Why are women still speaking small, even when we’re the boss? Because when we dare to be heard, we’re called “difficult”.
When the Prime Minister was asked to describe Grace Tame in one word last week, he didn’t choose “brave”, “relentless” or “necessary”. He chose “difficult”. In that moment, Anthony Albanese didn’t just describe one woman. He reached for a label generations of women know by heart, the word that gets used when a woman won’t comply, won’t smile on cue, and won’t make powerful people comfortable.
Grace Tame is a child sexual abuse survivor and former Australian of the Year who has built her public life on refusing to be agreeable when the truth is ugly. After the comment triggered backlash and a public apology from the Prime Minister, Tame shared a line that cut to the bone: “‘Difficult’ is the misogynist’s code for a woman who won’t comply. History tends to call her ‘courageous’.”
Most women in business don’t have a national platform. They don’t have a lectern, a press pack or a red carpet. But they know exactly what that word feels like. “Difficult” is the quiet threat that hangs in the air any time a woman dares to take up space, following up an unpaid invoice, raising her prices, saying no to a “pick your brain” coffee, correcting a client, pitching herself to the media.
I work with small business owners who, on paper, want visibility. They want more clients, more credibility, more media coverage. But when we really talk, what they’re often afraid of isn’t the camera or the microphone. It’s the possibility that if they step into the spotlight, someone will decide they’re “too loud”, “too pushy”, “too alpha”… or simply “difficult”.
So they talk small. They minimise their expertise. They keep their wins to themselves. They stay off the stage, away from the media, out of the photos.
Not because they don’t have something worth saying, but because they’ve been taught that the worst thing a woman can be is inconvenient.
I learned that lesson early. I spent 15 years working in live TV news in the early 2000s, when the big bosses were all middle‑aged men who left for lunch on a Friday at noon and never came back, what happened in the newsroom stayed in the newsroom, and if you didn’t say yes to every weekend, late night and public holiday shift, the news director would happily find “one of the million other girls who’d kill for your job.”
On the breakfast show, shifts started at 11pm the night before. Young cadets were openly encouraged to climb over each other for the best stories. It was pretty toxic, and it was made very clear that if you wanted to stay, you didn’t make trouble. You weren’t difficult.
Years later, sitting across from women running multi-six and seven‑figure businesses, I realised something bleak: we’d left the old newsrooms, corporates and institutions, but we’d carried their script with us.
“It’s just a little business.”
“I only started a couple of years ago.”
“I’m not really an expert, but…”
These aren’t unsure teenagers. These are women carrying payrolls, mortgages, teams and IP, still talking about themselves like a side character in their own story.
And it shows up in who we see and hear. Research in recent years has found that less than a quarter of experts quoted in the media are women. That’s not because women aren’t qualified. It’s because women are under‑quoted, under‑pitched and under‑visible. We hesitate. We overthink. We wait to feel “ready”. Meanwhile, men with half the experience are happily putting their hand up to comment on anything with a Wi‑Fi signal.
Here’s the part that often gets missed: when a woman steps up as an industry expert, writes the op‑ed, does the radio interview, fronts the TV grab, she isn’t just promoting herself. She’s claiming a public platform on behalf of everyone who looks like her, works like her, lives like her. Her voice travels further than her own marketing. It shapes how customers think, how decision‑makers think, how the wider public understands her industry.
When women don’t step into that expert space, the commentary about their industries is left to others, usually men, usually bigger players, usually people further from the frontline reality.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you are a woman with an opinion, a standard, a boundary or a spine, someone, somewhere, will decide you are difficult. You can contort yourself to avoid the label and they may still use it anyway.
What you can control is whether your silence helps them.
If you run a business, employ people, raise kids, hold a mortgage, you are not a “little” anything. You are living evidence of how policy, economics and culture land in real time. That experience is not a side note. It is data. It is story. It belongs in the public record, not just on your Instagram grid, but in news bulletins, opinion pages and expert panels.
So this is a plea, and a challenge, to the women who are still waiting to feel “non‑difficult” enough to step up. Retire the words that keep you small, “just”, “only”, “little”. Stop introducing your life’s work like a hobby you might give up next week. Start talking about your business, your expertise and your opinions at their true size, and start saying yes when you’re asked to speak as an expert for your industry, not just your brand.
Not because it will protect you from criticism. It won’t.
Do it because the cost of staying quiet, for you, for your industry, for the women coming after you, is now greater than the cost of being called “difficult”.
They will call you difficult. So, say it anyway.