Women Don’t Need a Seat at the Table—The Table Needs Their Leadership

Between Tables is where I explore the emotional, psychological, and practical sides of money, especially for women carrying a lot.

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“I can’t afford to get hurt when I’m the one directing this cruise ship.”

Words I said to a friend recently as we were talking about ideal family vacations and listing the 115 reasons neither of us are interested in skiing (or putting in the tremendous amount of effort it takes to teach our kids).

Many of us didn’t go into adult life planning to simultaneously be event coordinators, logistics and operations control, management, on-call therapists, and multi-taskers of the day’s schedule du jour. And yet, here we are. We run schedules, businesses, families, activities, vacations, departments, finances, feelings, and (insert your own personal load here).

It’s funny, in the forced ha kind of funny, that women hold only 11% of Fortune 500 CEO seats and 9.4% of S&P 500 CEO seats. (29% of C-suite roles, in case you wanted a slightly more cheerful number.)

The usual response to that statistic is to make the case for fairness. Women should be at the table. Women deserve a seat. I believe this in my bones. But this is not today’s essay.

I’m here to make a different case.

I want to make the case that the world needs more women leading. Not because of representation, although that matters. Not because women are saintly or naturally magical at anything. But because of a particular cluster of skills that women, broadly speaking, are trained in by life. Skills the most respected leadership research keeps identifying as the markers of leaders who actually move the needle. Skills the rooms we aren’t sitting in are starving for.

The Leader Who Saw You

I want you to think for a minute about the best leader you have ever worked under or alongside. (Not boss. Leader. They are different.)

I’ll bet you a coffee that what made her stand out was not her strategy deck or her KPIs.

What made her stand out was a quality of attention.

She saw you. She noticed when you were running on fumes. She asked the good question about what was actually getting in your way. She told you the hard thing in a way that left you feeling more capable, not smaller. She held your mistakes lightly and your wins firmly. She somehow knew you were ready for a stretch assignment six months before you did, and she put you in a position to grow into it without making it feel like a test.

If you have had a leader like that, you remember her.

What she was doing was not soft. It is, in fact, the highest-leverage thing any leader can do. It is the thing that separates leaders whose teams perform from leaders whose teams merely comply.

She was leading toward the person, not just toward the result.

How This Plays Out

I’ve spent 20+ years in this industry, in seats ranging from receptionist to client service associate to founder to the C-suite of a multi-billion-dollar firm. I’ve been led, badly and well. I’ve led, badly and well. The leaders I have watched do this best all do specific things. Here are some of them.

Recognizing what someone is carrying before they say so. This is not magic. It is a learned habit of attention. Walking into a 1:1 and noticing that your direct report is not okay before she has said three words. Catching that the friend who is “fine!” is on the edge of tears. Sensing that your son is not actually mad at you, he is mad at his middle school best friend, and what he needs from you in this moment is a snack and ten minutes of being asked nothing. Picking up that the colleague who has been missing deadlines is not careless, he is grieving. The leaders who do this consistently build teams that perform better, stay longer, and bounce back faster from setbacks. It is also what people mean when they say a leader is human.

Coaxing the best out of someone, rather than demanding it. The patient work of helping a person do the thing they were not sure they could do. Not by lighting a fire under them, but by standing next to them long enough that the fire becomes their own. This is what leadership literature calls “developing others,” and it is, arguably, the highest-compounding skill in leadership. A leader who develops others builds an organization of leaders. A leader who does not, builds an organization that depends on him. The Zenger Folkman analysis of thousands of 360-degree reviews, published in Harvard Business Review, found women rated higher than men on developing others, and on 16 other leadership competencies, for that matter.

Holding warmth and standard at the same time. Care and clarity are not opposites, although most leaders treat them as if they were and end up picking one. The leaders who land highest in the research can hold both at once. They tell you the spreadsheet is wrong and that they care about you. They love you and hold you to the version of yourself they know you can be. Mothers, the good ones, do this constantly. So do the best teachers, the best coaches, the best partners, and the best managers most people have ever had.

