Flying the world. Viking warriors, leadership potential, earned autonomy.

The weapons, game pieces, location: Everything told scholars that the man buried in what is known as grave Bj 581 was a prominent, well-respected Viking warrior. No one was really prepared when DNA tests were conducted in 2017 and a new story began to emerge. This was a prominent warrior, all right, but the occupant of Bj 581 wasn’t a man. She was a woman.

The study, co-authored with Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota and Danielle Li of MIT and based on assessment and promotion records for nearly 30,000 workers, finds that women are 14% less likely to be promoted at the company in each year, and that a major factor preventing women from being promoted is that they are consistently judged as having lower leadership potential than men. In a two-part annual assessment, according to the records, women’s performance at the company is rated higher than men’s, on average. But their potential is rated lower—a pattern than continues even when women exceed those expectations.

These young women were smart, talented — and lucky — and they knew it. During training classes, instructors drilled into future flying attendants a definitive idea: You are an ambassador of the United States of America. …Like flight attendants on other airlines, “when they were working, their self-presentation, from hemlines to hats — and the way they applied makeup, when they smiled, what they said — served the corporations, the men who ran them, and the men they sought as paying customers. The women were more or less willing to go along with such visible constraints to earn so much autonomy.”