Reflections by
Shalinee Basak
Global CHRO and Talent Leader
The inflection points in my career were not the comfortable ones. They were the assignments that demanded more perspective, more resilience, and more humility.
I did not become more capable because I felt ready. I became more capable because someone decided I should be tested. They placed me where the consequences were real, the expectations were higher, and the learning curve was not negotiable. That is how leadership is formed. Not by intention alone, but by exposure.
This is why when organisations tell me they are committed to gender parity in senior leadership, I listen for a particular set of signals. Not the aspiration. The architecture. Where the stretch roles are being allocated. Who is getting the first step into management. Who is being sponsored when the room goes quiet and decisions get made. And what the top of the house reinforces and insists on, because that is where commitment starts to become lived reality.
We keep returning to the same headline problem. As at the end of 2024, data across 74 countries shows that women account for 43.4% of roles globally but only 30.6% of leadership positions and since 2022, progress has largely flatlined.
We also keep returning to the same business reality. When leadership teams reflect a wider range of backgrounds and perspectives, performance tends to improve. Evidence is also making this clearer, including a 2025 finding from Australia that organisations with more gender-balanced executive teams are associated with higher company value and stronger business outcomes.
If the case is compelling and the conversation has matured, why does the pipeline still thin as roles become more senior.
From a leadership seat, the answer is often uncomfortable because it is operational. We are not failing at awareness. We are failing at design.
The psychology of readiness
Confidence is not a personality trait. It is a lived conclusion.
Carol Dweck’s work on fixed and growth mindsets has long been used in education and is highly relevant in organisational domains. When people believe capability can be developed, they reach for stretch, stay with discomfort, and treat feedback as fuel. When organisations signal that ability is fixed, people do something else. They play it safe. They manage impressions. They avoid the very risks that create future readiness.
In corporate progression, that distinction matters. Early to mid-career women often deliver with consistency, build trust, and stabilise teams. It is valuable work, but it is not always the work that gets noticed. Then the mission-critical roles appear, and the criteria quietly shift. It is no longer, can you deliver? It becomes, are you ready? Who can lead ambiguity? Who can withstand scrutiny? Who can decide under pressure?
If those mastery experiences have not been distributed equitably, self-doubt is not an odd quirk of personality. It is an entirely rational response to a system that has offered fewer chances to practise leadership under pressure.
There is another psychological dynamic at play. Role congruity theory describes the double bind that emerges when leadership and gender expectations collide. As Alice Eagly and Steven Karau explain, “perceived incongruity between the female gender role and leadership roles leads to two forms of prejudice: (a) perceiving women less favourably than men as potential occupants of leadership roles and (b) evaluating behaviour that fulfils the prescriptions of a leader role less favourably when it is enacted by a woman”.
So, if we want more women in senior leadership, we must stop over-indexing on coaching women to sound more confident and start redesigning the conditions that make confidence earned.
The conditions that accelerate women’s progression
The most effective organisations do not rely on individual talent or sporadic sponsorship. They put protocols in place so that progression is less dependent on luck and similarity.
Start with the first promotion into management. Women in the Workplace 2025 is clear on this point. For every 100 men promoted to manager-level roles, only 93 women were promoted. That early shortfall compounds at every level that follows.
If we want a stronger leadership bench, treat that first step up as a business-critical metric. Track it by function, geography, and manager. Investigate outliers. Insist on evidence in talent discussions rather than impressions. This is not bureaucracy. It is risk management.
Next, get disciplined about stretch. Many organisations unintentionally ration the experiences that create senior capability. High visibility roles are allocated through informal networks. Transformation work goes to the usual suspects. Complex stakeholder assignments are handed to the people who already look fluent.
If you want a balanced succession pipeline, you need a transparent mechanism for allocating career shaping assignments. Not a perfect process, but a visible one. Who is getting enterprise projects. Who is getting cross-functional scope. Who is getting commercial exposure early enough to become viable for senior roles later.
Then formalise sponsorship. Mentoring helps people interpret the organisation. Sponsorship changes what the organisation does with them, especially when decisions are made behind closed doors. Sponsors do three things consistently. They put high potential women’s names forward for stretch. They make capability visible to other leaders. They stay close enough to remove structural obstacles.
Finally, do not underestimate community. Employee networks, when properly resourced, are not soft culture initiatives. They are social capital engines. They shorten the distance between high-potential women and the informal information that shapes opportunity. They make ambition visible. They make patterns discussable. They make it harder for leaders to claim they did not know.
The accountability moment
Psychological safety is often discussed as a team dynamic, but it is also a progression dynamic. Amy Edmondson’s work shows that learning and performance improve when people feel safe to take interpersonal risks.
For early to mid-career women, psychological safety is not only about speaking up in meetings. It is also about whether ambition is welcomed. Whether mistakes are truly treated as learning for growth, or used as evidence that someone is not ready. Whether growth is allowed to look imperfect while it is happening.
This is where leadership intent either becomes cultural reality, or it remains symbolic.
Looking ahead, the next chapter will be shaped by redesign. Some of that redesign is structural, as organisations revisit what roles look like, how work is distributed, and how talent is assessed. Some of it is technological, as AI changes what early career roles contain and how performance is measured. In either case, the risk is the same. If we do not build equity into the new architecture, we will simply reproduce old patterns with greater speed and less visibility.
This is the accountability moment. Across boardrooms and executive teams, the message is becoming clearer. Progress follows when leadership moves from intent to outcomes, with accountability as the bridge.
Leadership development is not accidental. It is designed through stretch, reflection, and community.
If we want more women in senior leadership, we must stop treating senior representation as the beginning of the story. It is the end of a long story about who was trusted early, who was tested fairly, and who was sponsored precisely when it mattered.
The inflection points that shaped my career did not arrive because I was comfortable. They arrived because someone had the courage to place me into growth and challenge me. And because, over time, I became more intentional in my choices, and more confident in my willingness to step in, or step away.
That is the work now. To design systems that distribute growth with intent. To build benches that reflect the full talent pool. To place the human dimension at the centre of business performance, deliberately and strategically.
1 See: The State of Women in Leadership – Global Employment Trends
2 See: When people thrive, business thrives: The case for human sustainability
3 See: Gender Equity Insights 2025
4 See: Growth Mindset
5 See: Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders
6 See: Women in the Workplace 2025
7 See: Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams
8 See: From intent to impact: How leadership accountability drives gender parity