When qualified women resist the leader label

🥳🥳 International Woman’s Day is almost here 🥳🥳!

With this in mind, I want to highlight female leadership and how important all the messaging and campaigns (see recent one from bol.com ) still is. According to the recent article “When qualified women resist the leader label”, published by MIT Sloan Management, 43% of women aspire to reach top management in the first two years of their careers versus 34% of men. After these two years, “the percentage of aspiring women drops to 16% whereas it holds steady at 34% for men.”

Quite jaw dropping right?

There are a number of factors contributing to this drop, but a factor that was surprising to me was: “whether women are comfortable seeing themselves as leaders.” Studies showed that women ARE comfortable describing themselves with the attributes of a leader, but NOT using “the leader label”. This has consequences on how they describe themselves within the company or even here on LinkedIn. Which leads to being overlooked for higher lever positions.

Cunningham, Ashford and Sonday propose very practical strategies to both organisations and individuals to bridge this gap

🌟Harness the power of narratives.

🌟Focus on leadership behaviours, not labels! → very critical one if you ask me…

🌟Provide external validation.

🌟Redefine leadership to include service-oriented behaviors.

Since this IS a celebration post I want to highlight the 3️⃣ point and provide some external validation to the exceptional female leaders that are in my life or I’ve met in the past year. I always get so excited meeting and talking to smart women doing important work in so many disciplines. So here’s to you all 🥂 and keep up being your fabulous selves! 🤩