Do we expect more from women in leadership?

Women are more prone to think long term, lead with collaboration and empathy and act in the interests of others, rather than just with themselves in mind. This is what a wealth of research shows: many female leaders are showing innovative and trust-based leadership styles, creating high-performing, functional, fair and sustainable societies and organisations. Today, in the face of wars, the climate crisis and continuing inequalities experienced across the world, it is therefore imperative that we ask ourselves if history would have unfolded in the same way if power had been held by both women and men.

The traits female leaders bring to the table are desperately needed to transform how we lead and address today’s global challenges. This calls for integrating such traits into the leadership skillset of all leaders, an effort that needs to start in the classrooms all the way up to the c-suite, where the occupants are primarily men and homogenous teams prevail.

Double standards

Women face complex challenges on their way up the career ladder. To name a few, they need to work harder to get to an executive position compared to men and throughout this journey, women are four times as likely as men to say they have been treated as incompetent or faced with scrutiny because of their gender, according to 2024 research from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org.

Compared to men, women also tend to feel more isolated at work, get passed over for promotions, receive less support by senior leaders, experience repeated gender-based microaggressions and of course for equal work, they don’t receive equal pay for equal work, as figures from the Pew Research Centre have demonstrated. These challenges add on to the expectations women face outside the office, where are expected to spend 2.3 hours more than men per day on care and domestic work by 2050, according to a 2023 report for UN Women.

By having to prove their worth despite their qualifications, while juggling career and care work, women are held de facto to higher standards than men. Higher standards that also now apply to leadership.

As companies focus on transforming workplaces for the better, female leaders are taking on the role of delivering change – the kind of change that requires empathy, collaboration and long-term thinking to be transformed into reality and this is why it’s increasingly falling under the domain of “female leadership”.

Many of those in charge of sustainability, impact, diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), human resources or change management are women. We count on them to fix what we have done wrong to date – yet, when it comes to allocating real power, such as that pertaining to the role of CEO, we continue promoting men without requiring a shift in their values and attitudes towards leadership. This is not a new pattern, as Tawakkol Karman, leader of the 2011 revolution in Yemen and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, explained during our conversation for my book Leading Our Way. Borrowing Karman’s words, “women make great leaders in the transformation period, in revolutions. But when the situation becomes stable again, men hijack their power... how many times did we hear them say: “no – you don’t have the experience, you don’t know how to govern, how these things work. It’s a man’s job”?”

This trend is now emerging in our workplaces, creating a double trap. Not only do women navigate unrealistic expectations on their way up but, once at the top, they are expected to bring the leadership traits our workplaces are missing and are once more held to higher standards than their male counterparts, yet often without the role, power or salary recognition.

Rethinking what leadership looks and acts like

The key to reverting this trend is to stop seeing these traits as exclusively feminine. Yes, because of nature and nurture, women tend to show them more explicitly.  Let’s be inspired and learn from them, but let’s also ensure that we make these traits an integral part of the leadership skillset for all and that we expect leaders of all genders to be inclusive. The duty and responsibility of redefining what leadership looks and acts like must be a shared one, leveraging diversity to make everyone better and not to deepen existing double standards.

How can such a shift happen?

Educate boys more like girls

Stereotypes are holding back all genders. Girls are often taught to be caring and kind, boys to be competitive and confident. In Leading Our Way, activist and journalist Gloria Steinem explored how we started educating girls more like boys and how this reflects in today’s workforce. Female leaders, to emerge, often adopt authoritative and competitive traits from the dominant leadership style. But is this the end result we want? No. If we want to see change, we must instead educate boys more like girls by teaching everyone to be relational, collaborative, kind and emphasising that these are strengths, not weaknesses. That’s when parity will materialise and different models of leadership will emerge.

Rethinking leadership courses

During my time at Harvard, I witnessed a variety of approaches to teaching leadership and management. While many focused on maximising performance, personal advancement and profit, far too few focused on people, our place in this world and values. Education is our best chance to instil this mentality shift in future leaders, so let’s use it. Rather than teaching competitiveness, let’s teach strategies to maximise results through collaboration; rather than teaching assertiveness, let’s teach how to listen; rather than teaching decisiveness, let’s teach how to share doubts and vulnerabilities to drive better decision-making; rather than teaching how to centralise power, let’s teach how to share power and build collective and not egoistic leadership.

Revamping company evaluation criteria

Still too often, when we look at companies’ appraisal criteria, they evaluate leadership based on performance, competitiveness, capacity to centralise decision-making and ease with exercising power over others. Without a deep rethink of such criteria, we will fail in enabling new leadership models. Redefining performance as well as staff retention and satisfaction, leadership development of others and the creation of a culture of inclusivity are crucial steps in this direction.

New role models for a new vision of leadership

In the office, at school, in MBAs, on TV or on social media, the leaders we see are often the “old-types” – those who excel for profit and advancing their interests, rather than for not for impact and solving global challenges. Portraying a revised model of leadership is necessary if we want to give today’s youth a fair shot at embedding such values. To do this we must inspire the leaders of today and tomorrow to be changemakers, questioning the dominant leadership style and finding the grit and vision to lead in their own way.