Is "Put Up and Shut Up" All You Can Do? Dealing with the quiet immunity of the well-connected
One thing you come to learn when working in a university is that there are a lot of people who are deeply connected to one another. This shouldn't surprise us. As with any large organisation, long and layered relationships are common. After all, you are more likely to meet a future partner at work than almost anywhere else.
There are of course other deep relationships and friendships that come from working together in different roles over many years of a career. Once the volatility of early career is over, it is not uncommon for someone to stay employed at the same university for ten, twenty, thirty years or more.
Christina is a case in point. She was at the University of Warwick from 1981 when she began her undergraduate degree to 2016 when she left for other employment. In those thirty-five years, she progressed through the ranks to Pro-Vice-Chancellor. Despite its 7,000 staff and 30,000 students, she says the campus had become like a village as she knew so many people in so many nooks and crannies.
Karoline has worked at the University of Warwick since 2011 and has worked in several roles and departments. Not quite the length of time as Christina (!) but similarly showing how common it is to work the same institution for a lengthy time, building relationships and networks that span well beyond your own immediate teams.
But that kind of accumulated belonging isn't equally available to everyone. It tends to accrue to those who were welcomed in from the start and that welcome has not, historically, been extended with equal warmth in all directions.
Of course, the relationships themselves are not the problem. Until we add power to how these relationships are operating. Then things can become a whole new ball game because then relationships can matter more than performance or effectiveness. And this cuts through any claims to meritocracy and fairness.
It could be a decision that doesn't make sense until you remember who's connected to whom. Or a concern that goes nowhere because it would land too close to someone powerful. Or a pattern of underperformance that everyone sees, but no one addresses.
When the Organisation Isn't Really the Organisation
Universities, like many institutions, like to think of themselves as meritocratic, structured and principled. They are certainly full to the brim with policies and processes, committees and systems.
But inside departments and faculties, something more informal is often at play: networks of personal and professional relationships that can be deeply intertwined.
A faculty lead who is partnered with a senior manager.
Colleagues who have worked together for decades and whose loyalty runs deeper than any organisational chart.
Friendships that blur into decision-making.
A woman whose carefully documented concerns about a colleague go quietly nowhere — because that colleague has social capital she does not.
None of this is unusual. But it does change how power works.
Because when relationships sit underneath formal structures, accountability can become, shall we say, negotiable.
The Quiet Immunity of the Well-Connected
In theory, performance matters. In practice, it's not always the deciding factor.
And so some people are protected though, of course, this is never the official line.
This protection is not necessarily the result of anyone's deliberate and conscious decision, though that can be the case. It also comes about through the cumulative effect of the many small decisions we all make, each one individually defensible, that add up to a pattern: it would be uncomfortable, complicated, or politically costly to address an issue involving this particular person. And so we put up and shut up.
This means things get managed instead.
Issues are softened or reframed.
Responsibility is redistributed.
Other people quietly pick up the slack.
And the person who raises a concern gets recast as the problem.
Over time, an unspoken understanding emerges: this is not a situation that will be resolved.
Why This Lands Differently for Women
These environments can be difficult for anyone. But they often carry a particular weight for women, and not all women equally.
The unspoken rules can cut in multiple directions at once:
Speak up, and risk being seen as "difficult" or "political."
Stay quiet, and risk being overlooked or taken for granted.
Challenge inconsistency, and find yourself outside the informal networks where decisions are really shaped.
The word difficult does a particular kind of work when applied to women. It rarely means quite the same thing it would mean if applied to a man raising the same concern in the same way. Research on this is consistent: women are routinely penalised for assertive behaviours that are read as leadership qualities in their male colleagues. This is not a perception problem on the part of women who feel it. It is a structural one.
And these pressures don't land equally even among women. For those who are also navigating race, disability, contract insecurity, or the particular invisibility that can come with being in a professional services or administrative role in an institution that prizes academic status above all else, then the calculation of what is safe to say, and to whom, is considerably more complex. The informal networks where decisions quietly get shaped have historically been easier to enter for some than for others. If you are already on the outside of those networks, the cost of speaking up can be substantially higher.
When relationships drive outcomes, access to those relationships matters. And not everyone has that access or indeed wants to have to rely on it.
The Cost of Playing Along
It's tempting to rationalise it.
That's just how things work here.
It's not worth the fight.
I'll focus on my own work.
