The Gratitude Tax

On Women, Achievement, and the Performance of Thankfulness

The Face

You’ve seen it. Lips slightly parted. Eyes wide with appropriate warmth. Head tilted just enough to signal humility. A smile that says “I know, can you believe it?”. I have been making this face for so long that I sometimes catch it in photographs and can no longer tell if it’s a performance or if it has simply become my face. The face of a woman receiving something in public.

I am grateful, sometimes overwhelmingly grateful for the people who read what I write, for the editors who took chances, for the investors who listened, for the bosses who offered mentorship, for the people who’ve offered me witness. Gratitude lives in me as something real. I return to it when I’m alone with myself, and it doesn’t look like the face. It looks like fierce joy.

That’s not what this essay is about.

This essay is about the other thing. The performance. The ritual. The very social tax that women pay, over and over and over, for the crime of receiving something they deserved. The tax that is not collected in money but in public deference.

How the Tax Works

You earn something. A book deal. A seat at the table. A platform. A title that took years to grow into. And then, before you can fully inhabit the thing you earned, you must pay for it. In the public enactment of humility that signals to everyone watching that you know, you really know, that you could not have done this alone.

Men receive. Women thank.

I have watched men walk into rooms they were given and immediately begin rearranging it for their comfirt. I have watched women walk into the same rooms and immediately look for whom to acknowledge. The disturbing part is not that gratitude is expected. It is how swiftly and personally ingratitude is punished. The woman who receives without visible deference is not read as confident. She is read as uncouth. As someone who has forgotten her place, gotten above herself, failed to understand the terms of the arrangement. The backlash is not really about her attitude. It is about what her attitude implies- that maybe she deserved this, and if she deserved it, the people around her weren’t being generous at all. They were just recognising something that was already true. And that is intolerable. Because it removes their role in her story.

High-power individuals smile when they feel like smiling. Their positive expression correlates with actual positive emotion. Low-power individuals smile regardless of how they feel. For them, the smile has no relationship to internal state. It is an obligation. Replace smiling with gratitude, and the mechanism of the tax becomes clear: women are not expressing thankfulness. They are performing it. And the performance is compulsory and has nothing to do with how grateful they actually are.

This is also why the tax is psychologically expensive. There is a difference between feeling an emotion and staging it. Displaying feelings you don’t have is associated, across decades of research, with burnout and dissatisfaction. You know the feeling. You’ve stood at a podium or in an interview or across a dinner table, performing gratitude and feeling something drain out of you. That drain is the tax being collected.

The group most socially required to perform gratitude is also the group that actually experiences it most genuinely. Research consistently finds that women report higher trait gratitude than men, are more willing to express it, and derive more psychological benefit from it. The emotion is real. The performance is demanded of the people least in need of the reminder to feel it, and exempts the people for whom gratitude is apparently too threatening to their sense of self to produce. So we perform the thing that is already in us, on command, for an audience that is checking to make sure we haven’t forgotten our place. And men feel nothing, and no one asks them to.

Whose Capital Is It?

When a woman performs gratitude, she is not expressing a feeling. She is generating capital for whoever is positioned as her benefactor. Her visible thankfulness becomes their symbolic capital: proof of generosity, evidence of good judgment, confirmation that they were the kind of person who recognised something before everyone else did. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this mechanism. Gratitude, he wrote, creates “durable obligations” that function as social currency, binding the receiver to the giver in ways that accrue value for the giver far longer than the original act warranted. Your thank you is their asset. Your deference is their prestige. And you are left holding the achievement, which is now slightly less yours than it was before you started thanking people for it.

This is why the backlash against ungrateful women is so disproportionately personal. It is not really about manners. It is about asset protection. A woman who receives without performing gratitude is not just being rude, she is refusing to generate the capital that her success was supposed to produce for the people around her. She is keeping the whole story for herself. And that is a kind of theft, in the logic of the tax: you were supposed to share the narrative of your own achievement, and you didn’t.

Research on what happens when women succeed without performing communality is remarkably consistent. They are rated as less likeable, more hostile, and less worthy of future support. Not less competent. Less likeable. The punishment is social, not professional, which makes it harder to name and easier to sustain. And the remedy, when researchers tested it, was the communality signal: provide information that the successful woman is warm, is a mother, is grateful, and the penalties disappear. Public gratitude, then, is not a nicety. It is armour. Women perform it not because they are told to but because they have learned, through accumulated experience, what happens when they don’t.

