How to get the recognition you deserve at work

Women have to prove themselves twice as hard to be seen as half as capable. Explore the recognition gap women face—and practice the strategies that help you make your contributions visible, valued, and impossible to overlook.

Before You Start

Goal: Reflect on your professional ambitions and practice communicating your achievements with confidence, clarity, and recognition for your team's contributions.

Meeting Agenda · Approx. 60 mins

  • Member Updates · 10 mins
  • Icebreaker · 10 mins
  • Key Takeaways · 5 mins
  • Activity · 20 mins
  • One Action · 10 mins
  • Wrap-Up · 5 mins

👋 Member Updates · 10 mins

Go around your Circle and share personal updates. Keep them brief and focused on significant changes or important decisions since the last time you met. It's OK not to have one every month. If you have a One Action update from last time, share that too.

🧊 Icebreaker · 10 mins

Invite everyone in the group to share. Keep answers to one or two minutes per person.

What is your greatest professional ambition? Why does that motivate you?

💡 Key Takeaways · 5 mins

Women often have to work harder than men to be seen as equally competent — and that gap in recognition is real, not imagined.

  • Performance bias creates a recognition gap. Women's achievements are more likely to be overlooked, attributed to luck, or shared with the team rather than credited individually.
  • Visibility is a skill you can build. Communicating your accomplishments clearly and confidently is not self-promotion — it's part of doing your job well.
  • Connect achievements to organizational goals. Framing your contributions in terms of impact on the team or mission makes them harder to dismiss.
  • Amplify others as you advocate for yourself. Research shows that women who celebrate their colleagues when sharing their own achievements face less backlash.
  • Build the relationships that create recognition. The people who get promoted are often the ones whose managers understand the full scope of what they contribute.

💬 Activity· 20 mins

Spend a few minutes writing a list of recent work-related achievements you may not have received full recognition or credit for (a completed project, a client meeting that went well, a higher-than-usual metric).

Go around the Circle and read your lists. After each list is shared, the group should offer positive feedback.

Then, write notes on how you would communicate one of your achievements to your manager. Think about:

  1. How did the achievement impact your organization and advance its mission? Do you have data to quantify impact?
  2. Which team members can you praise for their contributions?
  3. How would you frame it so it highlights both your own impact and your colleagues' collaboration?

Share your notes with the group (2 minutes per person).

Discuss as a group:

  1. What other strategies have you used to get greater recognition at work? (For example, do you regularly align with your manager on your goals and performance? Build relationships with colleagues who can advocate for you?

🎯 One Action · 10 mins

Commit to one concrete action — big or small — you'll take before next meeting. Go around the Circle and share (1 minute or less per member). Vocalizing it helps hold each other accountable.

Think about one achievement you've been underselling. Commit to communicating it to your boss: specifically, confidently, and in a way that connects to your organization's goals.

📅 Wrap-Up · 5 mins

Before you break, plan your next meeting, and close on an energetic note. Go around your Circle one by one and finish the sentence:

Now I am feeling… (choose one word).

  • Set the day, time, and location
  • Choose the next topic or resource
  • Confirm who's leading the discussion
  • Decide how you'll stay in touch in between