I'm Done Applauding Women Who Survived a System That Should Never Have Been This Hard.
By Dr. Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj
Georges Seguin (Okki), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There is a fountain in the south of France that tells you everything you need to know about how little has changed.
The Fontaine de la Rotonde in Aix-en-Provence is crowned by three sculpted female figures; Justice, Agriculture, and Fine Arts. The highest ideals of 19th-century French society, immortalised in stone. Beautiful. Honoured. Permanent.
And entirely fictional.
The women carved above the doorway were not, as a rule, the women admitted through it. They were allegories, symbols of virtue, not participants in it. The sculptor's model and the senator's wife occupied very different worlds, despite both wearing the same face of civic progress.
I thought about that fountain a great deal after hearing Christine Lagarde speak in Aix-en-Provence this week. Because as President of the European Central Bank, and as someone who has actually walked through more doors than almost any woman in her generation, she used it as a mirror to hold up to modern organisational life.
The reflection was uncomfortable. It should have been.
We Are Still Building Monuments, Not Entryways
We live in an era of extraordinary female symbols. Women grace conference keynotes, leadership panels, and corporate anniversary campaigns. We celebrate them during heritage months. We put them on posters. We hand them microphones and ask them to share their secrets.
What we rarely do is examine the system that made their survival so exceptional in the first place.
Lagarde spoke with unusual candour about this. She described her own path, commuting between Chicago and Paris as often as she could, just to be home for weekends, holding together a legal career and a family across two continents and two time zones. By any measure, an extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things.
And then she said the part that matters most: "When I tell young women my story, I am always aware of the risk that comes with it. When we look to the women who made it through, our attention rests on them, and not on the barriers that narrowed the pipeline behind them."
That sentence is the most important thing a senior leader has said about gender equity in years. Not because it's new. Because it's finally being said out loud, by someone who earned the right to say it, in the very city where stone women watch over a square they were never meant to enter.
The Number That Should End Every Diversity Panel
Before we go further, consider this.
Women represent 78% of Europe's healthcare workforce, an industry feminised at every level of entry. In countries like Estonia and Latvia, female participation rises above 90%. The talent is there. The pipeline is there. The vocation, the training, the experience are all evident.
If that data came from any other domain, engineering, finance, law, we would call it structural exclusion and legislate immediately. In healthcare, we call it a "known challenge" and schedule another awareness seminar.
The numbers tell us clearly: this is not about insufficient talent. This is not about women lacking ambition. This is about impenetrable structural barriers operating at every level of the funnel, long before the glass ceiling comes into view.
Women hold 25% of senior leadership positions across European healthcare networks.
And just 18% of hospital CEO seats.
Here is the misconception that costs organisations the most: that gender equity is a problem of the C-suite.
Because of this, companies direct the bulk of their investment upwards, board quotas, executive mentoring, senior diversity headhunters, leadership academies for high-potential talent. These programmes are not without value. But they are addressing the wrong end of the problem.
The pipeline does not break at the top. It leaks at the very bottom.
Research into corporate pipelines reveals that the single most damaging barrier occurs at the first step, from individual contributor to first-line manager. For every 100 men promoted at that juncture, 93 women make the same transition. A 7% gap that sounds modest until you understand what it means compounded across five or six subsequent levels of a corporate hierarchy.
By the time an organisation looks to fill a VP seat, the female talent pool has already been quietly, structurally, and systematically drained. The pipeline appears thin at the top because it was deliberately, if not consciously, narrowed at the bottom.
Two Invisible Taxes on Women's Careers
Understanding why that gap opens up requires examining two systemic friction points that rarely make it into leadership training curricula.
The Availability Trap
Organisational cultures still overwhelmingly reward presence over output. Who is most visible? Who responds to the late-night email? Who stays when everyone else leaves? We have, across decades of corporate evolution, confused permanent availability with strategic capability, and built our promotion criteria accordingly.
Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin's research shows that men's and women's earnings paths diverge sharply after the birth of a first child. This is not because women become less competent or less ambitious. It is because women across advanced economies still carry roughly twice the unpaid care hours that men do, and are therefore penalised in organisations that place a premium on unpredictable hours and constant presence.
When the first promotion to manager requires the sacrifice of predictability, many women lose career momentum at precisely the moment it is hardest to recover.
The Promotability Tax.
Inside most organisations, work divides into two invisible categories. High-visibility strategic work; the kind that leads to promotion, recognition, and the next opportunity. And low-visibility "office housework", administrative coordination, internal committee membership, covering operational gaps, managing the logistics nobody else wants to manage.
Behavioural research shows that women are disproportionately asked to take on the second category, and, due to organisational expectation and social pressure, are more likely to accept. The result is a slow, systemic diversion of talented women's time and energy away from the work that would advance their careers, and toward the work that keeps everyone else's moving.
Neither of these is a confidence problem. Neither requires a workshop. Both require a structural redesign.
What Organisations Can Actually Do
Fixing a fragile system means moving away from programmes designed to "fix the women" and toward interventions that redesign the environment.
Three levers are within any leader's direct control.
Lower the cost of absence
Restructure roles so that clean, quality handovers are possible. When no single person must be permanently on-call, presence ceases to be the currency of commitment. This is an operational design choice, not a cultural luxury.
Make flexibility predictable
Define core hours. Introduce and enforce clear boundaries around evening and weekend communication. Predictable flexibility is not a perk it is a structural equaliser. Unpredictability, conversely, is a tax that falls disproportionately on those with care responsibilities outside the office.
Audit how opportunity is distributed
Do not allow high-impact work or low-visibility administrative burden to be distributed by default, proximity, or the path of least resistance. Actively rotate both. Set gender-balance targets at every stage of the pipeline, not only at the senior levels, and hold the leaders responsible for those stages accountable for meeting them.
This is not a theoretical framework. The ECB has applied nuanced versions of these interventions across its own organisation. Women now hold just under 40% of senior management roles there, an increase of eight percentage points since 2019.
European Parliament from EU, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Cost of the Hero Academy
When we celebrate a female leader chiefly for the steepness of the climb she endured, we are reinforcing a story that should horrify us: that the climb must be that steep, and that only those who survive it deserve to lead.
Christine Lagarde is exceptional. But her exceptionalism should not be the benchmark. It should be the evidence of how much talent we have wasted by building an environment that required that level of sacrifice to navigate.
A resilient leader should be the goal of your development programmes, not the entry requirement for underrepresented groups to earn a place in the room.
We have spent three decades studying the survivors.
It is time to redesign the system that produced the casualties.