In India, this tax has a name. Ehsaan. The word sits at the intersection of kindness, favour, and obligation. It describes the bond created when one person does something significant for another. Unlike “thank you,” which is transactional and complete, ehsaan is open-ended. It does not expire. You carry it. And in a culture structured around collective obligation and family honour, the debt of ehsaan falls most heavily on women who are expected to feel it toward the families that raised them, the husbands who married them, the in-laws who accepted them, the industries that gave them a chance. Gratitude is not just interpersonal. It is cosmological. You owe the universe, expressed through every person who ever did anything for you, and the appropriate response is a lifetime of performed thankfulness.

Indra Nooyi became CEO of PepsiCo in 2006. On the night she found out, she drove home to tell her family. Her mother sent her out to get milk. When Nooyi returned, her mother told her: “When you enter this house, you’re a wife and a daughter and a daughter-in-law. Leave that crown in the garage.” When she visited India afterward, neighbours came to congratulate not her but her mother for having raised her so well. The achievement was routed back through the family system. Nooyi herself later reflected that she believed a man in her position would have been given more room to simply inhabit his success, that men seem to be allowed to celebrate their work without being constantly reminded of their responsibilities elsewhere. The crown was always in the garage. The question is only whether you put it there yourself or whether someone takes it from you at the door.

What strikes me most about this is the efficiency. The tax does not need enforcers. It does not need explicit instruction. Women police each other, police themselves, pre-emptively perform the gratitude before anyone has asked for it, because the alternative has been made clear enough. We build someone else’s capital before we have even finished counting our own.

The Compounding

The tax is not flat. It is regressive. The more you achieve, the more theatrical the thanks must become, and the more the story of how you got there gets rewritten to foreground everyone except you.

Researchers gave participants an identical case study about a successful venture capitalist. Half read it with the name Heidi. Half read it with the name Howard. Howard was respected and well-liked. Heidi was rated as equally competent but significantly less likeable. She was selfish, political, not someone you’d want to work with. The achievements were identical. The feedback was not. What this study captures is not just bias against women but the specific mechanism of the tax: success in a woman reads as something taken, not earned. And something taken requires justification. The justification is gratitude.

Studies also find that among high-achieving women, feelings of fraudulence do not diminish with success. Sixty-three percent of female executives report grappling with imposter syndrome, and crucially, the feeling grows with the achievement. The higher you go, the more convinced you become that you have somehow ended up somewhere you don’t belong, that the room will figure it out eventually, that the appropriate response to being in the room at all is a kind of permanent, low-grade apology enacted through visible gratitude. Imposter syndrome, ultimately, is the psychological interior of the gratitude tax.

I have a platform. A large one, built across fifteen years of sitting alone and writing things and putting them into the world and doing it again and again, through the years when no one was reading and the years when a few people were and the years when it finally became something with a shape and a name and a following. I built it the way you build anything- slowly, through accumulated labour, through countless unpaid hours, through the discipline of showing up when it felt pointless. And then a point came when the platform opened doors, when it became a reason for people to want to work with me, to offer me things, to take my calls.

And the thing I have noticed is the implication that follows me into those rooms. The suggestion that the opportunity is a product of the platform and the platform is a product of luck, and therefore I should be, fundamentally, grateful. That I am an influencer who “gets opportunities” because of her following, as though the following descended from the sky fully formed, as though fifteen years of labour produced it through some passive, ambient process that required nothing of me. As though I happened to an audience rather than built one.

A man with an equivalent platform would be called a founder. He would be described as having built something, as having identified a gap, as having executed with vision. The platform would be evidence of his capability. For me, it is reframed as circumstance, something I was handed, or fell into, or only benefited from. And because it is circumstance rather than achievement, the appropriate response is gratitude. To whom? To the algorithm, I suppose. To the audience that chose to show up. To the universe that was kind.

This reframing is not accidental. It is the compounding of the tax at work: take a woman’s achievement, locate the luck within it (because luck exists in every achievement, including men’s) and then elevate the luck until it becomes the primary explanation. She didn’t build the audience. The audience found her. She didn’t earn the opportunity. The opportunity opened up. She didn’t write the book that got published. She had a platform that made the book publishable. In each case, the woman is subtracted from the story of her own success, and a benefactor (circumstance, timing, luck, the kindness of others) is installed in her place. And then, naturally, she should be grateful to the benefactor.

The compounding means there is no level at which the tax stops being collected. A study tracking women across 103 countries found that 87% reported being penalised for their achievements at work. Not despite them, but because of them. The Tallest Poppy Study called it by its folk name: tall poppy syndrome, the cultural impulse to cut down whoever grows too visibly. It is not that women are punished for succeeding. It is that they are punished for succeeding without sufficient acknowledgment that they had help. The poppy is not cut for being tall. It is cut for appearing not to have noticed how much water it was given.

