Female Leadership

“She’s so resilient” Translation: She’s overworked but expected to keep going. When you’re told to be more resilient It is often just code for quietly burning you out. We celebrate resilience as a badge of honour: – “He’s so resilient!” – “Our team powers through anything!” But let’s unpack what that actually means: ❌ Late nights ❌ Overloaded schedules ❌ Zero time to breathe And when the cracks show? The solution is almost always, “Be more resilient”. Translation: Work harder → Bounce back faster → It’s on YOU. But when resilience becomes the answer to everything, we’re quietly burning people out – and calling it growth. When companies talk about resilience, this is what they should mean: ✅ Processes that don’t require heroics ✅ Workloads that people can sustain over time ✅ Rest and recovery as part of high-performance If you’re leading a team, ask yourself: – Have you created a sustainable working environment? – Or are you primarily rewarding endurance? The difference matters. Because resilience shouldn’t be about enduring the brink of burnout. Let’s not push people to the edge. And then call it resilience when they don’t fall off. What’s your take on this? __ 📌 I'm Mostyn Wilson, former KPMG Partner and Head of People. Follow me to achieve your ambitions – without burning out.

📄 Women’s Leadership — What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Missing I invite you to read this new review co-authored by Ana María Muñoz Boudet, Francesca Bramucci , and Mariana Viollaz that examines policies to promote women’s leadership. Here are the takeaways for practitioners, governments, and development partners: 🔍 Main Findings 1. Women remain underrepresented in leadership across politics, business, and community institutions due to barriers in capabilities, motivation, and opportunity. 2. Quotas do not always yield substantive influence (i.e. real decision-making power). 3. Role models can inspire women and shift norms. Training, mentorship, and capacity-building often boost advancement potential, yet less clearly move women into top leadership positions. Success of organizational reforms and anti-discrimination policies depends on leadership buy-in and norm change. 4. Poorly designed interventions can provoke backlash, tokenism, or reinforce stereotypes. And without complementary supports—networks, legitimacy, access to resources—women leaders may struggle to influence outcomes meaningfully. 💡 Recommendations (and Reflections) • Adopt multidimensional strategies: To promote women’s leadership at scale, we must tackle multiple barriers—capabilities, motivation, and opportunity—simultaneously. • Design quotas in alignment with meritocracy and apply them with accountability and support systems. • Support role models and narrative change to boost women’s aspirations and shift norms. • Reorient training toward leadership outcomes: Align capacity-building with the “last mile” challenges women face stepping into top roles—navigating power dynamics, influencing strategy, leading teams. • Strengthen institutional architecture: Incentivize equal opportunities for women in leadership pipelines, evaluation and promotion systems. • Monitor “substantive representation” beyond counting women in leadership roles to assessing whether those roles yield real influence and improved outcomes. This paper resonates with my experience: • It confirms what I have observed: engaging women as leaders is not just about opening doors, but transforming systems so those roles are meaningful. • It underscores the importance of pairing structural reforms (laws, quotas) with norm change, institutional incentives, mentoring, and support. • It reminds us to evaluate substance and impact, not only representation. How do outcomes change when women participate in decision making? Let’s design leadership ecosystems that empower women not only to lead, but to shape agendas and drive better outcomes - and let’s measure the impact. 🔗 Read the full paper: Promoting Women’s Leadership: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Missing https://lnkd.in/dn-J4P27 #GenderEquality #WomenLeadership #WorldBank

As International Women’s Day nears, we’ll see the usual corporate gestures—empowerment panels, social media campaigns, and carefully curated success stories. But let’s be honest: these feel-good initiatives rarely change what actually holds women back at work on the daily basis. Instead, I suggest focusing on something concrete, something I’ve seen have the biggest impact in my work with teams: the unspoken dynamics that shape psychological safety. 🚨Because psychological safety is not the same for everyone. Psychological safety is often defined as a shared belief that one can take risks without fear of negative consequences. But let’s unpack that—who actually feels safe enough to take those risks? 🔹 Speaking up costs more for women Confidence isn’t the issue—consequences are. Women learn early that being too direct can backfire. Assertiveness can be read as aggression, while careful phrasing can make them seem uncertain. Over time, this calculation becomes second nature: Is this worth the risk? 🔹 Mistakes are stickier When men fail, it’s seen as part of leadership growth. When women fail, it often reinforces lingering doubts about their competence. This means that women aren’t more risk-averse by nature—they’re just more aware of the cost. 🔹 Inclusion isn’t just about presence Being at the table doesn’t mean having an equal voice. Women often find themselves in a credibility loop—having to repeatedly prove their expertise before their ideas carry weight. Meanwhile, those who fit the traditional leadership mold are often trusted by default. 🔹 Emotional labor is the silent career detour Women in teams do an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes work—mediating conflicts, softening feedback, ensuring inclusion. The problem? This work isn’t visible in performance reviews or leadership selection criteria. It’s expected, but not rewarded. What companies can do beyond IWD symbolism: ✅ Stop measuring "confidence"—start measuring credibility gaps If some team members always need to “prove it” while others are trusted instantly, you have a credibility gap, not a confidence issue. Fix how ideas get heard, not how women present them. ✅ Make failure a learning moment for everyone Audit how mistakes are handled in your team. Are men encouraged to take bold moves while women are advised to be more careful? Change the narrative around risk. ✅ Track & reward emotional labor If women are consistently mentoring, resolving conflicts, or ensuring inclusion, this isn’t just “being helpful”—it’s leadership. Make it visible, valued, and part of promotion criteria. 💥 This IWD, let’s skip the celebration and start the correction. If your company is serious about making psychological safety equal for everyone, let’s do the real work. 📅 I’m now booking IWD sessions focused on improving team dynamics and creating workplaces where women don’t just survive, but thrive. Book your spot and let’s turn good intentions into lasting impact.