Repair. No relationship (work, romantic, family, team) is defined by whether ruptures happen. They all happen. Relationships are defined by whether the people in them know how to repair. The capacity to come back to the hard conversation. To say I’m sorry, that was unfair. To say I want to understand what happened there. When HBR researchers looked at how anxiety reshapes leader behavior, they found something striking: anxious male leaders were more likely to act abusively toward their teams, while anxious female leaders continued to engage in supportive behaviors with their direct reports regardless of their own internal state. They kept showing up. They repaired more often. They dropped fewer relationships off the cliff.

Witnessing. Some of the most powerful leadership I have ever experienced has been pure witnessing. Not advice. Not problem-solving. The mentor who heard the whole story before she said anything. The boss who, when I told her I was scared, said “of course you are, this is hard.“ The friend who texted “I see you“ on the day I needed it most. We chronically undervalue witnessing in leadership culture because it does not ship features. It does, however, build the trust that makes shipping features possible. People do their best work for people who see them. They always have.

The Research Is Embarrassingly Consistent

The most-asked question in modern leadership research is some version of: what actually predicts effective leadership?

The answer, repeatedly, is the cluster of skills above. And women, on aggregate, score higher on that cluster.

In the Zenger Folkman work cited above, women were rated more effective than men on 17 of 19 leadership competencies. Not a couple. Most. When the same researchers studied leaders during the early waves of the pandemic, the gap actually widened. Under stress, women outscored men on 13 of 19 skills, including the ones employees said they most needed: honesty, sensitivity to anxiety, willingness to keep developing people through hard times.

The financial data is, frankly, stubborn. S&P Global found that companies’ stock prices outperformed by an average of 20% in the 24 months after appointing a female CEO. Female CFOs delivered stronger profitability and better risk-adjusted returns. McKinsey’s Diversity Matters Even More found companies in the top quartile for executive gender diversity were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability.

It is hard, in 2026, to find a serious leadership researcher who will tell you that women are not, on aggregate, leading effectively when given the chance.

It is also hard to find one who can tell you why they aren’t given the chance more often.

The World Is Starving for This

The case for more women in leadership is not, ultimately, about women.

It is about the people they lead.

It is about the team that walks into a meeting feeling seen instead of surveilled. The employee who tries something risky because he believes his leader will catch him if he falls. The kid who learns, through being witnessed at home, that he is allowed to be confused without being abandoned. The aging parent who feels less alone because someone in the room is paying attention to what she is not quite able to say.

These are not small outcomes. They are the outcomes that determine whether companies retain talent, whether teams take creative risks, whether families function under stress, whether the next generation grows up with the wiring to do any of this themselves. Burnout is at historic highs. Engagement is at historic lows. The younger generations entering the workforce are explicit about wanting to be led by humans, not pressed by them. The institutions that will survive the next decade will not be the ones with the toughest leaders. They will be the ones whose leaders can see, repair, and develop.

The women I know are doing this in micro, all day, every day. With their kids. With their employees. With their parents. With their sisters, their friends, the cashier at Trader Joe’s, the new hire on the team who is pretending to be fine. It is not a performance. It is a practice. And it is exactly what more leadership tables, in more rooms, are quietly desperate for.

Walk Into the Room

The call to action here is not do more.

It is to recognize that the kind of leadership we are already practicing: the kind that sees, that repairs, that coaxes, that holds warmth and standard in the same hand, is not a lesser leadership. It is the leadership the data keeps pointing at. It is the leadership the next generation of employees keeps asking for. It is the leadership that, when it shows up at the head of a household or the head of a company or the head of a country, tends to produce humans who become more capable than they would have been otherwise.

If you have been doing this work and showing up in this way for years and not calling it leadership, I am asking you to call it that. To yourself, first.

If you are in a position to put another woman in a room she belongs in, do that.

If you are in a room that is missing this, notice. And, where you can, change it.

We are not making the case for women in leadership because women need it.

We are making it because the rest of the world does.