For decades, we’ve been telling women what they need to do to get ahead at work.
Be more confident. Speak up in meetings. Negotiate your salary. Build your network. Find a mentor. Put yourself forward for promotion.
I’ve spent more than twenty years helping women navigate their careers and develop their leadership, and I believe deeply in the value of this work. I’ve seen what happens when a woman begins to recognise her capabilities, stops allowing self-doubt to determine her decisions and starts making more intentional choices about her future.
But there’s something that has always troubled me about the broader conversation around women’s advancement.
We keep asking women to change without asking enough of the workplaces they’re trying to succeed in.
A woman can develop extraordinary confidence and still work in an organisation where her contributions are consistently overlooked. She can become a brilliant communicator and still find herself interrupted or dismissed in meetings. She can be ready for promotion and still be passed over because the people making decisions have a narrow idea of what leadership potential looks like.
And she can do everything the career advice tells her to do without ever having access to the opportunities that would allow her to progress.
At some point, we have to acknowledge that the problem isn’t always something women need to work on.
Developing women matters. But it isn’t enough.
One of the reasons we created Women Rising was because I wanted women to have access to practical, evidence-based development that would genuinely help them navigate their careers and leadership.
I know the difference it makes when women understand the patterns that hold them back, become clearer about what they want and develop the tools to advocate for themselves.
But I’ve never believed that developing women alone would solve gender inequality.
Because the barriers women encounter at work aren’t all internal. Many are embedded in the everyday practices of organisations: how talent is identified, who gets access to important assignments, whose potential is recognised, how performance is evaluated and who has influence over promotion decisions.
These things shape careers, often in ways that aren’t immediately visible.
Think about the woman who consistently delivers excellent work but is never considered for a stretch assignment because her manager assumes she’s too busy with family responsibilities. Or the capable leader who is told she needs to demonstrate more confidence, while a male colleague displaying similar behaviour is described as having leadership potential.
These aren’t problems that another confidence workshop will solve.
And this is where I think organisations sometimes get the balance wrong. They invest in developing women, which is important, but don’t always examine whether the environment those women return to will support their progression.
If we genuinely want more women in senior leadership, we have to work on both sides of that equation.
What about the men?
This is a question I’ve been asking for years.
Not because men need to be centred in every conversation about women’s advancement, but because we cannot create meaningful workplace change without engaging the people who hold influence within those workplaces.
And in many organisations, men still occupy a significant proportion of senior leadership positions and the roles where decisions about talent, succession and opportunity are made.
Their actions matter.
A male leader who actively sponsors a talented woman can change the trajectory of her career. A manager who questions why there are no women on a promotion shortlist can influence how talent is considered. A colleague who challenges an inappropriate comment or ensures a woman’s contribution is recognised can help shift the everyday culture of a team
These actions may seem small, but organisational culture is shaped through thousands of everyday decisions and interactions.
The challenge is that many men genuinely support gender equality without necessarily knowing what meaningful allyship looks like in practice.
They believe women should have equal opportunities. They want their female colleagues to succeed. They may consider themselves supportive leaders.
But support and action aren’t the same thing.
Being an ally isn’t simply believing in equality. It’s being willing to use your influence to help create it.
That requires awareness of the barriers women experience, a willingness to examine our own assumptions and the confidence to act when something isn’t right.
It also means understanding that allyship isn’t about rescuing women or speaking on their behalf. It’s about recognising where you have influence and using it to help create fairer opportunities.
We need to stop treating women’s advancement as a women’s initiative
I think this is one of the most important shifts organisations can make.
Too often, responsibility for gender equality sits primarily with HR, diversity teams or women’s employee networks. These groups do valuable work, but they cannot carry the responsibility for changing an entire organisation.
Women’s advancement needs to be part of how the business operates.
It needs to show up in leadership expectations, succession planning and the everyday decisions managers make about who gets developed and promoted.
And it requires leaders to recognise that creating more equitable workplaces isn’t something separate from their responsibility to build strong teams and develop talent.
This is also why I don’t believe we should frame women’s development and male allyship as competing investments.
Women deserve opportunities to build their capabilities, strengthen their leadership and make intentional choices about their careers. At the same time, the people around them need to understand how their behaviour and decisions can either create or limit those opportunities.
We need women who feel equipped to lead and workplaces that are genuinely ready for their leadership.
Both matter.
As organisations begin planning their leadership development priorities for 2027, I hope we’ll see more leaders asking not only how they can help women develop, but what they themselves need to do differently.
Because women have spent decades being told how to become more confident, more capable and more ready for leadership.
Perhaps it’s time we put just as much attention on whether our organisations are ready for them.
And whether the people with the greatest influence over women’s opportunities are doing enough to help create them.