Last week, I facilitated a discussion at Columbia University for their Women’s Leadership Network and one of the readings I assigned the participants was about the glass cliff and now one week later we have a real-world example of the glass cliff playing out. The glass cliff is the phenomenon that occurs when women (often from racially and ethnically marginalized backgrounds) are able to ascend to leadership positions when the corporation is in turmoil. Many women are tapped to stepped in when a company is mired in controversy. What is happening right now at #Boeing is the perfect example of this. Why are they now elevating longtime female exec (Stephanie Pope) as their new CEO at a time when they are making headlines for all their issues and controversy? 🤔🧐 When the women that are elevated into these leadership positions inevitably fail, people use this as proof of their incapability and incompetence + further evidence of why #DEI “doesn’t work.” We need to recognize this corporate trap and call it out whenever we see it happening because it harms us all. Don’t hire us when your company is in trouble. Allow us to lead and trust us to lead when the company is prosperous and watch how we magnify your organization to new heights. #WomensHistoryMonth

I once got feedback that I was “intimidating.” I took it to heart. I spent the next few years trying to be as approachable, warm, and agreeable as I could be. I assumed this was a character flaw that I needed to fix. But years later, I realized something: this feedback wasn’t about me. It was about the system - one that judges women more harshly and polices their personalities more than their performance. And the numbers back this up. 👇🏽 🎯 Women are 7x more likely to receive negative personality-based feedback than men. 🎯 56% of women have been called "unlikeable" in reviews (vs. 16% of men). 🎯 Harvard Business Review found that 76% of “aggressive” labels in one company’s reviews were given to women (vs. 24% to men). This Is the Leadership Double Bind: Speak up? You’re “too aggressive.” Stay quiet? You “lack confidence.” Show ambition? You’re “unlikeable.” Ask for a promotion? You’re “too pushy.” And here’s the kicker - it’s worst for high-performing women. This is why women... ↳  Hesitate to showcase ambition. ↳  Are reluctant to ask for opportunities. ↳  Are leaving workplaces faster than others. So, what can we do? Here are 3 ways we can start changing this narrative today: ✅ Check your language. Is the feedback about personality or performance? If you wouldn’t give the same critique to a man, please reconsider. ✅ Challenge vague feedback. “You need to be more confident” isn’t actionable. Women deserve the same clear, growth-oriented feedback as men. ✅ Support women’s ambition. If certain leadership traits (ex. being assertive) are seen as strengths in men, they should be seen as strengths in women too. Have you ever received unfair feedback? What’s one piece of feedback you’ve had to unlearn? 👇🏽 ♻️ Please share to help end unfair feedback. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor (She/Her) for more insights on conscious leadership. Source: Textio 'Language Bias in Feedback' Study, 2023 & 2024 #EndUnFairFeedback #IWD2025

Most negotiation advice is written for men. Here's what works for women. Last week in Marrakech, I led a session on negotiation and tested every principle in the souks, where nothing is fixed and every price is a dialogue. If you want to understand negotiation as a living practice, you watch it unfold a thousand times a day in those narrow alleyways. Most advice says to anchor high and never move first. That logic, built for dominance, teaches women to defend positions before understanding what's on the table. The result is predictable: assertiveness gets labeled aggression, and we miss the strategic, relational approach that actually works; at work, at home, anywhere two people are trying to find common ground. Women are socialized to gather information, read context, and ask about others' needs before our own. The backlash for being too direct has forced us to master this. We learn more in five minutes of inquiry than in thirty minutes of persuasion. We've been taught to do this everywhere except at the negotiation table. The shift is simple. Start your next negotiation with curiosity. Ask what matters most to the other side before defending your position. Diagnostic questions reveal what people truly want, position you as collaborative rather than adversarial, and uncover options neither party had considered. I saw it work last week. Ask first. Listen longer. Shape agreements with information, not assumptions. I'll share the specific moves in future posts. For now, try one genuine diagnostic question before you state your position in your next negotiation. See what you learn.

