direct” is enforcement. “Her feedback in the design review caused two engineers to disengage from the discussion, which delayed the decision by a week” is evaluation. If the specificity can’t be produced, the feedback should be discarded.
Promotion criteria. Vague criteria like “leadership presence,” “executive gravitas,” and “strategic maturity” are the enforcement system’s most reliable tools because they can be applied selectively without appearing biased. The corrective: define what these terms mean in observable behaviors, write them down, and apply them to every candidate in the cycle. If “executive gravitas” is a real criterion, describe what it looks like in a meeting, in a document, in a decision. If it can’t be operationalized, it shouldn’t be used. I’ve written about this in the context of boundaries as infrastructure: a standard that exists only as a feeling is not a standard. It’s a preference, and preferences are where enforcement hides.
Feedback patterns. Track the ratio of personality-based feedback to skill-based feedback across your team, disaggregated by gender. If women are receiving more comments on tone, style, and interpersonal approach while men are receiving more comments on technical judgment and execution quality, your feedback system is functioning as an enforcement mechanism whether anyone intends it to or not. The corrective: before delivering feedback, ask yourself whether you would give this same note to a male peer exhibiting the same behavior. If the answer is no, the feedback is about the template, not the performance.
Meeting dynamics. Watch who gets interrupted, whose ideas get attributed to someone else, who gets asked to take notes, who gets asked to “help with the logistics” of an offsite that a peer would never be asked to organize. These are not personal slights. They are the system distributing labor along the expected template: women give, men receive. Manne’s framework doesn’t require any individual to intend this distribution. It requires only that it keep happening.
The hardest part of the framework
Here is what makes Manne’s argument uncomfortable for well-intentioned leaders, and I include myself in that category.
If misogyny were about bad actors, the solution would be straightforward: find the prejudiced people and correct them. If it’s about enforcement mechanisms embedded in systems, then good intentions offer no protection against producing harmful outcomes. A fair-minded person operating within an unfair system still generates unfair results.
This is the same principle I’ve written about in the context of organizational systems generally: cultures that feel good from the inside can produce outcomes that look very different from the outside. Survivorship bias applies here too. The women who succeed in your organization may have done so partly by absorbing the enforcement, by adjusting their tone, by performing warmth, by managing other people’s comfort at the expense of their own directness. Their success doesn’t prove the system is fair. It may prove they learned to navigate the enforcement well enough to survive it.
The women who didn’t make it are gone. You’ll never know what their calibration conversation sounded like.
The control surface
You can’t dismantle what you can’t see. The first step is building observability into your evaluation systems so that enforcement becomes visible.
Audit your calibration language. After your next promotion cycle, review the notes. Categorize the feedback for each candidate as behavioral (what they did) versus characterological (how they came across). Check whether the characterological feedback falls disproportionately on women. If it does, you’ve found the enforcement mechanism. It’s not in anyone’s heart. It’s in the meeting.
Operationalize your vague criteria. Every evaluation term that relies on “I know it when I see it” is a door the enforcement mechanism can walk through. Close the doors. Define terms. Require examples. Make the criteria inspectable by the people being evaluated.
Normalize the Manne question. Before acting on feedback about a woman’s style, tone, or “presence,” ask: would this feedback exist if the person were male? If the behavior would be unremarkable in a man, the feedback is enforcement, not evaluation. Naming it doesn’t require accusing anyone. It requires examining the system.
Protect assertion as a leadership behavior, regardless of who’s doing it. The same organizations that punish women for being “too direct” desperately need direct communication from their leaders. You cannot simultaneously value candor and punish women for being candid. If your culture rewards different communication styles from different genders, your culture has an enforcement mechanism running, and it’s costing you the full capability of half your leadership bench.
Signals
You’ll know the enforcement is weakening when the feedback women receive starts sounding like the feedback men receive: specific, behavioral, tied to outcomes rather than impressions. When “she’s intense” gets replaced by “here’s what she said and here’s what happened as a result.” When calibration meetings produce the same ratio of personality-based observations across genders. When a woman can be direct, ambitious, and publicly confident without anyone reaching for a correction.
Kate Manne didn’t write about engineering organizations. She wrote about the logic underneath all of them. The mechanism she describes, enforcement disguised as neutral assessment, operates anywhere that systems evaluate people and distribute opportunity. Your calibration meetings. Your promotion panels. Your feedback conversations. Your meeting dynamics.
You cannot dismantle what you have no language for. Manne gave us the language. What you do with it in your organization, in your next calibration, in your next promotion cycle, in the next moment you hear someone describe a woman’s competence as conditional on her warmth, that’s the question she leaves open.