I'll make a controversial observation, but it's worthy of discussion.

If you're a woman of average or better looks, you have one under-spoken superpower. Namely, how you interact with other men will have a huge effect on their social status. I'm not talking about overt flirtation (don't do it) or office relationships (avoid, avoid, avoid). I'm talking about more subtle stuff, like who a woman smiles at, who she initiates conversations with, and what her body language is toward various people. This will have huge ripple effects on the male status hierarchy. Much of the reason why men tend to seem "afraid of" women in the office is that they're afraid she'll judge him lowly and send out "loser signals" about him, bringing him down a notch or two. Since everything that happens at most workplaces (especially cliquish startups, so don't give me this "meritocratic" bullshit) is really about social status-- "performance" is a myth made up to justify firings and scare the mediocre-- this is huge.

Overtly flirting with the men in the office will destroy a woman's reputation, for sure. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the subtle fact that, among groups of people, women have the capability to exert a disproportionate influence on the status ordering. In fact, the best way to use this is to do exactly what a young man would do: be nice to everyone, reach out and try to make allies, seek mentors... but also take a small comfort in the fact that men have an added incentive to be nice to you-- you have a disproportionate effect on their image, and they want to be seen with you.

For example, a 23-year-old with 6 months on the job comes into the office of a powerful person (MD in banking, Partner in a law firm) and says that (s/)he is bored with the work that (s/)he is getting. If male, he's just another entitled fuck looking for an advantage. The response usually is: go away, pay your dues, and come back in 7 years after you've proven yourself (if I haven't fired you before that). That's because humans have a visceral hatred of low-status males, and in the workplace, men in the youngest 15% are almost always of low status (hence, they get the shittiest work).

If the 23-year-old is female, this 45-year-old executive might realize that having a 23-year-old woman come into his office once a week might give him a younger, "cooler" image and prevent him from getting "managed out" (read: fired) for being "resistant to change" (read: old). So he might give her the kind of work that most people have to wait a few years to have a crack at.

Again, she's not flirting with him, or compromising herself in any way. She's doing exactly what a man would do if he had the courage: going into a powerful person's office and asking for better work.

It doesn't always happen this way, but it can. Career advancement is about stringing together a large number of high-impact, low-probability prospects (with enough parallelism that the likelihood of some success becomes high) and waiting for one to hit. The "superpower" that an attractive woman has doesn't turn the low probability into a high one; it makes it slightly less low.

I'm not saying life is fair and, on the whole, women almost certainly have to deal with more bullshit than men. It's wrong that women's looks are taken to matter so much. It's wrong that people are huge dicks to women about aging. Some of the "old lady" comments I heard when Clinton was running for President in 2008 made me want to vomit.

Men have a huge and unfair advantage after 32, which is that they can have children with their careers interrupted, and that their social status (being abysmal, in the workplace, at 22-24) peaks around 40-50. Men can (and are expected to) work through child-rearing, while for it to make sense for a woman to keep working after having children, she has to make about 2.5 times the average income (to hire help, day care, etc.) On the other hand, women have a huge advantage from 22 to 32, which is that they have the subtle but potent ability to determine who's "cool", and if they're aware of how to use it, they can speed up their careers. And given the heaping plate of bullshit that society gives women once they get older (and it starts in the 30s) they pretty much have to use this advantage while it's there.