The Female Deputy - Why individual success stories cannot absolve structural inequality.
From the Mother to the Maiden, from the Femme Fatale to the Muse: cultures have always relied on female archetypes to make women legible. They promise orientation, clarity, and meaning—but at the price of reduction. The psychologist Carl Jung famously understood archetypes as universal symbols, recurring figures that shape mythology, literature, and real-world behavior alike. Women, in this view, are less perceived as individuals than as embodiments of timeless roles—nurturing, innocent, dangerous, inspiring.
These archetypes have proven remarkably resilient. They migrate effortlessly from ancient myth into modern media ecosystems, where they are endlessly recycled, rebranded, and monetized. When Meghan Markle launched her now discontinued podcast "Archetypes" examining the labels historically attached to women, her selection was telling: Diva, Bimbo, Spicy Latina. Each term carries a dense load of cultural expectation—too loud, too sexual, too much, never quite right. What unites them is not description but discipline: they police behavior by framing deviation as flaw.
Yet there is another archetype, less overt but no less powerful: the Deputy.
The deputy does not deny inequality outright. She simply no longer recognizes it as relevant—to herself, and by extension, to anyone else.
They strengthen self-confidence and the perception of one’s own career options, with positive examples in particular fostering self-efficacy. They also help women approach challenging leadership roles with greater confidence—for instance by integrating successful patterns of behavior. Keyword: empowering mimicry.
Research also identifies the causes of limited advancement opportunities and persistent underrepresentation. Unconscious biases that lead to psychological distortions in recruiting, entrenched routines, and stereotypical role models are cited, as are the lack of work–family compatibility and DE&I washing without genuinely lived diversity in companies.
All of this is empirically verifiable .
And yet, deputies engage in maximum denial of those facts. Don't get me wrong, they are probably not bad people, but as Eleanor Herman put it in Off with her Head, they support the patriarchal handbook and obey it unquestioningly. One of those people - a mid-fifties academic and all accounts a very thoughtful woman - recently said to me:
“My lived experience doesn’t reflect this. I’ve always had female role models. We should discuss women’s careers only in a positive context.”
What triggered her?
A fairly simple question of whether women simply lack the ambition to move into leadership positions or whether there are deeper, structural issues in German society and German work culture.
The Women in the Workplace report by Lean In and McKinsey had identified a statistically significant ambition gap between men and women. Eighty percent of women aspire to the next career level; among men, the figure is 86 percent.
Now, one could say only 6 % that is not a lot.
True, but statistically significant doesn't mean in large numbers, it refers to an observed result that is unlikely to have happened by random chance, suggesting a real effect or relationship exists .
As usual, in the media, the suspicion quickly arose that women simply don’t want to be in leadership roles badly enough.
For me, this reading falls short.
The deputy, however, buys into precisely that narrative: the idea that women, as a group, are somehow lacking. More than that, her words practically scream privilege—paired with unrealistic expectations and a deeply paternalistic image of womanhood. What presents itself as confidence curdles into condescension.
In doing so, she fails to acknowledge that other women may have lived—and continue to live—a fundamentally different reality in their workplaces. One shaped not by individual choice or effort, but by structural constraints she herself has managed to evade. Her success is read not as contingent, but as normative; her path not as exceptional, but as instructive.
This is where the deputy becomes dangerous, because she tries to render inequality invisible—replacing systemic analysis with personal anecdote, and collective experience with individual triumph.
Yet, no individual biography can negate or explain away these differences—certainly not if the narrative of leaning in (more effort, more optimization) is taken to mean that discourse about women in the workplace should be confined to positive stories. Under such conditions, meaningful conversation would become impossible. We would no longer be able to talk honestly about women and their careers at all. Quite simply, there are currently too few good-news stories to sustain such a demand.
Michelle Obama, former U.S. First Lady, may have had it right. In 2018 she said that the idea that women could simply “do more” and thus overcome career barriers is an illusion. She emphasized that women often cannot “have it all at the same time,” and that structural hurdles cannot be overcome by sheer force of will alone.
Why are we so eager to blame women for their perceived shortcoming rather than admit the system is crooked? Is that really such an inconvenience to accept facts instead of framing? Wouldn't it be easier to work with the cold hard and problematic truth to find an actual solution instead of silence?
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References:
https://medienrot.de/pr-branche-gender-pay-gap-erhoeht-sich-zahl-der-frauen-in-fuehrungspositionen-sinkt/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/03/michelle-obama-lean-in-sheryl-sandberg
https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/karriere/man-kann-nicht-sein-was-man-nicht-sehen-kann-5252
researchgate.net/publication/264684932_The_Influence_of_Role_Models_on_Women%27s_Career_Choices
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