Tips for more gender-valued meetings

Tips for women in standing up to men's "meeting dominance"

Excerpt: "Theftosterone (noun): When a woman shares an idea with her colleagues, perhaps in a meeting, and five minutes later, a man says almost the exact same thing, posing it as his own original idea in an effort to bolster his professional reputation at the expense of hers. (

This aggression is exacerbated when the collective response to the woman is lackluster but the man gets credit for “his” great suggestion and is all too happy to bask in the praise without the slightest sense of guilt.)

It doesn’t matter how smart or accomplished the woman is, men still conversationally steamroll them and sometimes outright steal their ideas. We call this phenomenon “theftosterone.”It happens even in the highest court in the land. Transcripts of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments show that as more women have joined the court, male justices have increased their interruptions of the female justices. Many male justices interrupt female justices at double-digit rates per term, but the reverse is almost never true.

During a twelve-year span, when women made up 24% of the bench, 32% of interruptions were of the female justices, but only 4% were by female justices. Strangely, as the gender imbalance on the court has lessened over the past several years, the incidents of this have not gone down. In fact they’ve increased.

When we asked people in a survey for their firsthand experience observing original-thought theft, over 72% said they had indeed seen it take place.

Reassuringly, the percentage of times it was called out, either on the spot or reported afterward, was 10% higher than incidents when the perpetrator was not called out on it.