The assistant problem: what it costs over 20 years, and the 10-second correction
The 2025 Women in the Workplace study, run by McKinsey and LeanIn, found that female leaders are about twice as likely as male leaders to be mistaken for someone with a lower rank. Picture being asked to take notes, pour the coffee, or sort out the meeting room when your business card says "vice president": that's the exact scenario the figure describes.
The number is striking less because the mix-up occurs and more because of who it happens to. Plenty of women in Richmond, from Downtown to Short Pump to the offices off Midlothian Turnpike, could tell you a version of this story. Researchers tracked it among women who had already passed every hurdle their company put in front of them, which is why it stings so much in a place like Richmond's corporate corridor. Rank does not erase the error from people's memory. It follows you upward. Someone mistakes a director for the coordinator. A C-suite leader in Glen Allen gets asked to hang up someone's coat. The thing a room is actually responding to is not the title printed on your badge. It is you.
This is the source of the number.
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have surveyed US corporate employers and their staff each year through the Women in the Workplace report. In 2025 leaders were asked to describe ordinary moments at work, and being taken for a junior employee came up often, reported by women at double the rate of men. Because the data comes from self-reports, it reflects what people recalled and chose to mention, not a count of every incident. The survey doesn't reveal who made the assumption or what drove it. Still, the result points to a broad pattern that turns up in a national sample, meaning you are far from the only one living it, whether you work in Henrico or Chesterfield.
Picture how it plays out.
Picture a quarterly review in a Richmond office. You are the senior vice president responsible for the figures projected behind you. A recently appointed board member walks in ahead of schedule, glances around, and wonders aloud whether "the SVP" is on her way. Politely, you tell him she's already sitting at the table. He flushes for a moment, then regains his footing, and spends the rest of the session a bit guarded around you, a small cost of its own. There was no hostility behind the slip. The room simply assumed the most senior person couldn't be the woman standing in front of it.
Here is how this touches your daily work.
Researchers in Henrico and Chesterfield have a name for it: the assistant problem. Each occurrence eats roughly ten seconds plus a small dip in your composure. The cumulative cost is different. As an illustration, if this occurs about once a month over a twenty-year career, you would have corrected a stranger's initial impression around 240 times before the substantive discussion could start. Those first impressions matter, since that is when a person's credibility is effectively assessed. The trouble is not that you seem inexperienced. It is that the room's picture of "senior" was built by looking at who used to hold the job, and in much of the Richmond region's corporate and public-sector leadership, that picture has been slower to change than the org charts suggest.
Here is the plan.
Correct it briskly and calmly each time, then keep going. If you can head it off, say something like, "I'm the regional SVP, and you'll be presenting to me this afternoon." When there's no chance to pre-empt it, respond as matter-of-factly as you would to a wrong date on a slide: "Actually, I'm the SVP. Then launch in with "Shall we begin?" and leave out the joke, the apology, and any dwelling on it. Think of it as correcting a bad data point, where the quickest fix is the one that works best.
Richmond women who want to practice this with peers have options. Women's Business Council in Chesterfield, FemCity Richmond, the Network of Enterprising Women and NAWBO Richmond all host regular networking where leaders compare notes on exactly these moments. Girl on Fire, the Girls2Women-VA Spring Fling and Women In Bloom are also on the local calendar for women who want a broader room to share them in.
Which correction do you find yourself making most, and how long did it take before you quit apologizing each time you had to make it?