What women sacrifice to become leaders
One thing we hardly address is that a woman doesn’t stop being a daughter, a wife, or a mother the day she takes a senior role.
What you need to know:
- We often talk about women’s leadership as a numbers problem; there are very few women in boardrooms, too few in Parliament and too few company executives. This is true and it matters.
- But it also lets us avoid a harder question, one that came up in that room without anyone quite naming it directly: what did it actually cost these women, at home, to get where they are?
I recently spent close to three hours in a room with some of Kenya’s most senior women leaders; women who run companies, sit on boards and hold public office. We were there to talk about leadership, the usual territory: mentorship, visibility, confidence and opportunity. But somewhere along the conversation someone mentioned home. And after that, the conversation in my head stayed there; less about titles and more about what it actually takes to hold a career and a household at once.
We often talk about women’s leadership as a numbers problem; there are very few women in boardrooms, too few in Parliament and too few company executives. This is true and it matters. But it also lets us avoid a harder question, one that came up in that room without anyone quite naming it directly: what did it actually cost these women, at home, to get where they are?
Also read: Motherhood in the corner office
One thing we hardly address is that a woman doesn’t stop being a daughter, a wife, or a mother the day she takes a senior role. The job is just an addition to everything else she was already carrying. And somewhere in that stacking, something has to give. For some women, it is a partner who reorganises his own career while for others, it is a mother or sister who quietly steps into the gap. Yet for a few, there is no one, and they simply carry both loads themselves, without much fuss, because that’s what the situation demands.
Often, we say mentorship, networks and confidence can fix the gender leadership gap, and they honestly do. However, none of that solves the actual question of who for example, collects a sick child from school on the morning of a board meeting. Or who runs the house while a woman is away for three weeks on business. That is a logistic problem, not a confidence one, and it still lands on women far more often than it does on men, even the most senior and accomplished ones.
Men make sacrifices for their careers too, of course. But the sacrifices don’t land the same way. A man moving up is rarely seen as a threat to his home life. A woman’s rise is, however, often questioned, sometimes by the people around her, and sometimes by herself, in the quiet voice that makes her second-guess her own decisions. She is the one asked how she "balances it all," as though success is something she must constantly explain. Hardly is a man asked to account for his household before he is congratulated on a promotion.
I think this is where a lot of the leadership gap actually starts; not in the boardroom, but years earlier, in ordinary decisions made quietly inside a marriage or a household about whose career gets to come first when something has to give. Those decisions rarely get revisited once they’re made. They become part of a household routine, and by the time an opportunity shows up years later, the pattern’ is already set; usually without anyone consciously deciding it should be that way.
I’m not arguing that women shouldn’t lead. Each woman in that room was proof you can hold ambition and family together. But I left thinking we often overlook an important part of these women’s stories. Almost every senior woman I have interacted with eventually speaks about someone who made sacrifices behind the scenes; a mother, a sister, a partner or another loved one who stepped in so she could step forward. Without that unseen support, many of these leadership stories would have unfolded very differently.
So maybe the real question isn’t only how we get more women into leadership. It could be how we get more households and more partners to treat a woman’s ambition as worth rearranging life around, the way we’ve always done for men, almost without thinking about it. Until that shifts at home, I suspect the numbers we keep quoting in boardrooms will keep telling us only half the story.
