A man who is decisive is a leader.
A woman who is decisive is a lot.
A man who is angry is passionate. A woman who is angry is emotional. They are both emotional. That's the point, and it's a point the research has now caught up with, even if many workplaces haven't.
I have spent twenty years in the life sciences sector watching this double standard applied so consistently that people stopped noticing it. I have coached women who have internalised it so completely that they were policing themselves before anyone else had the chance.
This is not a piece about what's wrong. It's about what's possible when we stop asking women to lead in a shape that was never designed for them.
The Research — Because It's Worth Naming
A 2024 Harvard Business Review study by Ivona Hideg, Tanja Hentschel and Winny Shen examined 137 leaders and their direct reports during the early stages of COVID-19. The findings are worth sitting with.
Women leaders in the study reported higher levels of anxiety than their male counterparts — and did not translate that anxiety into hostile or abusive behaviour toward their teams. The men in the same study did, exhibiting what the researchers describe as abusive supervision when under stress.
Women are called too emotional. The data suggests they're often the ones managing their emotions most effectively.
The stereotype — that women are too emotional, too reactive, too unstable under pressure to lead effectively — is not just unfair. According to this research, it's empirically backwards. And yet it persists, because the double bind is not about data. It's about expectation.
Adam Grant, organisational psychologist at Wharton, has written extensively about how this plays out in practice. In a 2023 New York Times piece, he examined the common advice given to women to drop so-called 'weak language' and communicate more forcefully. The research he cites tells a more complicated story: when women do communicate assertively, they are frequently penalised for it, seen as difficult or abrasive where a man saying the same thing would be seen as decisive. Grant's conclusion was pointed: instead of asking women to change how they communicate, we should be challenging the stereotypes that punish them for it.
The Double Bind — Named Clearly
Be too warm and you're not taken seriously. Be too direct and you're difficult. Show conviction and you're aggressive. Show care and you're soft. Display any emotion and you're called emotional. Even when the person next to you displaying exactly the same emotion is called passionate.
There is no behaviour that satisfies both sides of this equation simultaneously. The goalposts are not just moving, they are structurally contradictory.
And the cost is not just personal. The qualities being penalised — empathy, genuine listening, care for the people in the room — are precisely what modern leadership research identifies as most strongly associated with high-performing teams, strong retention and sustainable cultures. Organisations enforcing the double bind are systematically undermining their own results.
What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like — Lived Evidence
I want to tell you about two leaders who showed me what integrated leadership looks like in practice. Not from a framework, from rooms I was actually in.
The first was a CEO with a philosophy I've thought about many times since. He would say: if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.
If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.
That's not a modest statement. It's a profound one. A leader who genuinely holds that belief is not building a culture around his own unchallenged authority. He's actively seeking people who will push back. His confidence comes from the quality of the people around him, not from their silence.
The second was a manager whose rule for disagreement was simple and entirely liberating: bat the ball, not the person. Any idea (including his) could be taken apart in the room. The debate was always about the idea, never about who raised it. Decisions that came out the other side were genuinely stress-tested. Even when you hadn't fully agreed with the outcome, you were completely on board. Why? Because you had been genuinely heard.
Both of these leaders embodied what Brené Brown describes in Dare to Lead as daring leadership — the courage to create genuine space for honest conversation, to build trust through consistency rather than authority. And they embodied what Simon Sinek would recognise as the Circle of Safety in practice: an environment where people felt protected enough to think clearly, challenge freely, and do their best work.
Neither of them asked anyone to smile more. Neither penalised care or directness. Neither confused emotional expression with emotional incapacity. They understood that the full range of human intelligence — including the parts that have long been coded as soft or feminine — was the point, not the problem.
The Permission Gap
Here is what I observe consistently in my coaching work with women in life sciences. The capability is there. Almost always. The technical excellence, the emotional intelligence, the read on the room, the instinct for what's happening beneath the surface of a team.
What's often absent is the permission to use it.
In its absence, women do what they've learned to do: code-switch. They perform a version of leadership that is slightly flatter, harder, less themselves. And they do it every day — in every meeting, on every call — and the energy it consumes is extraordinary.
Simon Sinek's argument in Leaders Eat Last is that empathy is not a soft addition to good leadership. It is the mechanism through which trust is built, retained, and converted into performance. Leaders who genuinely care about the people in their teams — who listen, who notice, who ask — create the conditions where people do their best work. Not because they're being managed, but because they feel safe enough to.
Caring about your people and making good business decisions are not in tension. They are the same thing.
The qualities women are most frequently asked to suppress are the very ones Sinek identifies as foundational to sustainable, high-performing organisations. The irony is not subtle.
Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO has built an entire platform on the proposition that authentic, emotionally honest leadership is not a soft alternative to high performance, it is how high performance is sustained over time. Brené Brown's appearance on the show spoke directly to this: the relationship between courage, trust and power, and why leaders who show up fully tend to build teams that outlast everyone else.
This is not new thinking. It's thinking that hasn't yet reached every boardroom, every performance review conversation where a woman is told her directness is a problem, or her empathy is a liability.
What Change Actually Looks Like
For organisations, the question is practical: what does your culture actually reward in practice? Not in the values statement — in who gets promoted, in who gets described as leadership material, and in whose emotional responses are read as passion versus instability.
Some concrete starting points:
- Examine whether performance language is applied consistently across genders. If it isn't, your culture is doing the double bind's work for it.
- Name the double standard when you see it. Silence is alignment — and alignment with the wrong thing is still a choice.
- Create explicit frameworks for disagreement. The bat the ball rule works because it's known, consistent, and applies to everyone including the person at the top.
- Stop asking women to manage their expression. Start asking leaders to examine their assumptions.
- Invest in transition support for women stepping into leadership. The identity shift from technical expert to people leader is real, and coaching during this period pays for itself many times over.
For women navigating this while the culture catches up:
Your empathy is data. Your instincts about the room are information. The read you have on what's actually happening in your team — what's said and what isn't, what's working and what's going underground — is intelligence that most organisations haven't yet learned to name properly. That doesn't make it less real or less valuable.
The leaders who shaped me — the CEO who didn't need to be the smartest person in the room, the manager who batted the ball — gave me something I couldn't have articulated at the time. They showed me what it felt like to bring my whole self into a professional space and have it received as an asset, not a liability.
That's what I'm building at SPG Scientific Consulting. Not a programme that helps women shrink themselves more efficiently into spaces that were never designed for them. A space where the women who've been told they're too much, or not enough, can find out what they're actually capable of.
The Close
A man who is decisive is a leader. A woman who is decisive is a lot. Until the culture fully catches up, and it will, because the evidence is too clear and the cost too high to ignore indefinitely. We need women who know that their decisive and their empathetic, their direct and their caring, are not contradictions. They are the whole toolkit.
You don't need permission to lead like yourself. You need to find the rooms that deserve it.