Why Women Lead So Well, And Why They Still Struggle to Lead at All

You’ve likely heard the stats: women are grossly underrepresented in CEO suites and top managerial spots. It’s a frustrating reality, especially because decades of research suggest that women often possess exactly the right mix of attributes needed for effective leadership, and in some cases they even outperform their male counterparts.

This creates a paradox worth unpacking. Women appear to have a leadership advantage in terms of effectiveness, yet they experience a clear disadvantage in terms of emergence and access. Understanding this contradiction requires us to look at the complex interplay of personality, perception and social dynamics that shape who gets to lead and who doesn’t.

The Advantage: Transformational Leadership is Where Women Shine

The idea of the “female leadership advantage” has been discussed for decades. Many scholars argue that women tend to bring strengths in interpersonal connection, collaboration and shared decision making, which fit the demands of modern, team-based organizations remarkably well.

When researchers talk about the strongest evidence for a true female advantage, they often point directly to a leadership style called transformational leadership, which is one the most consistently effective leadership styles across industries. Transformational leaders:

• Inspire others through vision
• Motivate teams beyond their own self-interest
• Show individualized consideration
• Build trust and strong relationships
• Elevate team performance

The data is remarkably consistent: a meta-analysis of 45 leadership studies confirms that women are more transformational leaders than men. More specifically, they generally score higher than men on leadership dimensions that relate positively to leaders’ effectiveness such as:

• Idealized influence (being a role model)
• Inspirational motivation (articulating a compelling vision)
• Individualized consideration (mentoring and development)
• Contingent reward (setting clear expectations and rewarding performance).

So, if women are naturally more adept at transformational leadership, where does that capability come from? That’s where personality steps in.

The Trait Perspective

Across large cross-cultural studies, women tend to score higher than men on three of the Big Five personality traits that are especially relevant for effective leadership:

• Extraversion, which includes being energetic, socially engaged and willing to take initiative, qualities that reliably predict whether someone is likely to be perceived as a leader.
• Agreeableness, which supports cooperation, empathy and relationship-building.
• Conscientiousness, which reflects reliability, preparation and a drive for high performance.

Another key predictor of transformational leadership is Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which is the ability to perceive, understand and regulate emotions. Women tend to score higher on EQ than men, which contributes to women’s consistent advantage in transformational leadership.

Together, these traits help explain why women tend to excel in transformational leadership, because the style itself draws directly on qualities where women, on average, score higher.

Communion vs. Agency: The Core Difference

Beyond the Big Five and Emotional Intelligence, much of the difference between men and women in leadership is framed by two gender-stereotypic traits: Agency and Communion.

• Agency is typically associated with masculinity. It emphasizes traits like assertiveness, dominance, confidence and independence.
• Communion is typically associated with femininity. It emphasizes traits like warmth, helpfulness, empathy and nurturance.

Studies have shown that women may enjoy a leadership advantage in transformational leadership precisely because of their communal traits. This stands out because traditional leadership stereotypes lean heavily toward masculine, agentic qualities. Transformational leadership doesn’t. It values empathy, mentoring and individualized attention; behaviors more often associated with femininity. That’s why it’s the rare leadership style where women’s stereotyped strengths translate into a real advantage.

The Disadvantage: Why the Right Personality Doesn’t Guarantee Being Seen as a Leader

If women have the winning personality profile for effective transformational leadership, why isn’t the C-suite 50/50? The answer lies in perceptions and deep-seated stereotypes.

The first major hurdle is leader emergence, which is the ability to simply be perceived as a leader in the first place. Research consistently shows that men emerge as leaders more frequently than women. While this gap has narrowed slightly over time, it remains stubbornly persistent.

Is Leadership Masculine?

Women’s disadvantage in emerging as leaders is often explained by the mismatch between traditional gender roles and the perceived leadership role. Here are a few psychological theories that help explain the origins of this mismatch:

• People hold unconscious beliefs about how a leader ought to behave, known as Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs). Think of these as mental shortcuts we all use to quickly categorize who fits the “leader prototype”, often without conscious awareness.
• Stereotypes of leaders are culturally masculine. Specifically, people often associate the leader prototype with typically agentic qualities such as assertiveness, confidence and dominance. These traits have long been culturally coded as masculine and are historically associated with men.
• On the other hand, women are more often stereotyped as more communal and are expected to exhibit caregiving and relationship -focused behaviors.
• These long-standing expectations shape how people judge leadership potential, making agentic traits seem more “leader-like”.

