‘I felt an unspoken pressure to smile’ – Kenyan women in the workplace

During a meeting at her office in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, 24-year-old Faith suddenly became nervous – reluctant to be perceived as difficult in a part of the world that does not like opinionated young women.

It had started pleasantly enough. Faith, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, had dutifully laughed along at the bad jokes made by her bosses.

But then a senior colleague made a suggestion that she felt would not work practically. But before Faith could express her opinion, her colleague mentioned her name.

“And Faith agrees with me!” The others in the meeting room turned to face her as her colleague added: “You agree, don’t you?”

Faith did not agree, but felt under pressure: “I didn’t want to be seen as difficult or moody.

“I felt an unspoken pressure to smile, to be agreeable, to not be disruptive,” she tells me.

At that point she was two years into her first job at a sought-after company and among the first women in her family’s generation to go to university – she had so much more she wanted to achieve.

“How do I progress if I start disagreeing with colleagues at such a junior stage?” she asks.

Faith is aware she faces what a Women in the Workplace 2025 report, which focuses on India, Nigeria and Kenya, calls “the broken rung”. This refers to a significant barrier on the corporate ladder that has seen a steep drop in women’s representation between entry-level and management roles.

Published in May by McKinsey, the management consultancy has for the first time expanded its annual research beyond North America and found that in these three big developing economies, women remain significantly underrepresented in senior leadership positions.

In Kenya, women make up 50% of entry-level roles in sectors such as healthcare and financial services, but that drops to just 26% at senior levels. The pattern is similar in Nigeria and India.

Faith did not challenge her colleague in the meeting. She smiled and said nothing.

There is now a term for her experience – experts call it “likeability labour”.

“[This] is a really fun name for an incredibly depressing reality,” says Amy Kean, a sociologist and head of the communications consultancy Good Shout, which coined the term.

“It refers to the constant second-guessing, overthinking, paranoia, shape-shifting and masking women do every single day in order to be liked in the workplace.”

Ms Kean’s UK-based study – Shapeshifters: What We Do to Be Liked at Work – which also came out in May, states that 56% of women feel pressure to be likeable at work, compared to just 36% of men.

Based on a survey of 1,000 women across the UK, the report also highlights how deeply ingrained, and unequally distributed, the burden of likeability is in professional environments.

It details how women often feel the need to soften their speech using minimising language, even when confident in their point.

Common phrases include: “Does that make sense?” or “Sorry, just quickly…”

This kind of constant self-editing, Ms Kean explains, may act as a defence mechanism to avoid being seen as abrasive or overly assertive.

“There is also a class element to this,” she adds, in reference to the UK. “Working-class women, who are less used to modulating themselves in different settings, also get accused of being direct and also suffer in the corporate world.”

For many women who are not used to advocating for themselves in their personal environments, the stakes go beyond fitting in or being well-liked.

“It’s not as simple as being popular, it’s about being safe, heard and taken seriously,” Ms Kean adds.

Earlier this year, she organised a summit in London for women feeling the likeability labour pressure, titled Unlikeable Woman. More than 300 women turned up to share their experiences.

The UK study is not an outlier. Sociologists say the pressure women feel to be likeable in order to advance professionally is a global trend.

A 2024 study by the US-based recruitment firm Textio supports this. Analysing data from 25,000 individuals across 253 organisations, it found that women were much more likely to receive personality-based feedback and that 56% of women had been labelled “unlikeable” in performance reviews, a critique only 16% of men received.

Men, on the other hand, were four times more likely than other genders to be positively labelled as “likeable”.

“Women perform likeability labour for a mix of social and cultural reasons,” says Dr Gladys Nyachieo, a sociologist and senior lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya.

“Women are generally socialised to be caregivers, to serve and to put the needs of others before themselves and this invariably transfers to the workplace,” says Dr Nyachieo.

“There is a term for it in Kiswahili – ‘office mathe’ – or the office mother.”

The office mathe does additional labour to keep a workplace functioning, including making tea, buying snacks and generally being of service.

I ask what is wrong with this if that is what a woman wants to do.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Dr Nyachieo says. “But you won’t get paid for it. You will still be expected to do your work, and possibly additional work.”

Dr Nyachieo believes that in order to tackle likeability labour, systemic change has to happen at the root, including implementing policies that allow women flexible hours and have mentors that advocate for them.

She herself mentors several young women just starting out in Kenya’s workforces.

“I take mentoring young women very seriously,” Dr Nyachieo says. “I tell them: ‘If you act pleasantly all the time, you will go nowhere. You have to negotiate for yourself’.”

One of her mentees is Faith.

“She’s taught me not to feel pressure to be smiley and nice all the time,” Faith says.

“I am working on it.”