Women aren’t pulling back because they’ve lost ambition. I'm sick of this flattened and false narrative. They’re pulling back because the cost of progression has become too high. The data is consistent across McKinsey & Company, Deloitte and Women's Agenda: women remain deeply committed to their careers, yet fewer are aspiring to senior roles. Not due to a lack of drive, but because burnout, inflexibility and invisible loads are eroding capacity. In this article, I unpack why the so-called ambition gap is actually a wellbeing gap in disguise. We’re seeing women micro-shift, quietly adapting how, when and where they work, to survive systems that haven’t evolved to reflect real lives. And when those systems refuse to bend (aka rigid Return to Office mandates), women don’t opt out of work. They opt out of unsustainable design. This isn’t a resilience problem. It’s a system design problem. If organisations want to retain women and grow female leadership, the solution isn’t more wellbeing initiatives layered onto broken structures. It’s flexibility within a clear framework, digital guardrails, and a shift from hours logged to outcomes delivered. Women don’t need fixing. Work does. Read the full piece below, and if this resonates, this is the exact conversation I go deeper into in my 2026 IWD keynote Powered-Up Women: Rebalancing Invisible Loads. #FutureOfWork #WomenAtWork #Leadership #WorkplaceFlexibility #WellbeingAtWork #IWD2026

A highly qualified woman sat across from me yesterday.   Her resume showed 15 years of C-suite experience. Multiple awards. Industry recognition.   Yet she spoke about her success like it was pure luck.   SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT of female executives experience this same phenomenon.   I see it daily through my work with thousands of women leaders. They achieve remarkable success but internally believe they fooled everyone.   Some call it imposter syndrome. I call it a STRUCTURAL PROBLEM.   Let me explain...   When less than 5% of major companies have gender-balanced leadership, women question whether they belong.   My first board appointment taught me this hard truth.   I walked into that boardroom convinced I would say something ridiculous. Everyone seemed so confident.   But confidence plays tricks on us.   Perfect knowledge never exists. Leadership requires:   • Recognising what you know • Admitting what you miss • Finding the right answers • Moving forward anyway   Three strategies that transformed my journey:   1. Build your evidence file Document every win, every positive feedback, every successful project. Review it before big meetings. Your brain lies. Evidence speaks truth.   2. Find your circle Connect with other women leaders who understand your experience. The moment you share your doubts, someone else will say "me too."   3. Practice strategic vulnerability Acknowledging areas for growth enhances credibility. Power exists in saying "I'll find out" instead of pretending omniscience.   REALITY CHECK: This impacts business results.   Qualified women: - Decline opportunities - Downplay achievements - Hesitate to negotiate - Withdraw from consideration   Organisations lose valuable talent and perspective.   The solution requires both individual action and systemic change.   We need visible pathways to leadership for women. We need to challenge biased feedback. We need women in leadership positions in meaningful numbers.   Leadership demands courage, not perfect confidence.   The world needs leaders who push past doubt - not because they never experience it, but because they refuse to let it win. https://lnkd.in/gY9G-ibh

I just stepped off stage at the World Economic Forum's World Woman House, and I told a story I don't share often enough. When I was 21, I sat across from an investor to pitch my e-commerce business. I was one of the first three creators in India in my industry. I had built a community of 50,000 young women who trusted me, who read every word I wrote. My pitch was simple: I have the readers. They read everything I say. This business will turn these readers into buying customers. It's a full-proof concept. Here's what the investor said: "But what about scale? You'll be married in three years, have kids a few years after that. A woman's life changes after she gets married in India. You won't be able to handle this much responsibility." In that moment, my confidence broke. My belief broke. I was rewired to think I couldn't take the risk because my social infrastructure as a woman wouldn't allow it. Here's what they got wrong: I built the business anyway. But here's what haunts me: How many women heard that same "no" and didn't build? The data tells the story. The 2025 Forbes Top Creators list shows women make up just 20% of top earners, men 80%. Women aren't less capable of building scale, we're penalized more severely when we try. So what changes this? Three structural shifts: → Capital that stays: Patient capital. First-loss guarantees. Access to Series B and beyond. Flexibility when life happens, because rigid milestones assume rigid lives. → Platforms that don't punish: Revenue models that reward depth and influence, not just reach and virality. Value the creator who drives purchasing decisions for 50,000 people as much as the one with 5 million passive followers. → Care infrastructure as economic policy: Bulletproof childcare systems. Elder care support. Tax credits for caregiving entrepreneurs. Because you can't scale a business on two hours of sleep and a collapsing support system. The creative economy contributes over $2 trillion globally. But it will never reach its full potential until we stop treating women's participation as optional and start treating it as the growth strategy it actually is. #WomenInBusiness #CreativeEconomy #Davos2026 #CapitalAccess