Leave it to The Bear to transparently illustrate how you cannot separate professional development and ending oppression from personal healing. And if you willfully do so, it’s at your own risk.

If you’re not yet a fan of the Fx series or you haven’t caught up on the last season, female leadership figures more prominently in Season 2. Natalie is the reluctant Project Manager for the restaurant’s renovations, transforming The Beef into The Bear. She demonstrates her leadership in some pretty challenging situations including facing virulent sexism and chauvinism.

There is a scene in episode 2 where Fak and Richie are debating (really just fighting) about how to correctly prep an area for painting: to move the employee lockers or to not move the employee lockers. Marcus is playing the role of referee or mediator.

The argument escalates around “calling mom” (aka Natalie) to decide who’s way is “right.”

If you have siblings, you cannot help but recall all the times one of you threatened to “call mom” to get the other sibling in trouble or for her to take your side in a disagreement.

This scene lays bare how our relationships and feelings about our mothers consistently show up in the workplace, in a refreshingly transparent way.

Female leaders are viewed through the lens of “mother.”

Mothers are our first leaders. You learned what female leadership can be by watching your mother. You experienced the effectiveness of her leadership first-hand by how she led in your family. You witnessed your mother navigate sexism and male domination, up close and personal. And in ways that impacted your survival and thriving.

I had an untraditional upbringing in terms of childcare and economic roles, especially for my generation. My papi was the principal caregiver for me and my sisters, while my mom worked outside of the home, was the primary “breadwinner,” and handled all money and finances for our family. It might be tempting to think that I didn’t grow up with sexism. I did.

Sexism isn’t only about my parents’ roles in their heterosexual marriage. (Although the roles they took on certainly reinforced or disrupted sexist ways of thinking and societal biases that devalue female leadership and view females as less preferred than males, if not downright inferior to them.)

Sexism is institutional and my family, all families, are institutions where this oppression showed up.

Workplaces are also institutions.

Unconsciously and sometimes very consciously, female leaders craft our leadership by mimicking or rejecting what we observed or experienced with our mothers.

Many of these decisions to imitate or reject our mothers is rooted in our own unhealed or even unacknowledged anger and discouragement about sexism.

For many, many years I thought the less my life and leadership could look like my own mother’s, the greater chance I would have at not experiencing sexism. As I reflect on our relationship, I think she thought that too. What did that mean for me? A series of decisions to not have my mother’s life—read not have sexism in it.

I refused to learn to cook. I have never married. I didn’t partner with Latino males. I decided not to have children. You see where this is going…

I kept thinking these decisions were the “more liberating” ones, and that somehow I would escape sexism. I didn’t. None of us can “escape” it—we can only work together with male allies to end it.

Not unlike the way society holds mothers to unreasonable and unattainable standards, the same can be said for female leaders.

And no where is this more apparent than in our workplaces.

When I’m in the final stages of interviewing someone for a position on my team, I ask them: what’s your relationship with your mother like? Their answer gives me invaluable information about how I can expect to be treated as their female boss.

How might you answer that question? What connections can you make between your relationship with your mother and your female boss (or past female bosses)?

Through our leadership females are expected to fulfill others’ ideas of who a “good” leader (read “mother”) should be, and judged harshly when we, inevitably, cannot (and will never) measure up.

This view of female leaders is not surprising. In fact, it’s predictable. Just ask any female leader.