Why perfectionism feels like safety

In Sunday’s essay, I wrote about almost not writing my book because I knew it could not do everything.

It could not solve every systemic problem, represent every mother’s experience, or answer every possible critique.

And for a while, that felt like a reason not to write it at all.

Today I want to zoom out from my own experience, because I do not think this pattern is only mine. I see it all the time in women who are trying to write, lead, speak, build, apply, publish, ask, or contribute in some visible way.

The fear is not only, “What if this is imperfect?”

Often, the deeper fear is, “What if the imperfection means I had no right to offer it?”

One line of research that helps explain this is the literature on the double bind for women in leadership. Women are often expected to be both competent and warm, decisive and likable, confident and humble, ambitious but not too ambitious.

If they are too communal, they may be seen as lacking authority.
If they are too agentic, they may be seen as abrasive, self-interested, or difficult.

In other words, the target keeps moving and they are wrong no matter what they do.

That matters because when the standard is contradictory, perfectionism can start to feel rational. If there is no clear way to get it right, many women try to become impossible to criticize. They over-prepare, over-explain, over-function, and anticipate every possible objection before they let their work leave their hands.

Sometimes this looks like excellence, but often it is fear..

A related body of research looks at backlash. Women who display traits traditionally associated with leadership like assertiveness, ambition, directness, and authority, can be penalized when those traits violate expectations of feminine niceness or warmth. This does not mean every criticism of a woman’s work is unfair or biased, and it does not mean women should be beyond critique. But, it does mean that many women are not imagining the social cost of being visible, ambitious, or imperfect in public.

This is also the territory Stefanie O’Connell explores in her new book, The Ambition Penalty. Her work looks at the ways women are encouraged to step up and then penalized when they do. I think that phrase captures something many women know in their bodies before they have language for it.

We are told to speak up, but not make anyone uncomfortable.
We are told to lead, but to make leadership look effortless.
We are told to be ambitious, but not too obviously invested in our own ambition.
We are told to name the system, but not leave anyone feeling hopeless.
We are told to offer practical tools, but not make it sound like women are responsible for fixing what they did not create.

No wonder so many women hesitate.

No wonder we wait until the sentence is perfect, the proposal is airtight, the argument is fully developed, the credentials feel more impressive, the timing is obvious, and the risk is smaller.

Sometimes caution is wisdom. Sometimes the pause matters. Sometimes we do need to revise, reflect, listen, read more, or notice whose experience is missing from the room.

But sometimes the pause becomes a place to hide.

That distinction feels important to me, because this is not an argument for pretending things are better than they are. It is not toxic positivity. It is not “look on the bright side,” or “just try harder,” or “focus only on what you can control.” The point is almost the opposite. The systems, constraints and inequities are real. And still, many women are living, working, leading, mothering, deciding, and trying to make meaning inside those realities right now.

So perhaps, when we are feeling stuck or like shrinking is the safer bet, we can change the question—instead of “Can this be criticized?,” because anything meaningful can be criticized, we ask ourselves “is this useful enough to offer?”

That is a different standard. It does not ask us to be careless or sloppy. It does not ask us to pretend our work is more complete than it is. It asks us to remember that a contribution can be partial and still matter.

This is where I think many of us get stuck. We are often very good at responsibility, see nuance, anticipate critique, and notice what else needs to be considered. These are strengths, and they often make our work better. They are also ways in which we have kept ourselves safe. And, taken too far, the same strengths can become paralyzing. We begin to treat every limitation as disqualification, and we forget that contribution is often how a conversation begins, not how it ends.

This week’s practice is what I’m calling the Imperfect Contribution Filter.

When you are hesitating to share, publish, pitch, apply, ask, or offer something because it does not feel complete enough, pause and ask:

• What is this contribution actually trying to do?

• Am I asking it to solve more than one contribution can reasonably solve?

• Is there a real gap I need to address, or am I trying to become impossible to criticize?

• What would be lost if I stayed silent?

I especially like that last question because perfectionism usually focuses on what could go wrong if we act. It is much less likely to ask what is lost when we do not.

What conversation does not happen? What person does not feel less alone? What idea does not get built upon? What part of us learns, again, that safety means staying small?

The work is not to lower our standards. It is to stop confusing impossible standards with integrity.

There is no way to do meaningful work and remove all risk.
There is no way to contribute anything interesting without leaving something unfinished.
There is no way to speak in a human voice and be understood perfectly by every person who hears it.

Maybe the goal is to contribute with care, tell the truth as fully as we can from where we stand, stay open to learning, and refuse to let the impossibility of doing everything become the reason we do nothing.

Alice H. Eagly and Steven J. Karau, “Role Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders,” Psychological Review, 2002.

Laurie A. Rudman and Peter Glick, “Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes and Backlash Toward Agentic Women,” Journal of Social Issues, 2001.

Laurie A. Rudman and Kimberly Fairchild, “Reactions to Counterstereotypic Behavior: The Role of Backlash in Cultural Stereotype Maintenance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004.

Laurie A. Rudman and Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, “Gender and Leadership: Backlash Effects and the Double Bind,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2010.

Catalyst, “The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership.”

Stefanie O’Connell, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up—and Then Pushes Them Down.