When Women Refused

In May 2019, the actress Constance Wu learned that Fresh Off the Boat, a show she had been the lead of for five seasons, a show that had made her career, had been renewed for a sixth. She tweeted her frustration. Not at the show, not at the cast, not at anyone in particular, just a flicker of disappointment that the renewal would interfere with another project she had been hoping to pursue. The internet responded as though she had committed an act of violence. She was called ungrateful, a diva, a disgrace to Asian American representation. She was told she should be thanking the show on her knees. She was told she didn’t deserve what she had. What the public did not know, and what Wu revealed years later in her memoir, was that she had been sexually harassed on set by a senior producer for years. The tweet was not ingratitude. It was an eruption from someone who had been performing gratitude for a workplace that had been actively harming her. Constance Wu attempted suicide in the aftermath of the backlash. She retreated from public life for three years. She later wrote: the message she received, with total clarity, was that she had not been grateful enough for the opportunity to be abused.

Anne Hathaway won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013 and became, almost simultaneously, the subject of a coordinated cultural hatred so intense it was given a name: Hathahate. Her crime was not ingratitude in the traditional sense. It was enthusiasm. She was too visibly delighted by her own success, too earnest in her acceptance speeches, too transparently pleased to be there. She prepared for her speeches, which was reported as evidence of calculation, inauthenticity, trying too hard. When she tried to be warmer and less polished, she was accused of performing warmth. When she was polished, she was accused of being cold. There was no version of publicly inhabiting her own achievement that was permitted. Roles dried up. She later reflected that she had spent years believing the hatred was about something she had done, something fixable, some miscalibration in her public presentation. It wasn’t. It was about the fact that she had not seemed sufficiently surprised to have won. She had not made the face.

Katherine Heigl had the temerity, in 2008, to publicly observe that the film Knocked Up was “a little sexist.” She also withdrew herself from Emmy consideration that year because she felt the writing had not given her enough to work with. It was an opinion that, coming from a man, would have been called professional standards. Coming from her, it became the founding document of a reputation. “Difficult.” “Ungrateful.” “Not a team player.” The escalation, as she later described it, was swift and total: a few candid opinions became ingratitude, ingratitude became difficulty, difficulty became unprofessionalism, and unprofessionalism became un-hireable. She was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood for the better part of a decade. Her co-star Ellen Pompeo vindicated her publicly in 2022: Heigl had been right, Pompeo said, and if she had said the same things today, she would have been celebrated as a pioneer. She was simply ahead of the moment. The tax, when Heigl refused to pay it, was collected with interest.

The most recent controlled experiment in this space is Rachel Zegler versus Jacob Elordi. Both made dismissive comments about franchise films that had launched their careers. Comments that, in substance, were essentially identical. Elordi called the Kissing Booth films “ridiculous” and said openly that he had not wanted to make them. The response was warm: he was praised for his honesty, his self-awareness, his willingness to evolve beyond his early work. Zegler made similar comments about the original Snow White and was savaged. Ungrateful. Disrespectful. Did she not understand what the role had done for her? Same behaviour. Same basic sentiment. The gender changed and the verdict reversed. A man who owns his success completely, including the parts he doesn’t like, is admired for it. A woman who does the same is punished for it.

I want to include Kangana Ranaut here, and I want to be transparent about something first: I find her politics genuinely repugnant. When Ranaut called Karan Johar the flag-bearer of nepotism on national television in 2017, the backlash that followed was not primarily about what she said, which was, by most reckonings, accurate. It was about the fact that she said it at all. That she, an outsider from Bhambla, Himachal Pradesh, someone who had clawed her way into an industry that had not wanted her, would sit across from one of its most powerful gatekeepers and refuse to perform the gratitude that her presence in that room required. She did not make the face. She was tone-policed, accent-policed, talked over, and dismissed. The Wire noted at the time that much of the harshest criticism came from women within the industry, women who had paid their own version of the tax and found her refusal to pay it threatening. That is the efficiency of the system. It does not even need men to enforce it.

What connects all of these women is not ingratitude. Not one of them was actually ungrateful. What connects them is a single moment of failing to perform thankfulness at the required register. And in each case, the response was the same: not criticism of the specific thing they said, but a totalising verdict on their character. Difficult. Ungrateful. Got above herself. Forgot where she came from. The language is always the same because the offence is always the same. They kept the story of their own success for themselves. And the tax, when you don’t pay it voluntarily, is collected by force.

The Book Launch, The Acknowledgements, The Platform I Built

My book comes out in April. I have been writing it, in some form, for years, and in its current form, the form that has a cover and a publisher and a launch date and a ten-city tour, for the better part of two years. It is a book about Indian women and the systems that constrain them. It is, in the way that all honest books are, also a book about me.

