Even if you’ve never heard of it, you may have come up against the Prove-It-Again Tax, yet another gender bias in the workplace. What exactly is it and how can we escape its trap?
Sally*, who works at a technology company in Wellington, has often compared the meetings that she runs to the meetings run by her male colleague. “I’m far more prepared. I have a PowerPoint up on the screen which I tell people I’ll email to them later, so they can pay attention in the meeting rather than them needing to take lots of notes. I stick to the topic, stick to the most important points, and make sure meetings don’t go over time.”
“But when my colleague runs meetings, he only has a notepad, nothing on a screen, and often seems to ‘wing it’. Sometimes that means meetings go over time, sometimes it means he fails to hit the most important points.” And nope, he doesn’t have a PowerPoint to share afterwards.
“Also, people tend to interrupt me more than they interrupt him, or seem to doubt my capabilities despite me proving them. That really bothers me.”
“When I landed a big contract, various people said ‘nice, you got lucky’ or words to that effect, rather than congratulating me for all the effort I’d put in, including staying late at work. I’ve never heard that said of a man who has landed a big contract.”
“Also, I document work projects carefully, so the information is stored for future reference – like, if someone wants to pull up details as a template of sorts.”
She’d always thought that this was just best practice, but can now see it’s part of women needing to prove themselves over and over. “What the f**k is going wrong that this is happening in 2026? Wasn’t the patriarchy meant to be deconstructed by now?”
Re-proving Ourselves
The ‘prove-it-again bias’ is something that many women come up against in workplaces. It’s a phenomenon that sees women have to repeatedly prove their competence, far more than men have to. Many men may deny this bias exists, but many women will nod their heads if you talk to them about it.
Because this is no subjective take, nor is it a mere theory. This is something that’s been studied in organisational psychology and diversity research.
Author of the book What Works For Women At Work, law professor Joan C. Williams writes, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, that the prove-it-again bias is the way in which “men are presumed to be competent, while women often have to prove their competence over and over again. Thus, men but not women may be given the benefit of the doubt. In addition, women’s mistakes may be remembered forever, while men’s are soon forgotten.”
She says that it particularly affects women working in STEM, and other jobs historically held by men. But it’s also a wider phenomenon.
Dr Sunita Sah – the awarded professor and organisational psychology expert who told us about her book Defy – calls this “the prove-it-again tax”.
“While men are often judged on their potential, women are judged strictly on what they’ve already accomplished. Men get the benefit of the doubt. Women get the doubt.”
Faced with this, women often prepare more for meetings and presentations. “There’s a tax paid in extra hours preparing for meetings that men walk into cold.”
Sah states that nearly 65% of women report having experiences that boil down to this prove-it-again tax. Yes, two-thirds of us. “Successes are attributed to luck or circumstance. Mistakes are remembered longer. The same behaviour that reads as ‘confident leadership’ in a man reads as ‘abrasive’ or ‘difficult’ in a woman.” Women who aren’t white? Even more affected.
Warm or Cold?
Psychologist Susan Fiske has done research on warmth (trustworthiness, friendliness) and competence (capability, assertiveness). As Sah explains, “the ‘warmth-competence bind’ reveals a cruel paradox: we tend to see people as either warm or competent, rarely both. For men in leadership, this isn’t a problem: competence is expected, and warmth is a bonus. But for women, displaying competence triggers a warmth penalty. Be decisive, and you’re ‘cold’. Be collaborative, and you’re ‘not leadership material’.”
“Women leaders often skew toward proving competence at the expense of warmth: not because they lack warmth, but because they’ve learned that their competence is what gets questioned.”
And so women can feel forced into a more forceful, ‘male’ leadership approach. Kirsty,* a team leader for an Auckland consultancy, has seen that happen with her CEO. “She has been called cold, and at least once a bit of a bitch, for operating how many male leaders do.”
“Our former CEO, a man, often used to bang the table after he’d told us to get something done. No one raised an eyebrow. But when our new CEO started, she got some disapproving looks when she slightly raised her voice.”
Diligence vs Vibes?
Kirsty puts in serious work when looking for a new hire. She finetunes the job description, interviews the five top applicants, re-interviews the top two if necessary, and checks the references, along with all her regular work. However, her (male) colleague, also a team leader, routinely interviews just two people. “His process seems based on vibes. He’s interviewing and hiring mostly men, TBH. And he also seems to judge men on their potential, and women on their CVs alone.”
Women pay more tax
Rubene Ramdas – a chartered accountant with 25 years of experience across financial management, internal audit, governance, and compliance in both the private and public sectors – has written a piece called ‘The Unspoken Tax Women Pay In The Workplace’ . She says there “is a quiet truth many working women carry in their hearts, even when they cannot say it aloud: some days, it feels as though we are paying a tax simply for being women”.
“A tax measured not in money, but in effort. In scrutiny. In expectations. In the endless work of having to prove again and again what is freely assumed of others.” Of men. “Across my 25 years in the working world, I have watched this truth unfold in boardrooms, in open-plan offices, in interviews, and in the quiet corners where women gather to breathe for a moment before returning to their professional armour. I have lived it too.”
“Many women learn early that competence is not automatically attributed to them. While their male colleagues often walk into a room presumed capable, a woman must often demonstrate her worth before she is believed. She arrives prepared. Then over-prepared. She anticipates questions, rehearses responses, checks her work twice and then once more for luck.”
“Meanwhile, the world around her quietly extends grace to her male colleague – forgiving his mistakes, praising his potential, trusting him without requiring proof. This is one form of the unspoken tax: women must be exceptional just to be seen as equal.”
A Self-fulfilling Prophecy?
Sah explains what makes this so insidious. “The prove-it-again tax doesn’t just drain your time and energy. It changes how you make decisions. When you’re constantly under scrutiny, you start playing defence. You over-prepare. You hedge. You spend so much cognitive bandwidth proving you belong that you have less left for the actual decision in front of you.”
“The prove-it-again bias wants you to work harder, stay later, and accumulate more evidence of your worth. That’s an endless treadmill. You can’t out-work a systemic problem.”
“This is the trap: the more you try to prove yourself, the more you reinforce the frame that says you need to.”
Is it just me, or does this tax – this trap – feel almost like victim-blaming?
So What Can You Do?
Sah has some advice. “The answer isn’t to work harder at proving yourself. The answer is to build systems that make the question irrelevant.”
“The most defiant thing you can do is refuse to let your competence be perpetually on trial and create structures that allow you to lead without constantly defending your right to be there. That’s not gaming the system. That’s designing a better one.”
She has five suggestions. “Structured processes, joint evaluation, accountability mechanisms, genuine dissent, accurate attribution – none of these require you to be more likable or more credentialed or more perfect. They change the conditions under which decisions get made. They shift the weight from subjective impressions to objective criteria. That’s not a workaround. That’s better decision-making for everyone.” See details on those five suggestions here.
It’s very frustrating that it’s up to women to set up these structures, criteria and processes, which takes up more of their energy and time. Also, because the motherhood penalty can keep women in more junior roles, not everyone is in a position where they can alter structures and processes or create criteria.
If any men are interested in helping women doing this, we’ll send them a PowerPoint.