One giant step for womankind… and then an unexpected drop-off.
This is the reality of the women’s leadership labyrinth.
But here is what I’ve came to know after spending a career in aerospace and completing my doctoral research on the women who have reached the top of the most extreme profession on Earth: the labyrinth is real, and while we must champion systemic change, waiting for the system to evolve is a losing strategy. The path through the leadership labyrinth is built from countless small, deliberate acts that happen in community.
I spent the last couple years studying 25 women astronauts (more than a fifth of every woman who has ever left the planet) through primary interviews, oral histories, and other secondary data, on the premise that if you want to understand how a high-performing woman comes to believe she can lead, in a boardroom, an operating room, or a C-suite, study the ones who had to believe it against the longest odds there are. We can learn a lot from these extraordinary women, and here’s what they taught me.
Leadership is not a skill developed in 12-week program or a journey that begins with a management title. Leadership development, in women especially, is a lifelong process of building self-efficacy – belief in oneself and their capability to do what they intend to – and it runs through five domains most women pass through: childhood, school, friendship, the workplace, and partner relationships.
Finally, the women astronauts nearly all reported that one of the most consequential leadership decisions they made was who they choose to build a life with. A supportive partner sustains the confidence of even the busiest leader, whereas an unsupportive one can dismantle it, particularly in early motherhood. The women I interviewed were blunt: encouragement from a partner without the action of problem solving and sharing labor is worthless. Yet with real support, motherhood made them better leaders. Despite countless challenges navigating both motherhood and being an astronaut, Cady Coleman realized best thing she could show her son was a mother carrying out a mission she was made for.
The conclusions from these findings are both uncomfortable and freeing. While women are going to continue to navigate a labyrinth that is slow to evolve, developing women leaders is not an elusive challenge for people ops teams to improve in a silo. Developing women leaders is a parent’s job, a teacher’s, a friend’s, a manager’s, and a partner’s.
The first woman reached the Moon because, for decades, people continued to tell a young Christina that her interests were valid, she was capable of pursing her dreams, and supported her along the way.
The walls of the labyrinth will move when they move, but a woman’s belief in her ability to persist and navigate can be developed and improved right now in yourself and in the women and girls in your own life, be they your employees, your students, your friends or your daughters.
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