The Tragedy of Shiv Roy

This is the tragedy of Shiv Roy. “A young woman with no experience,” as her father, Logan (Brian Cox), puts it in season two. “A woman… that’s a minus,” Shiv bites. “Of course it’s a minus,” her father shouts. “I didn’t make the fucking world!”

But he made her world: one in which she was forced to compete, on an unequal playing field, with her brothers, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin), for power, love and attention. As the only woman in the Roy family circus, Shiv found that she was never enough: not a good enough wife, a good enough sister, a good enough daughter, a good enough liberal, good enough to be a mother, good enough to run the company.

And for all the Roys’ billions, PJs, and penthouses, it felt horribly familiar at times, because this is what happens to women in workplaces. Shiv was never going to “win,” because she’s one of us. Not even status, money, and power offer full protection from the patriarchy.

“It’s only your teats that give you any value,” Kendall says after Shiv rejects his plan to take down their father. “You’re still seen as a token woman.” And in the end, she was just another woman in a man’s world—sidelined, ignored, dismissed as “hysterical” and “too emotional” when she tried to express an opinion. She could have been the most qualified, smartest woman in America, but she was always going to lose. How could she ever be empowered when the gilded cage in which her ambition fluttered was built by a misogynistic man upon misogynistic values, into which she had been born?

It seems naive now to have ever doubted it. After all, this is the woman whose own husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), tracked her menstrual cycle in the hopes of impregnating her as an insurance policy against his own imprisonment. The woman who was treated differently to her brothers by powerful men. “If I hug you, will I get a lawsuit?” asked creepy Scandi tech bro Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), when the siblings arrived at his Norwegian compound to do a deal. Whose emotional journey remained largely unknowable to us, whether through her own fear of appearing too vulnerable, or because she could only ever be two-dimensional – defined by the men in whose orbit she had to operate. Even her family nickname was “Pinky” – a generous interpretation, counting on your fingers, might be that Shiv was Logan’s fourth child. A blunter reading was always the obviously gendered one.