What Organisations Must Do to Support Women in Leadership

The two previous pieces in this series have addressed women leaders directly — naming the strengths they routinely undervalue and the mechanisms by which they build authentic influence. Those pieces matter. But they operate within a framework that places the primary burden of change on the individual: develop your strengths, build your influence, navigate the environment effectively. That framework is insufficient — not wrong, but incomplete — because the environments most women are navigating were not designed to support their leadership, and developing stronger individual capabilities does not change the structural conditions that limit them.

The most honest thing I can say about most organisations’ commitments to supporting women in leadership is this: they are genuine in intention and inadequate in structure. The intention is real. The diversity reports, the mentoring programmes, the women’s leadership networks, the stated commitments from senior leadership — these are not cynical performances in most cases. They are genuine expressions of a desire to do better. But desire, without structural change, does not produce different outcomes. The McKinsey Women in the Workplace research has tracked this for over a decade: the pipeline of women at senior levels has improved marginally, the attrition of women leaders has not, and the experience of women who do reach senior positions has in many respects become more rather than less demanding.

This piece is addressed to the organisations — and specifically to the leaders, the HR professionals, and the board members — who are genuinely committed to doing better and want a specific, structural account of what better actually requires. It is the third piece in a series: the first named the strengths women undervalue, the second addressed how they build influence authentically, and this piece addresses what the organisation must provide as the structural foundation for both.

Why Organisational Intent Is Not Enough to Support Women in Leadership

The Gap Between Stated Commitment and Structural Support for Women Leaders

The most consistent finding across ten years of McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research is what the researchers call the “broken rung” — the disproportionate attrition of women at the first step up from individual contributor to manager, which produces the pipeline deficit that makes senior-level gender diversity so difficult to achieve. For every 100 men promoted to manager, approximately 87 women are promoted. That gap — created at the first management transition — is not closed by senior leadership programmes or C-suite diversity targets. It is created at the structural level of how organisations make promotion decisions, how they evaluate leadership potential, and how they design the early career experience that determines who reaches the management transition ready to succeed at it.

Deloitte’s Women in the Boardroom research found that 87% of companies say gender diversity is a priority — yet only 38% have concrete targets with accountability mechanisms to achieve it. This gap between stated priority and structural accountability is the most accurate description of where most organisations are: genuinely intending to do better, structurally designed to produce the same outcomes they always have. The intention is not the problem. The absence of the structural architecture that would produce different outcomes is the problem. And the structural architecture requires specific, difficult, sometimes costly organisational decisions that most organisations have not yet made.

What “Supporting Women in Leadership” Must Mean Structurally

Supporting women in leadership cannot mean primarily offering them development opportunities to become better adapted to the existing environment. This approach — which describes the majority of women’s leadership development investment in most organisations — places the burden of change on the individual and leaves the structural conditions that create the barriers unchanged. A woman who has completed a leadership development programme in an organisation that still promotes based on informal sponsorship networks she is excluded from, evaluates performance using criteria that discount her natural leadership style, and distributes the most high-profile opportunities through informal channels that favour incumbents is not better supported. She is better equipped to navigate a system that remains structurally biased against her.

Structural support means changing the conditions — the evaluation criteria, the promotion processes, the sponsorship mechanisms, the meeting structures, the feedback systems, the development opportunities, and the accountability architecture — in ways that produce different outcomes regardless of the individual effort any particular woman leader makes. It means building an organisation where the People-First principles are applied consistently to women as well as to men — where the investment in developing capability, the clarity of standards, and the accountability for outcomes are the same for every leader regardless of gender.

The Four Structural Changes Organisations Must Make to Support Women in Leadership

Structural Change 1 — Fix the Evaluation System, Not the Women

The most consequential structural change an organisation can make for women’s leadership is to audit and redesign its performance evaluation criteria to ensure they capture the full range of effective leadership rather than a template derived from the dominant model. This means specifically examining what behaviours and capabilities the evaluation system rewards and what it discounts — and then comparing that evaluation standard against the research on what actually drives team performance and organisational outcomes.

In most organisations, the audit reveals that the evaluation system undervalues relational intelligence, collaborative decision-making, people development investment, and values consistency — the specific capabilities that women leaders disproportionately demonstrate and routinely undervalue. It rewards individual decisive action, visible assertiveness, and individual performance metrics that do not capture collective contribution. An evaluation system calibrated on these criteria will consistently underrate women who lead through connection, consensus, and development — and consistently overrate men who lead through individual assertion, regardless of what the organisational outcomes actually are.

Fixing the evaluation system is not about applying a different standard to women. It is about applying a better standard to everyone — one that captures the full range of leadership effectiveness rather than a historically derived subset of it. This requires the organisation to be honest about what it actually values versus what it claims to value, and to design the evaluation architecture that makes those values operationally real.

Structural Change 2 — Replace Informal Sponsorship with Structured Advocacy

The research on sponsorship is unambiguous: sponsorship — the active advocacy of a more senior leader for a woman’s advancement, in the rooms she is not in — is more predictive of women’s career advancement than any amount of mentoring, networking, or development investment. HBR’s landmark research on promotion gaps found that women are over-mentored and under-sponsored — receiving more advice on how to navigate the environment and significantly less active advocacy for their advancement within it.

The structural problem is that sponsorship, in most organisations, is an informal process. Sponsors emerge from personal relationships, from visibility, from proximity to power, from the social networks that form most naturally among people who are demographically similar. Women — particularly women who are underrepresented in senior leadership — are structurally disadvantaged in this informal process. They have fewer natural connections to the people who would sponsor them, less visibility in the informal networks where sponsorship decisions are made, and less access to the social contexts where these relationships form organically.