So, when people mentally sketch a “leader,” they tend to default to someone who fits the agentic mold—someone who, in many cultural contexts, is imagined as male.

This creates the famous “double bind” for women; a lose-lose situation where women face criticism regardless of their approach. If a woman displays communal (feminine) traits, she risks being seen as “not strong enough to lead” or lacking in authority. If she displays agentic (masculine) traits (like assertiveness or dominance), she risks being penalized because she is seen as deviating from expected feminine behavior, a phenomenon often called the “backlash effect”.

Therefore, women must constantly navigate between being seen as competent leaders and maintaining social approval, which is a tension that men rarely face to the same degree. It’s exhausting, and it’s one of the most persistent barriers in leadership emergence research.

Why Old Templates Still Influence Modern Leadership

Beyond personality, biological and evolutionary factors offer additional, and somewhat surprising, insights into the leadership paradox.

Evolutionary Hangovers

Evolutionary leadership theory applies principles from evolutionary biology to understand leadership processes. The basic idea: leadership and followership evolved to solve coordination problems that our ancestors faced.

In hunter-gatherer societies, gender roles were relatively distinct:

• Men typically served as providers and protectors; roles involving physical strength, risk-taking, and dominance.
• Women often worked collaboratively in gathering resources and caring for offspring, potentially developing enhanced empathy and interpersonal capabilities.

For most of human history, leaders were selected in contexts involving physical protection, hunting or conflict, which are situations where strength and dominance mattered. Male leaders had a clear advantage in these environments.

Here’s the problem: although the modern workplace no longer requires these qualities, our unconscious preferences may not have caught up. This creates what researchers call mismatches between ancestral environments and modern contexts. For example, research shows that:

• Height: Taller individuals, particularly men, still get paid more and emerge as leaders more frequently— despite height having zero functional relevance for most leadership roles today.
• Facial dominance: Features associated with dominance continue to influence leadership perceptions, even when these characteristics don’t predict actual performance.

These represent residual biases from environments fundamentally different from modern workplaces. Even though these ancestral pressures no longer matter in modern workplaces, our instincts haven’t fully caught up.

Context Shifts Everything

But here’s a fascinating twist: evolutionary research also shows that leadership preferences aren’t fixed, they shift with context.

When situations call for cooperation and diplomacy rather than conflict, people actually favor leaders with more trustworthy, feminine-looking faces. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with female leaders generally achieved better outcomes, as they demonstrated greater empathy and confidence in their communications.

This suggests something hopeful: changing contexts can alter which traits we value, potentially creating more opportunities for women in leadership.

The Motivation Gap: Who Steps Forward?

Even when someone has all the right traits for leadership, that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll seek leadership roles. And this is where another piece of the puzzle comes into place.

Leadership self-efficacy, which is one’s belief in their capability to lead effectively, significantly influences whether they pursue leadership opportunities. Here’s where gender creates another barrier.

Research consistently shows that women report lower leadership self-efficacy than men. Men tend to perceive themselves as more effective leaders and rate their own performance more positively than women rate theirs.

Why? One possible reason is that persistent mismatch between gender roles and leadership roles. When you’ve absorbed messages, subtle or overt, that leadership isn’t “for people like you” it affects your confidence in your ability to lead. When you’ve witnessed the double bind in action, the calculus changes about whether it’s worth putting yourself forward.

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that pushes capable women out of the pipeline: 

Lower self-efficacy → less willingness to seek leadership → fewer leadership experiences → less skill development → even lower self-efficacy.

Making Sense of the Paradox

When you put all these pieces together, the paradox no longer looks contradictory at all. It’s quite logical, if frustrating.

