On Sunday, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast to discuss reproductive rights, address criticisms from Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance, and set the record straight on her own family.
Plenty of clips from the show—which is the most listened-to podcast by women on Spotify—quickly picked up traction on platforms like X and TikTok. But many women are especially struck by one moment in particular: Harris’s assertion that women don’t have to “aspire to be humble.”
The comment has sparked discussions about deeply ingrained—and often unquestioned—expectations for women’s behavior in the workforce, with male peers, and in society more generally.
The statement came after host Alex Cooper asked Harris how she felt about an assertion by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who said her own children “keep her humble,” whereas Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
The comment was a jab at the fact that Harris doesn’t have biological children, despite the fact that she shares two stepchildren with her husband, Doug Emhoff.
Harris responded, “I don’t think [Sanders] understands that there are a lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble [. . .] Two, a whole lot of women who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”
How society conditions women to be “humble”
Aside from highlighting the misogynistic undertones of Sanders’s analysis, Harris struck a chord with women through her casual rejection of the need to be humble.
“Never once have I seen someone tell women that we don’t have to ‘aspire to be humble,’ and to have it be an elected official, wow,” one TikTok user wrote. “Thirty-seven years of life and I’ve never heard a woman say that she doesn’t aspire to be humble,” another said. One creator even said that the moment “healed me.”
There’s actually a scientific basis for women’s strong reaction to the assertion that Harris was challenging. Women are deeply conditioned to behave “humbly,” more so than their male counterparts—so much more so, in fact, that it becomes a part of their own internal thought processes.
Despite the fact that men and women have been shown to generally possess equal intelligence, when asked to provide an estimation of their own intelligence, women consistently rate themselves lower than men, studies have found.
“Indeed, this pattern of gender differences in self-estimated intelligence (SEI) is so universally found across different samples, ages, ethnicities, and cultures that it has been termed the male hubris, female humility (MHFH) problem by Furnham et al. (2001),” researchers from Griffith University’s School of Applied Psychology wrote in a study on the topic published in 2022. In that same study, female respondents underestimated their own intelligence by an average of 6.32 IQ points and reported significantly lower self-esteem than male respondents.
The cost of lowered self-estimation
As one might expect, this lower self-estimation has real consequences for women in the workforce (and everywhere else).
In a LinkedIn post this January, female founder Piyu Dutta wrote about this phenomenon as something she termed Inherent Modesty Syndrome (IMS). She recalled an event during which female executives were reluctant to share their own accomplishments for fear of seeming too proud—and when they did, they were self-deprecating.
“Both in this group but also as a broader pattern that I have noticed throughout my career, women seem conditioned to be intrinsically modest and humble,” Dutta wrote, adding that the biases powering these patterns are held both by men and by women.
“IMS costs us when it comes to our annual performance review at our jobs or at the time of negotiating our salaries or asking for a promotion,” Dutta wrote. “It costs us when we fail to challenge lazy assumptions about our capabilities or professionalism (in turn, often masquerading as faux concern for our needs for work-life balance or our biological clock). It costs us when we talk ourselves out of applying for roles for which we may be a decent but not a perfect fit (a timidity that as per research, men are far less likely to suffer from).”
While women face a healthy dose of internal pressure to remain humble, there’s plenty of external pressure to do so too. On the internet (notably, in far-right circles), a recent trend of men “humbling” confident women (just search “I had to humble her” on TikTok) has inspired countless think pieces. This exhausting discourse adds to the subconscious narrative that women need to appear more outwardly modest if they want to avoid public shaming.
To many women, Harris’s brief comment brought these internalized feelings to the forefront—and demonstrated that there’s no shame in refusing to be “kept humble.”