The assistant problem: what it costs over 20 years, and the 10-second correction
Per the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and LeanIn, women in leadership roles are roughly twice as likely as their male peers to be mistaken for someone in a lower-ranking position. If you have been asked to take the minutes, grab the coffee or confirm the room booking while your title includes "vice president," you already know the pattern from the inside.
The notable part is less the occurrence itself than its persistence. Plenty of women in Cincinnati, from the Kroger and P&G offices downtown to the hospital campuses in Hamilton and Warren counties, have a story like this. The study measured it at the leader level, among women who have already cleared every bar their organization set. Rising through the ranks does little to make this error go away. It follows you upward. Imagine a director being taken for the coordinator in a Cincinnati meeting room. Picture a C-suite leader being asked to take the coats. What the room picks up on is not your job title. It is you.
The source of the figure
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have jointly produced Women in the Workplace, a yearly survey of American corporations that gathers responses from both the firms themselves and the individuals who work inside them. Among the everyday workplace experiences the 2025 survey probed, women leaders said they were mistaken for someone junior at double the rate reported by men. Because the figures come from people's own accounts, they reflect what stuck in memory rather than an exhaustive tally of incidents. The data also leaves open who the person making the error was and what led them there. What it does show is that this is a pattern, common enough to surface in a national survey, and not something that happens only to you in your Cincinnati office.
What it looks like on screen
Picture a quarterly review at a Cincinnati firm. As the senior vice president, the figures on this screen fall under your responsibility, here in Cincinnati. Early to a Covington board session, a newcomer glances around and wonders aloud when the SVP will show up. Calmly, you point out that she has been seated across from him the whole time. He flushes for a moment, regains his footing, and spends the remainder of the afternoon treating you with a slight, noticeable caution, a cost of its own. The mistake carried no ill will at all. It simply reflected the room's automatic assumption that the person in charge could not be you.
What this means for your standing
Many people in Covington and Hamilton call it the assistant problem. Every episode eats up roughly ten seconds and a brief loss of poise. The cumulative cost is different. Hypothetically, a single incident each month over a two-decade career adds up to around 240 occasions when someone's initial impression of you had to be set straight before the substantive discussion could start. Those opening impressions are the moments when people decide how much weight to give your words. Looking younger or less senior is not what causes the difficulty. The trouble is that the room's mental image of a leader was formed by observing who previously occupied the role.
Those first impressions also matter in pay conversations. Median earnings for women in the Cincinnati metro were $43,206 in 2024, compared with $60,042 for men, roughly 72 cents on the dollar. Every moment spent correcting a stranger's assumption is time not spent making the case for your next raise or your next budget.
Action items ahead
Correct it quickly and keep going, each time, with a steady voice. Introduce yourself first, if you can: "I'm the SVP for the region, joining from Fairfield." If you have no chance to do that, respond with the same plain tone you'd use to fix a misstated date: "Just so you know, I'm the SVP." Then move right into the agenda. Skip the quip, the apology, and any dwelling on it. When a figure is wrong, whoever pushes the correction fastest prevails.
Cincinnati has plenty of places to practice this. The Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber and local networks such as CREW Greater Cincinnati and the Greater Cincinnati chapter of the Ohio Federation of Business and Professional Women give you rooms full of peers who have made the same correction. Sharing your own version with them is often the quickest way to stop apologizing for it.
Which correction have you found yourself making most frequently, and how many meetings went by before you no longer felt the need to apologize while making it?