The structural solution is to formalise sponsorship: to create explicit, accountable mechanisms by which senior leaders are specifically assigned sponsorship responsibilities for high-potential women leaders, with clear expectations about what sponsorship requires (active advocacy in decision-making rooms, specific opportunity allocation, public credit attribution) and explicit accountability for outcomes. This is not the same as a mentoring programme. Mentoring advises. Sponsorship advocates. The distinction is the entire mechanism — and getting it right requires the organisation to name it clearly, build it structurally, and hold sponsors accountable for what happens to the people they are sponsoring.

Structural Change 3 — Make Accountability for Women’s Advancement Real, Not Aspirational

The most reliable predictor of whether an organisation’s stated commitment to women’s leadership will produce different outcomes is whether there is genuine accountability for those outcomes — whether the people who make decisions about promotions, assignments, and development investment are held responsible for the patterns those decisions produce, in the same way they are held responsible for financial results. In almost every organisation I work with, the answer is no. The commitment to women’s advancement is genuine. The accountability for outcomes is aspirational.

Real accountability looks like this: the people who make promotion decisions know that the demographic patterns in those decisions are visible to the people above them and are factored into their own performance evaluation. The leaders who control access to high-profile assignments know that the distribution of those assignments across gender lines is tracked and reported. The executives who approve development investment know that the investment patterns are audited for equity. None of this requires quotas. It requires transparency — the specific, regular, named reporting of the outcomes that the organisation’s stated commitment should be producing — and the willingness to ask, when those outcomes are not being produced, who specifically was responsible for the decision-making that produced them.

Structural Change 4 — Design Development That Builds on Strengths, Not Toward Conformity

Most organisational investment in women’s leadership development is implicitly designed to close the gap between women’s natural leadership approaches and the dominant model — to make women more assertive, more directive, more comfortable with the communication style and the decision-making approach that the organisation’s informal promotion criteria actually reward. This design produces the adaptation problem: women who complete the development programme are better equipped to perform the dominant model, at the cost of the authentic capabilities that made them most effective before the programme.

The alternative design — strength-based rather than gap-closing — starts from an honest assessment of the specific leadership capabilities each woman brings, and then builds development around expanding those capabilities, deepening them, and equipping the leader to deploy them more powerfully in the specific organisational contexts she faces. This requires the organisation to have done the work of the first structural change: to have evaluated what effective leadership actually looks like across the full range of its expression, and to have built the evaluation architecture that makes strength-based development legible, valued, and promotable. Without that foundation, strength-based development produces leaders who are more capable and no more promotable — which is a development outcome that fails the leader and the organisation simultaneously.

What the Organisations That Get This Right Actually Do Differently

How High-Performing Organisations Support Women Leaders Structurally

The organisations with the most consistent track record of supporting women’s leadership advancement — the ones where women reach senior positions at rates that approach their representation in the overall workforce, where they stay once they arrive, and where they lead with the authenticity and effectiveness that produces the performance outcomes the research associates with gender-diverse leadership — share a set of structural characteristics that distinguish them from organisations that have strong intentions and weak results.

They have done the audit. They have looked honestly at what their promotion criteria actually reward, compared it against what their stated values say they should reward, and invested in closing the gap between the two. They have built formal, accountable sponsorship — not mentoring programmes — and held the sponsors accountable for outcomes. They have made the demographic patterns in their high-value decisions visible to the people making those decisions, and connected those patterns to leadership performance evaluations. And they have invested in development that builds on what is already present rather than filling the gap from the dominant model.

The Long-Term Return on Supporting Women Leaders Structurally

The business case for structural support of women’s leadership is not primarily a diversity argument. It is a performance argument. Smart people fail under bad leadership — and the specific form of bad leadership that most women are navigating is not a single bad leader, but a system of structural conditions that consistently signals that their most effective capabilities are not valued. Changing those conditions produces the performance outcomes that the research on gender-diverse leadership has been documenting for over two decades: better decisions, higher engagement, stronger retention of the talent that produced those outcomes, and the compounding organisational capability that results from allowing the full range of leadership excellence to develop and be rewarded.

The organisations that make these structural changes are not doing women a favour. They are correcting a structural inefficiency in how they identify, develop, and retain leadership capability — and capturing the performance differential that the correction makes available. People-first leadership wins long term precisely because it creates the conditions in which the full range of human capability — across gender, across style, across experience — can contribute at its highest level. The organisations that build those conditions produce better outcomes. The ones that do not continue paying the cost of the capability they are not using.

The Organisational Responsibility That Cannot Be Delegated

The argument in this piece is not that women do not need to develop as leaders. The previous two pieces in this series have addressed exactly what that development requires — and it is significant. The argument is that individual development is insufficient to address structural conditions, and that organisations which invest primarily in developing women without changing the conditions those women are developing in are investing in an incomplete solution that will not produce the outcomes the research says are available.

The structural changes described here are not simple, and they are not costless. They require honest assessment of what the current system is actually producing, the willingness to name what the assessment reveals, and the organisational courage to make decisions that change the conditions rather than asking the people navigating those conditions to adapt more effectively. That courage is not equally distributed across organisations. The ones that exercise it are building something that their competitors will eventually need to replicate — a leadership culture where the full range of human capability can develop and be deployed at its highest level, and where the performance dividend of that breadth compounds year on year.

That is the organisation worth building. And it begins, as all genuine structural change does, with the honest question: are we changing the conditions, or asking people to navigate them better? If the honest answer is the latter — as it is for most organisations — the work is clear. The will to do it is the remaining variable. And that, ultimately, is a leadership question.