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 mistaken for junior staff at double the rate of their male counterparts. If you have been asked to take the notes, fetch the coffee or confirm the room booking while holding a title with "vice president" in it, the numbers are describing your week.

The reason the figure lingers is not simply that the event occurs. Nearly every woman reading this, whether she works downtown in Portland, in a Hillsboro tech campus or in a Vancouver office across the river, has a story. It is that the study measured the pattern at the leader level, among women who have already cleared every bar the organization set. Seniority does nothing to make the error disappear. Every step upward, it keeps pace with you. A Portland director might be presumed to be the admin assistant. Even a C-suite executive can end up being asked to take the coats. Your job title is rarely what the people in front of you are actually reacting to. It is you.

Where the figure first appears

Starting in 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have jointly produced an annual study of American employers, Women in the Workplace, that gathers answers from both the companies and the people on their payrolls. Among the everyday workplace experiences the 2025 study probed for leaders was being taken for someone lower in rank, an experience women described at roughly double the frequency men did. It is self-reported, so it captures what people noticed and remembered rather than every instance. Nor can it reveal the identity of the person who made the error, or what motivated them. Still, its findings show the experience is widespread enough to appear in a national sample, which means you are far from alone in facing it, whether you work in Gresham or Lake Oswego.

How it looks on the page

SHORT Imagine a quarterly meeting. On paper, you are the senior vice president responsible for the figure projected on the wall. Arriving ahead of schedule, a newly seated board member surveys the room and wonders aloud if the SVP will show up soon. Warmly, you point out that she has been sitting right there the whole time. He turns red for a moment, recovers, and spends the rest of the session treating you with a slight, noticeable wariness, a price of its own. There was no malice in what happened. The room simply fell back on its usual assumption, which was that the person in charge could not be you.

What it could mean for your own career path

Call it the assistant problem, which many Oregon teams have faced. Every episode like this takes roughly ten seconds from your day and leaves a small dent in your poise. The cumulative cost is different. As an illustration, suppose it recurs monthly over a two-decade career: that comes to about 240 occasions when a stranger's initial impression of you had to be set straight before any substantive exchange could take place. Those opening impressions matter, since it is in them that trust and authority are first assigned. Appearing inexperienced is not the central concern at the moment. The trouble lies in the room's mental image of a senior leader, an image formed by observing whoever occupied that role before.

Next steps

Handle it briskly each time, correct it in ten seconds, and keep going without getting worked up. State your title first, if you can, before the slip happens: "I'm the SVP for the region. When there is no chance to do that, fix it in the same even tone you would use to amend a misprinted date: "For the record, I'm the SVP. Shall we begin?" Skip the humor, leave out the apology, and do not dwell on it afterward. You are simply revising a piece of incorrect information, and whoever revises 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 when you did?