At some point in the writing process, I had to write the acknowledgements. This is, in theory, a simple task: thank the people who helped you make the thing. In practice, writing acknowledgements as a woman with a public platform and a history of saying what I think is an exercise in extraordinary complexity. Because the acknowledgements will be read. Not warmly, necessarily, but carefully, by people looking for evidence of one thing or another. Who did she thank? How effusively? Did she thank the right people? Did she seem grateful enough, or too grateful, or grateful in the wrong direction? The acknowledgements are, in miniature, the tax. A public ledger of your debts, calibrated for an audience that will audit them.

I wrote mine knowing they would be audited. I wrote them carefully and honestly and with real feeling for the people in them, but and I also wrote them with one eye on the performance, which is to say I wrote them as a woman who has learned what happens when you leave something out, or phrase something wrong, or seem insufficiently moved by your own good fortune. The real gratitude and the performed gratitude sat next to each other in the same document, and I could not always tell which was which. That is perhaps the most corrosive thing the tax does: it contaminates the genuine feeling. You cannot always find the border between what you actually feel and what you have learned to perform, because you have been performing it for long enough that the performance has shaped the feeling.

The launch circuit is its own version of this. There is a mode I go into, and I can feel it activating like a gear shift, when I am in public-facing book-launch mode. I become warmer, more accessible, more visibly moved by things. I perform enthusiasm at a register I don’t always feel. I thank interviewers for having me, thank audiences for coming, thank booksellers for stocking it, and thank the whole apparatus of literary culture for existing in a way that allowed my book to enter it. This is, partly, genuine. I am genuinely glad. But it is also partly the tax, the understanding that a woman launching her first book must be visibly grateful for the privilege of being taken seriously, must not seem to have expected this, must make the face.

The implication (and it is always an implication, always deniable, always wrapped in something that sounds like a compliment) is that I should be grateful. That the book exists because I got lucky with an audience, and the audience was generous enough to make me publishable, and therefore the appropriate response is a kind of permanent thankfulness to the ecosystem that produced the opportunity. I should be grateful to my followers. Grateful to the algorithm. Grateful to the moment. Grateful to everyone except myself, because myself is not a comfortable place for a woman’s success to live.

I am tired of being grateful for things I built.

What It Would Mean to Simply Receive

I am not arguing for ingratitude. The absence of performed thankfulness is not the answer any more than performed thankfulness is. What I am arguing for is the right to receive as if you were always going to.

This is a version of receiving that men do, largely without thinking about it. Taking the room. Sitting down fully in the chair. Not scanning immediately for who to acknowledge, not pre-emptively softening the fact of your success with visible humility, not performing surprise at your own arrival. Simply being there, as though there was where you were always headed, as though the thing you earned was always going to be earned by you. This is not arrogance. It is, I think, the appropriate relationship to your own work. You did the thing. The thing produced a result. You are now in the room the result opened up. You belong here. You were always going to be here.

Women are trained out of this relationship so young and so thoroughly that reclaiming it feels like arrogance even when it is not. The feeling of entitlement to your own achievements has been so thoroughly associated with bad women, difficult women, women who forgot their place, that many of us have learned to experience our own success as a kind of gift rather than a result. And gifts require thank-you notes. Results do not.

The philosopher David Graeber, writing about debt, made an observation that I have not been able to shake: gratitude, unlike financial debt, can never be quantified or discharged. A financial debt has a number attached to it. You can pay it off. You know when you’re done. Gratitude has no such mechanism. It is open-ended in the way that ehsaan is open-ended — it creates a permanent relationship of obligation that the receiver can never fully exit. And this is, he argued, one of the primary mechanisms through which hierarchies reproduce themselves: not through force, but through the cultivation of debts that can never be repaid, that keep the debtor in a permanent posture of deference toward the creditor. The tax does not just cost you something in the moment of paying it. It keeps you in debt. It is designed to.

What would it mean, then, to simply receive? Not to be ungrateful, but to feel gratitude on your own terms, without converting it into a public performance calibrated for an audience that is checking to make sure you haven’t gotten too big for yourself? To write the acknowledgements from the inside rather than from the outside? To walk into the room you earned and rearrange the furniture, just a little, just to see what it feels like to be someone whose arrival is the point?

I think it would feel frightening for a while. I think it would feel like arrogance, because we have been taught that a woman who receives without performing gratitude is arrogant. I think it would feel like ingratitude, even when it isn’t. I think there would be a period of recalibration between the thank you that comes from inside and the thank you that comes from fear.

But I think, on the other side of that recalibration, there is something that has been missing from every public success I have watched women navigate and every public success I have navigated myself: the simple experience of having earned something and knowing it.

The book comes out in April. I wrote it. I am not surprised it exists. I am not overwhelmed by my own good fortune. I am not, most of all, grateful to anyone for the fact that it is real.

I am glad. That’s mine. The rest can wait.