Why Even a Few Women At The Top Feels Like ‘Too Many'

On gender perception bias and its damaging consequences

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Many of the headlines following last week’s Grammy Awards claimed it’s women who dominated the night.

From Beyoncé finally clinching Album of the Year with Cowboy Carter to Doechii becoming the third woman ever to win Best Rap Album and Chappell Roan winning her first Grammy for Best New Artist, it perhaps did feel like it. But feelings don’t always reflect reality.

According to a new report from consultancy AKAS, titled Missing Voices of Women in Music and Music News, women accounted for just 28% of this year’s Grammy nominees, while men made up 69%. Ultimately, men took home 61% of all wins across the 94 categories.

The AKAS report also found that this disparity between media coverage of female artists’ success and the reality has been quite persistent. Over the past eight years — from 2017 to 2024 — women have received only one in five Grammy nominations and wins. And although there’s been some progress — in 2017, only 12% of wins went to women — the Grammys are still pretty male-dominated. Yet the media seems largely oblivious to this. In 2024, for example, around a quarter of female-related Grammy headlines included words like ‘dominate’ and ‘rule.’ Similar language appeared in articles from previous years, too, in both specialist and general news media.

But this exaggeration of women’s representation extends beyond the music industry as well.

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A month ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire owner of Meta, sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan for a three-hour interview and lamented the decline of ‘masculine energy’ in the corporate world. He also hinted that companies have swung too far toward women lately.

Well, can you guess what percentage of Meta’s workforce is male?

The latest available data from 2022 reveals that nearly two-thirds (62.9%) of its global employees are men. A similar pattern appears in the social media giant’s boardroom. Among tech employees alone, the number is even higher — three-quarters are men. But apparently, that’s not enough. Or perhaps all these men just aren’t ‘men enough’ (at least not by the standards of those who think ‘real’ masculinity is measured in steak consumption.)

Still, Zuckerberg’s comment doesn’t just reflect a certain genre of grievances that have emerged in recent years — which we’ll dive into later — but also a broader tendency to overestimate women’s representation and influence. A gender perception bias.

This bias is particularly evident when it comes to estimates of women in leadership. One 2018 global Ipsos survey spanning 27 countries and nearly 20,000 respondents found that people in almost every country polled believed that more than 20% of the world’s top CEOs were women. In reality, the actual figure was 3% at the time. Another 2020 study in the US found that Americans overestimate women’s representation in Congress by an average of 14%. Interestingly, it’s young people — especially young men — who had the most inaccurate perceptions of how many legislative seats women actually hold.

Men — and not just young — also tend to see a much rosier picture of gender parity in the workplace than women. In a 2010 survey by Bain & Company, 72% of male managers and executives believed their workplaces recruited men and women equally. In contrast, only 42% of their female counterparts agreed. Other research has also found that men and women differ in their perceptions of gender parity in fields like science.

But here’s what’s striking: misconceptions about women’s representation persist even when the evidence is right in front of us.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media uncovered that women make up only about 17% of the crowd in movie crowd scenes. Yet, this imbalance often isn’t perceived as an imbalance at all. As Davis noted in an interview with NPR:

If there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50–50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

Dale Spender found something similar in her research on women’s participation in group discussions. Even when women spoke only 15% of the time or less, their contributions in mixed-gender groups were perceived as ‘equally balanced.’ And when women spoke 30% of the time or more, they were seen as ‘dominating’ the conversation. This certainly helps explain why the stereotype that women talk more than men is so persistent despite studies consistently showing that men and women speak roughly the same number of words daily. If anything, some research suggests that in certain settings, it’s men who do more of the talking.

But it’s then also not that surprising that even though we are still decades — if not centuries — away from true gender equality, some people already believe we’re living in a full-blown matriarchy, is it?

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A big part of the reason why this perception bias exists in the first place is what sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter described as ‘Tokenism’. According to this theory, once a long-underrepresented group — women, Black people, or any other minority — reach a tipping point of 15% representation in a given environment, their presence and actions become disproportionately visible to everyone else.

In other words, it’s like zooming in on a handful of women at the top of the food chain and assuming, ‘women are everywhere these days!’

