Something happens to a lot of women around midlife. It’s not just the hot flushes and disrupted sleep, although those are real enough.

It’s something more subtle, and in many ways, more interesting.

Their hunger for approval begins to loosen its grip. Their willingness to say things out loud increases.

And their tolerance for performing a version of themselves designed to keep other people comfortable starts, at last, to drop.

I’ve watched this happen in women I admire. I’ve felt it in myself.

What strikes me every time is that the woman herself hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that she has stopped concealing essential parts of herself.

Just when women start becoming invisible in society’s eyes, she is making herself entirely visible.

Suddenly she is seen as as difficult, blunt, intimidating. In a word: unlikeable.

“I am an unlikeable woman,” wrote Amy Kean, sociologist and author, on LinkedIn last year. I recognised her cheerful defiance immediately.

She now runs an entire conference – the Unlikeable Women Summit – built around that provocation. Unlikeable according to whom?

A man who is decisive is called a leader. A woman who is decisive is called difficult. A man who sets boundaries is focused. A woman who sets them is cold. Same behaviour, different label.

Psychologist Alice Eagly developed what she calls Role Congruity Theory to explain this.

People react negatively when women display behaviours associated with authority and leadership. Not because those behaviours are wrong, but because they violate an expectation about how women are supposed to show up: agreeable first, competent second, warm always.

When women step outside that script, there is a social penalty that researchers call the likeability tax.

The tax isn’t necessarily conscious. Nobody wakes up intending to enforce it. It lives in performance reviews, in who gets interrupted and who doesn’t, in which ideas get credited to their originator and which somehow migrate across the table.

It also doesn’t fall equally on all women. An older woman, a younger woman, a black woman, a queer woman, a woman without children, a woman in a male-dominated field: each encounters the script differently, and for many, the penalties compound.

Unlikeability, in other words, is not distributed evenly.

South Africa gives us a useful frame here. Our Constitution is one of the most progressive in the world. And yet nobody would argue that all citizens experience society equally.

The formal rules changed. The informal expectations, the habits and assumptions written into daily life, are taking considerably longer.

Gender works the same way. We changed many of the official rules, but the unofficial ones are proving more stubborn.

Cindy Gallop, the advertising executive and founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, is one of the more vivid examples of what happens when a woman stops editing herself.

She speaks openly about age, sexuality, ambition, money and power – the subjects society tends to prefer women to discuss quietly, if at all. The reaction she provokes is telling.

People don’t push back because she’s wrong. They push back because she’s unexpected.

Most of us assume that wellbeing comes from being liked. Positive psychology suggests that it comes from living in accordance with your values, acting with agency, showing up as yourself rather than as a performance of yourself.

Being respected, the research suggests, matters more than being liked. And liking yourself may matter more than both.

This means that the midlife shift so many women describe, that loosening of the need for approval, that growing willingness to take up space, isn’t a personality change at all. It’s closer to an arrival.

Decades of social conditioning begin to lose their authority. What other people think starts to matter less than what you actually think.

In short, the performance winds down, and what remains is simply the person who was always there.

And that means that in all likelihood, the unlikeable woman isn’t a problem to be fixed. Rather, she’s a signal that an old script is being challenged, that someone has stopped making herself smaller to fit into spaces that were never designed to hold her.

The opposite of unlikeable isn’t lovable, it’s compliant. Let’s think about that as South Africa marks Women’s Month.

Let’s acknowledge the women who are in the middle of stopping their performance. The ones discovering that the discomfort of being called difficult is considerably more bearable than the exhaustion of being endlessly agreeable.

The ones learning, perhaps for the first time, that taking up space was never the problem. It was always the point.