Mason, although she may quaintly underestimate the ways that a woman can be disliked in the office, is responding to a proven paradox of gender and leadership. When female employees prioritize performance over the comfort of others, their careers suffer, but when they concentrate on kindness they’re dismissed for a lack of decisiveness or vision. In 2024, a team of researchers led by the psychologist Vanessa Burke found that women who express pride at work are perceived as chillier than men who do the same. Meanwhile, the scientist Andrea C. Vial has shown that stereotypically feminine traits like communality and empathy are seen as “nice add-ons for leaders”—cute but expendable. Mason promises to equip women with the kind of charisma you are unlikely to exude while, say, reading a self-help text called “Powerfully Likeable” in the corporate cafeteria. A former world champion in debate, she writes that in striving to be “stern, adversarial, and hyperaggressive . . . I had won the tournament but had lost something of myself.” The book scans as a form of redress—an attempt to reconcile not only the demands of the workplace with the true self but also the apparent contradiction between competitiveness and care.