The assistant problem: what it costs over 20 years, and the 10-second correction
According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and LeanIn, female leaders are mistaken for a lower-ranking employee at twice the rate of their male counterparts. If you have been asked to take the minutes, pour the coffee or confirm the room booking while your title carries "vice president" in it, you are the evidence.
The notable part is less the occurrence itself than how routine it has become. Plenty of women in Columbus, from Dublin to Westerville, could describe the moment. It is that the study measured it among leaders, women who have already passed every hurdle the organization put in front of them. The mix-up does not fade as your seniority grows. It keeps pace with you. Someone in a Columbus boardroom assumes the director is there to take notes. A C-suite leader in Dublin gets directed to the coats, as if she were staff. The room is not reading your title. It is reading you.
Source of the number
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have produced Women in the Workplace each year, a survey of US corporate employers that gathers responses from both the companies and the staff who work inside them. Among the everyday experiences the 2025 edition probed was being taken for a junior person, an experience that women in leadership described at twice the rate men did. Because the findings come from people reporting on their own experiences, they reflect what individuals remembered and chose to mention, not a complete tally of each occurrence. It likewise cannot reveal who made the error or what drove them to it. What it does show is a pattern common enough to appear in a national survey, which means it is not something happening only to you.
Presentation style
Picture a quarterly review at a company in the Columbus region. Imagine you are the senior vice president in Grove City whose name sits at the top of the figures being projected. Before the meeting begins, a recently appointed board member walks in ahead of schedule, scans the Hilliard conference room, and inquires whether the SVP will be arriving shortly. With composure, you tell her she is already speaking with the SVP. He is briefly embarrassed, recovers, and for the rest of the meeting he is a little overly careful with you, which carries its own cost. There was no ill intent behind that misstep. The room simply assumed, by habit, that the most senior person present could not be you.
What this signals for your career
Researchers have a name for this: the assistant trap. Every such episode takes roughly ten seconds from you and leaves a small dent in your poise. The cumulative cost is larger. As an illustration, a single occurrence each month over a two-decade career comes to about 240 instances in which someone's first impression of you had to be set right before the substantive discussion could begin. Those first impressions matter, because that is where credibility often gets priced. Your appearance is not the core problem. The problem is that the room's sense of what "senior" looks like was shaped by whoever held the role before, in Upper Arlington or anywhere else.
Action items
Correct it briskly, move past it, and keep your temper every time. Clarify it upfront, if you can, before anyone guesses: "I lead the regional team as SVP, based out of Westerville." If the moment has already passed, respond in the same even tone you would use to amend an incorrect date: "I'm actually the SVP." Then continue: "Shall we begin?" Skip the humor, the apology, and any dwelling on it. The mistake is simply a bad record, and whoever corrects it fastest comes out ahead.
Which correction have you found yourself making most frequently, and how long did it take before you stopped apologizing for it?