Women often possess:

• Personality traits that align with the most effective forms of modern leadership.
• Higher evaluations of transformational leadership behaviors.
• Interpersonal strengths that today’s organizations increasingly depend on.
• The actual capabilities to lead effectively.

Yet they simultaneously face:

• Deeply rooted social expectations around agency and communion that don’t favor them.
• Leadership prototypes based on outdated masculine stereotypes.
• Evolutionary “hangovers” that shape unconscious preferences toward male leaders.
• Lower leadership self-efficacy due to socialization, stereotype threat, and lived experience of bias.
• Less motivation to seek leadership roles when the psychological costs are high.

What Can We Actually Do About This?

Understanding the paradox is valuable, but it’s not enough. So, what does this mean for creating real change?

For Organizations

Redesign selection processes. Since implicit biases favor masculine presentations of leadership, organizations need structured and objective evaluation processes that explicitly assess the behaviors associated with effective leadership.

Redefine leadership prototypes. Make visible what effective leadership actually looks like in your context. If transformational leadership drives results, celebrate and reward it explicitly. Share stories of leaders who succeed through collaboration, not just competition.

Create safe spaces for risk-taking. Women are less likely to put themselves forward when the double bind means they’ll be criticized regardless of their approach. Organizations need to actively counteract this by creating cultures where different leadership styles are valued.

Address the participation gap. Since leadership emergence depends partly on visibility and participation, examine whether meeting structures, project assignments, and informal networks give women equal opportunities to demonstrate leadership capabilities.

For Managers

Check your mental prototypes. Before evaluating someone’s leadership potential, pause and ask: Am I looking for traits that predict effectiveness, or traits that simply feel familiar? Am I penalizing competence that doesn’t look the way I expect it to?

Actively sponsor women. Given the confidence gap, high-potential women may not self-nominate for leadership opportunities. Identify them proactively and explicitly communicate your belief in their capabilities. Sponsorship isn’t just mentorship; it’s using your influence to open doors.

Call out the double bind. When you see women being criticized for behaviors that would be praised in men, name it. When you hear someone described as “too aggressive” or “not assertive enough”, ask whether the same standard applies to everyone.

Recognize different forms of leadership. If someone builds cohesive teams, develops others, and drives results through collaboration, that’s leadership, even if it doesn’t look like traditional command-and-control.

For Women Navigating Leadership

Know that the barriers are real, and not your fault. Lower confidence isn’t a personal failing when the system is designed to undermine it. Understanding the structural nature of these challenges can help you externalize some of the psychological burden.

Seek environments that value your strengths. Not all organizations are equally stuck in outdated leadership models. Look for contexts where transformational leadership is recognized and rewarded, where your style of leading is seen as an asset rather than a deviation.

Build your leadership self-efficacy deliberately. Seek out leadership experiences in lower-risk contexts; volunteer organizations, project teams, communities where you feel supported. Each success builds the confidence foundation for the next step.

Find your people. Networks of other women leaders, sponsors who actively advocate for you, and allies who understand the double bind can provide both practical support and psychological safety.

Remember: you don’t need to lead like a man.  Recent research shows that the most effective approach for women involves integrating both agency and communion rather than choosing one over the other. Studies have found that women who “temper their agency with communion” are most likely to emerge as leaders and be rated as effective. This means displaying assertiveness and confidence while also demonstrating warmth and care. The goal isn’t to suppress your collaborative strengths or force yourself into a masculine mold, it’s to flexibly draw from both sets of qualities depending on what the situation demands.

A Path Forward

The question isn’t whether women can lead effectively. The evidence on that point is overwhelming. The question is whether organizations, managers and systems are willing to do the hard work of aligning leadership evaluation, selection and development with what actually predicts effectiveness rather than what simply feels familiar.

Intersectionality adds another layer of complexity here. The female leadership advantage and disadvantage aren’t uniform across all women. Stereotypes and biases differ across racial, ethnic and cultural lines, creating distinct experiences. A comprehensive approach must account for these intersecting identities.

In a nutshell, closing the gap between capability and access requires deliberate effort at every level: in how we think about leadership, how we evaluate it, and how we create pathways for those who can lead effectively but don’t fit outdated molds.