Women in management: International women’s day!

International Women’s day is the perfect time to pause and explore women in leadership.

Recent research suggests something surprising:

in some organisations, women are less likely than men to say they want the next promotion.

It would be easy to interpret this as an ambition gap. But that explanation belies the reality.

In conversations with leaders and managers over many years, I’ve seen something different emerging. Many highly capable women are not stepping back because they lack ambition — they are stepping back because they are reassessing the cost of leadership as it is currently structured.

Several factors sit quietly beneath this shift.

1. Leadership and Hidden Health Challenges

Leadership cultures still assume almost constant presenteeism as high commitment!

But many women navigate health realities that organisations rarely acknowledge:

• chronic illness especially reproductive or neurological diseases

• menopause

• autoimmune conditions

• fertility treatment

These issues are often accompanied by a sense of shame and usually involve a fluctuating energy and recovery cycles which makes women express difficulty in expressing that they can present as well on one day and get completely incapacitated on another day.

These are clearly not signs of weakness. They are simply part of human life.

Yet leadership structures rarely allow space for them.

As a result, some women ask a quiet question:

Is the current model of leadership compatible with a sustainable life?

2. The Weight of Invisible Labour

Another factor rarely captured in leadership research is the invisible work many women carry outside the office.

Even in dual-career households, women are still more likely to coordinate:

• family logistics

• caring responsibilities

• emotional labour within families

• support for ageing parents

This work is not always visible in leadership pipelines or performance metrics — but it profoundly shapes how people evaluate the sustainability of senior roles.

For some women, stepping back from traditional leadership is not retreat.

It is a strategic recalibration.

3. Redefining Leadership on Their Own Terms

Perhaps the most interesting development is that many women are not stepping away from leadership entirely.

Instead, they are reshaping how leadership looks.

We see this through:

• portfolio careers

• advisory and board roles

• consulting and entrepreneurship

• fractional leadership roles

These paths allow women to maintain influence while also retaining autonomy, flexibility and alignment with their wider lives.

Leadership, in other words, is not disappearing. It is being redesigned.

4. What Organisations Should Be Asking

If organisations interpret this shift simply as a lack of ambition, they risk missing a much deeper message.

The real question may be:

Does our model of leadership still fit the reality of modern lives?

If talented leaders are opting out, the problem may not lie with the individuals — but with the structures we expect them to fit.

The conversation about women in leadership often focuses on numbers and representation.

Those issues matter.

But the deeper conversation may be about how leadership itself needs to evolve — so that talented people do not have to choose between influence, health, and a sustainable life.

Value driven cultures that support and retain individuals throughout their lives journeys tend to perform well in productivity, staff and customer retention metrics, but often there is a tension in managing human realities and leadership paradigm based on notions of commitment that are incompatible with these realities.

That is a leadership challenge for organisations as much as it is for individuals.

These are questions I increasingly explore in my work supporting leaders and organisations to build cultures where leadership and sustainability can coexist