Language can serve as a potent and injurious tool against ambitious women in the workplace. Consider how often both men and women have thought or said 'bitch' or other derogatory terms when describing a woman in a leadership position. Freud once described mental health as the ability to love and to work. For many of these women, their work has also become their love, their passion. Working long hours, often working 'twice as hard as men,' to be viewed as equally competent, perhaps sacrificing spouse and children in deference to career, these women have been inculcated into a patriarchal corporate environment, one in which they must act in a sexual dissonant manner in order to succeed. And as they negotiate the male managerial model, they often come to view their own femininity in an objectified, disparaging way. They may defeminize their language and adopt a 'more adversarial, information-focused style characteristic of all male talk'. Here is where the dilemma begins: If they conform to the masculine linguistic norms of the corporate environment, then their behavior can be perceived as confrontational, harsh, contentious, un-lady-like. A collision of culture ensues on intrapsychic and interpersonal levels between what is expected of a woman in society and what is expected of a person in a high status position where valued leadership traits are male-gendered. Often these women select language and styles that veer away from the feminine side of the gender spectrum. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)