This sentiment can then be spun in many different ways. Feminist and liberal media outlets might lean into a more positive, ‘who run the world? girls!’ narrative, sometimes unintentionally overstating women’s progress. Meanwhile, more conservative outlets, as well as online spaces outside traditional media and entertainment — particularly the ‘manosphere’ communities — not only tend to exaggerate women’s advancements but also frame them as a threat to men and the world at large.

That’s all the remarks that women are becoming ‘too empowered’ and ‘taking over.’ That’s the complaints about too many female leads and female-centric stories in movies and games, too many women winning awards, too many women in positions of power and influence. That’s the insistence that we’re only one step away from a female-dominated dystopia where men are rendered powerless and miserable. And so on.

Still, these claims are about as rooted in reality as the idea that women ‘dominated’ this year’s Grammy Awards. That is to say, not so much.

Now, there is certainly plenty to celebrate when it comes to progress on gender equality. In my last piece, for instance, I talked about the feminisation of the labour market — the increasing number of women joining it as well as projected growth in ‘pink-collar’ fields, like healthcare and social work. In recent years, there’s also been steady progress in women’s participation in arts and entertainment, STEM, business and politics. Women now also outnumber men in higher education enrollment for the first time in history.

But none of this amounts to a total female take-over.

To claim that women have even a comparable say in this world as men, when 87% of billionaires, 93% of heads of governments, 73% of parliamentary members, 85.3% of movie directors, 95% of CEO positions and 80% of corporate board members are all men isn’t just absurd — it’s a gross misrepresentation of our reality.

Even in the arts and entertainment, women are hardly overrepresented. Well, we’re barely even equally represented. In children’s books, male characters are twice as likely to take leading roles and are given far more speaking parts than female ones. Almost 80% of video game characters are male — and nearly 60% are white — and they say, on average, twice as much as female ones. Men also continue to dominate leading and speaking roles in movies and TV shows, and, as per a 2020 global study, they account for 76% of all news subjects.

Sure, women in many places are better off than they were decades ago. But, by far and large, women don’t run this world.

We’re not even close.

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If you look at the world through patriarchy-tinted glasses and hence believe that men alone should dominate it, then any number of women in positions of power and influence is ‘too many’ because the ideal number is zero. As Jude Doyle writes:

The only environment not at risk of being ​’feminised’ is an environment with no women in it.

It’s then not hard to predict where all this paranoia about women ‘taking over’ and becoming ‘too empowered’ and the supposed need for more ‘masculine energy’ could ultimately lead us. Or rather, drag us back to.

Unfortunately, the gross overestimation of female presence in leadership, the workplace, entertainment, etc., paired with the equally pervasive idea that women’s gains must inevitably come at men’s expense, has serious consequences right now, too. For one, it results in complacency regarding gender equality efforts. If equality apparently already exists — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — then why bother with initiatives supporting women and girls? Why elect more women to office? Why talk about pay gaps, gender-based violence, or even feminism at all? Ironically, when we overestimate the pace of change, it tends to stall.

Beyond complacency, this false perception of gender parity and the framing of equality as a zero-sum game also fuel what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls ‘aggrieved entitlement’ — the anger and fear some men feel when they perceive their social status and privilege slipping away. This then means that when men struggle — as many undeniably do today — they may be drawn to scapegoating rather than scrutinising the real sources of their hardships. After all, it’s far easier to blame highly visible minorities — whether women, trans people, immigrants, or other groups — for the shrinking of your slice of the pie than to acknowledge that those in actual power shrunk the whole pie in the first place.

Of course, none of this is to say we shouldn’t celebrate women’s achievements. We can — and definitely should — celebrate the accomplishments of female artists, innovators, scientists, and leaders as long as the reporting on their success reflects reality, not wishful thinking (or paranoia). And as long as we keep the bigger picture in focus, too.

The truth is, we are still far from a world where everyone has an equal shot. The vast majority of wealth, power, and influence is still concentrated in the hands of a handful of men, and even the few women who do break through usually do so by having to play by rules they had no hand in creating and that only serve to maintain the current status quo further.

As Mary Beard notes in Women & Power: A Manifesto:

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

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There’s likely another reason why female artists at the Grammys seem to ‘dominate’ and stand out even when the numbers tell a different story: many of them use their platform to spotlight systemic inequality and urgent political issues. This year was no exception.

So, is a world where more women take the mic, so to speak, and drive change really such a terrifying prospect?

I don’t think so.

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