According to a recently published report in McKinsey on Women in the Workplace (2024), men continue to significantly outnumber women at the manager level, making it difficult for companies to support sustained progress at more senior levels like the C-Suite.

In a bizarre twist, research tells us that Organisations with women in leadership positions are more likely to be innovative and to have improved firm performance (Joecks et al., 2023; Sieweke et al., 2023).

How do we make changes to shift away from this illogical incongruity in order to bask in fulfilling our potential?

What are some practices we can put into place to evolve our future and current space for Women in Leadership?

This episode features references to:

- "Which organisational context factors help women to obtain and retain leadership positions in the 21st century?" (Gierke, Schlamp & Gerpott, 2024) - "Validation and Measurement Invariance of the German and Spanish Gender Bias Scale for Women Leaders" (Algner, Fay & Lorenz, 2024)

- Gender Bias Scale for Women Leaders by Amy Diehl, PhD

- World Economic Forum - Global Gender Gap Report 2022 - "How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership" (Zheng, Kark & Meister, 2018) - Guardian article on Eindhoven University of Technology

- A meta-analysis on gender and leadership with findings on agentic traits (Bandura et al., 2018)

- The Authenticity Paradox (Ibarra, 2015)

Don't worry, there is no management guru snake oil here. This is a broad topic with many facets. It also turns out it's a topic rife with paradox. Not a great surprise, I will say. I imagine this is not the final episode I shall create on Women in Leadership.

Good luck out there, Professionals!

p.s. 1943 Guide to Hiring Women

Substack version