Jill Abramson is out at The New York Times, and the circumstances of her departure have lots of observers feeling all flavors of depressed, angry, and tired.

We’ve seen this movie before.

It always starts out on a high note (the first woman to be put in charge of an American institution!), but then quickly deteriorates. Throughout her brief tenure, her management style comes under public fire. She’s too brusque. She’s too pushy. She’s too (dare I say it?) bossy. She promotes herself too much, has too many speaking engagements, or isn’t around the office enough. She might even be criticized for her clothes, or her voice. And then, one day, she’s gone.

In the case of Jill Abramson, there is another all-too-familiar twist: reports saying that she was paid less than her male predecessor.

The feminist commentariat has quickly latched on to these details to cry, “Sexism!” Others have been more wary, saying hold on, we don’t know all the details. Maybe she really was an overbearing boss. It’s a tough time to be in journalism – maybe top salaries have to come down.

The skeptics could be right, but that still doesn’t mean her dismissal was unbiased. It would only be free from bias if she were let go the same way a male editor would have been pushed out. Consider: Howell Raines, one of her predecessors, was occasionally critiqued for having a “hard-charging” management style, but he was only chased from the executive editor’s chair following the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. He was allowed to resign, and at his send-off, Sulzberger emphasized the decision had been Raines’s, that he had accepted it “sadly,” and that he wanted to “applaud” him for “putting the interests of this newspaper” first.

Again, it’s not biased to fire a woman; it’s biased when a woman is held to a higher standard than a man and is punished differently when she doesn’t meet it. There are a lot of opinionated editors in any newsroom. But are the men allowed to punch walls while the women must hire executive coaches to help smooth their rough edges?

To put it differently: wouldn’t offices everywhere benefit if the male executives were held to the same impossibly high standards as the women?

In 2009, Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru presented their analysis of 2,816 executives’ 360-degree evaluations: they found that female leaders scored higher than or equal to their male peers on ten out of ten key leadership behaviors. Ten out of ten. This doesn’t mean women are inherently better leaders than men are; it just shows they have to be exceptional to be promoted into positions of leadership at all. And when they do make it to the top of the career ladder, women are more likely to find that ladder leaning against a crumbling edifice. A famous study of FTSE 100 companies by Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam also showed that women are more likely to be appointed to senior leadership roles when a company is suffering financially – a phenomenon they termed the “glass cliff.”

Why do women have a harder journey to the top and a tougher job when they get there? Joan Williams and Rachel Dempsey offer some answers in their 2014 book, What Works for Women at Work. Consider what they call the “Prove-It-Again! bias.” Citing study after study, they document how women’s mistakes are judged more harshly, and remembered longer, than men’s. When women are successful, it’s more likely to be ascribed to luck; when men succeed, though, it’s noted as skill. Men are also more likely to be judged on their potential, while women are held accountable for having actual accomplishments. In the hiring and promotion process, standards that are relaxed for men are tightened for women. Over two-thirds of the female leaders in Williams and Dempsey’s study reported encountering some form of Prove-It-Again! bias.

Or think about another form of bias the authors call the Tightrope. It’s been well documented that for men, success and likability go hand-in-hand, while for female leaders, there’s a tradeoff. Here’s how Williams describes it: “All high-paying jobs are traditionally seen as requiring masculine qualities, while women are expected to be feminine. So women in these jobs often find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too masculine – respected but not liked – and being seen as too feminine – liked but not respected. ” Nearly three-quarters of the women in her study reported this type of bias.

Williams also found that the Tightrope became even more difficult to navigate as the woman continued to climb higher in the organization. Instead of getting to the top role and finding that they’d finally “made it,” the women in her study reported that the scrutiny only got worse. To deal with it, the more hard-charging female executives had to develop intentionally compassionate, consensus-driven leadership styles – ones that wouldn’t conflict with the stereotype of how a woman is supposed to be.

While it’s easy to lament that this isn’t fair – women should be allowed to be just as brusque and bottom-line focused as men, dammit! – what we should really be arguing for is the reverse: more humane workplaces where male bosses, too, have to occasionally remember to ask how their employees are feeling.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 5/15/2014.

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