And sometimes, that is a perfectly valid, conscious choice.
But over time, something can shift.
You find yourself working around problems that shouldn't exist. You lower your expectations and not because you no longer believe in them. Because the system persistently signals that it doesn't. You hold back the views that once felt important to you because they appear never to be heard.
The risk here isn't just frustration. It's a gradual disengagement from your own standards.
What often goes unacknowledged is that this accommodation has a cost beyond the personal. Every time someone talented quietly adjusts her expectations downward, the institution loses something as well, even if it never notices, and even if it never thanked her for keeping things running that should never have fallen to her in the first place. She is not the problem. She is absorbing a problem the organisation should own.
The Shift That Matters
Let us be clear: put up and shut up isn't always wrong.
It can be a strategic decision to protect your energy, your position, or your longer-term goals. There is no shame in it. It is often the shrewd call.
But - and we cannot say this loudly enough - this approach only works if it stays a genuine choice.
If you can say: I see what's happening, and for now, I am choosing how I respond to it - you are holding on to your agency.
If, instead, it feels as though there is simply no room to act differently, that speaking up is impossible, that nothing would change anyway, that your only role is to absorb and adapt, that is something else entirely.
That is where people begin to feel trapped in a cycle that feeds on itself: justified resentment at a system that presents itself as fair while operating otherwise; disengagement from work that once mattered; a constant, grinding sense of values being compromised with no visible way through.
What Are Your Options - Really?
There is no neat answer in environments like this. We really wish there were. This kind of dynamic is deep in the culture and systems of power, so thoroughly entangled that shifting it would require something close to a revolution. But there are still choices, even if they are imperfect ones.
Name it - at least to yourself. Recognise what is happening for what it is. This is one of the ways power operates, often below the surface, rarely announced. Having clarity on this matters. It allows you to make more grounded decisions rather than ones shaped by self-doubt or the nagging suspicion that perhaps you are the problem.
Be deliberate about where you invest your energy. Not every situation is fixable, and trying to fix every one of them is exhausting and dispiriting. Being selective about where you push and where you step back can protect both your effectiveness and your wellbeing.
Find your people. Even in tightly networked environments, there are others who see what you see. Quiet alignment can reduce isolation and, sometimes, create subtle influence. At minimum, knowing you are not alone can ease the particular burden of wondering whether it is you, rather than the system, that is the problem. For some women, for example those newer to the institution, in more isolated roles, or without easy access to informal networks, finding those people takes more effort and carries more risk. That is worth naming, even if there is no easy fix for it.
Hold your own standards. You may not be able to change how others behave. But you can decide what good looks like in your own work, and you can hold to that. It matters more than it might feel like it does in the middle of all this.
Use formal routes but with clear eyes. Christina wants to acknowledge that she is a conflict avoider by nature, so factor that in as you read this. She has also chaired more grievance panels than she would like to count, and not one has ever delivered an outcome that either party, whether complainant or complained-about, has experienced as justice. Formal processes in universities exist, but they do not operate in a vacuum. For women in particular, those processes carry specific risks: the possibility of informal retaliation, the way the procedure can inadvertently centre the person being complained about rather than the complainant, and the considerable emotional labour of having to formally evidence something that everyone around you already informally knows. If you use formal routes, do so with a clear understanding of the context you are working within.
Consider your longer-term position. If the gap between your values and the organisation's reality keeps widening, it is worth asking not just can I stay but at what cost, and to what end?
So… Is That All You Can Do?
No.
But the options are not simple, and they are not without risk.
In environments where relationships subtly shape outcomes, the challenge is not only what you do. It is also how you remain anchored in your own judgement whilst navigating a system that does not always reward you for it.
Recognising that the system is the problem: that it is not you, not your standards, not your unwillingness to simply go along, is not a small thing. It is, in fact, where most genuine change begins. Even when it begins softly. Even when, for now, only you can see it.
Because the real danger isn't choosing, for a time, to put up and stay quiet.
The real danger is slowly coming to believe that this is simply how things are everywhere, always and that your only role is to accommodate it.
That is not true.
Even here, even now, you still have choices.
The question is which ones you are willing to make, and what you need in order to make them.
And slowly, the question takes shape:
Is this one of those environments where you just … put up and shut up?
Christina and Karoline
Professor Christina Hughes is Founder and CEO of Women-Space Leadership
Karoline Schneider, Departmental Administrator (Education), University of Warwick