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Who do you picture in the CEO’s chair?
Picture this, you walk into an all-team meeting with your CEO set to deliver the year-end update. Business is thriving, everyone is happy, and your CEO has just announced that everyone is receiving a year-end bonus. Next, your Chief People Officer delivers an update on the recent employee engagement survey, engagement is high, people are motivated…
Who did you visualize when thinking of the CEO? What about the Chief People Officer? If it’s a male and female respectively, you’re likely not alone. More often that not when I do a similar exercise when facilitating training, its around 70-80% of participants think like this. It’s also okay to admit that. Who we visualize in different roles are based on our experiences. This is not random, these perceptions reflect societal norms and historical patterns in leadership representation, shaping assumptions of who belongs where. Our biases impact who we develop for leadership positions and promote. This blog outlines where traditional leadership models fall short and how we can create real pathways for equity.
Unconscious Bias: The Silent Barrier
How our experiences influence our perceptions and assumptions can lead us to develop programs that are unconsciously inequitable. My focus here is on leadership development. I cite one very important statistic to help frame the discussion; that 11% of Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO (as of June 2025).
While progress has been made with more women in CEO positions and boardrooms, structural inequities persist, particularly in how leadership programs define success. We need to ask why participation is still disproportionate to workforce representation (the workforce has been relatively gender-balanced for at least 35 years now). My opinion is that the root-cause of this issue is that unconscious bias in leadership development programs perpetuates systemic inequities, even when unintentional. There are subtle elements that can be embedded in programs that highlight the leadership qualities traditionally associated with males.
Putting Leadership Programs Under the Microscope
In my line of work, I am in a unique position to work closely with leadership teams, understanding their needs, and identifying those important drivers of leadership success. I’ve also had to realize that even some of the programs I’ve developed myself are part of the problem and have negative impacts on equity (albeit unintended). Part of the way to fix the issue is to acknowledge that unconscious bias exists, understand it, and then find a way to mitigate how it impacts decision making. This is based on my own experience, reflection of programs I’ve developed, and observations of dozens of leadership teams.
Real-World Impacts of Biased Expectations
What comes to mind right now as you read this article about what qualities or traits are most valued for a CEO? I hear words such as assertiveness and decisiveness, which can be male-coded language. I’m not exactly saying these are bad qualities for a CEO either. However, an issue is that they are perceived a different way when demonstrated by males and females. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly.
How about assertiveness? A male CEO enforcing a decision is seen as “strong leadership”. However, a female can be perceived as holding too high a standard or lacking empathy when saying the exact same thing in the exact same way. I tested this before. I asked a female leader on my team to communicate a decision. It was met with hostility by the person receiving it. When I was speaking to them about their complaint (after they had mentioned this leader was “being difficult”), I copied the same message word for word and sent it back to the (stating that this is what I was trying to convey). The exact same message was met with appreciation for my level of tact. I’ve seen the same thing play out many times over.
Redefining Leadership
So….what can we do?
From a leadership program design perspective, programs should broaden the definition of effective leadership to value collaboration, empathy, and adaptability alongside decisiveness and strategic thinking. Redefining these programs isn’t just an equity issue, it’s a necessity for long-term business success. Research shows that companies with diverse leadership teams outperform peers on profitability and innovation.
The following example is from my lived experience and I’d like to demonstrate how we can rethink the desired leaderships qualities.
Driving results is common leadership expectation. There is nothing wrong in expecting this of your CEO and prioritizing it in a talent development plan, since we kind of need the CEO to make the business viable. But it’s the path to those results is where I see bias. I’ve seen leadership programs value behaviours such as “pushing through obstacles to get the job done”. This can favour (perhaps inadvertently) those employees with more access to resources. A male who takes initiative to get results is given credit for “courage under fire”. If a female acts in the same way, they “need to stay in their lane”. Resilience is undoubtedly important, but when presented without a balance of adaptability or emotional intelligence, it may signal a preference for traditionally male-associated perseverance over collaboration. The underlying behaviour can be reframed as such as part of a leadership competency model: “Demonstrates resilience and adaptability to achieve results” or “Maintains focus and drives progress by overcoming challenges collaboratively”.
Expanding the Leadership Lens and Looking Beyond Quotas
As leadership development continues to evolve, it is important that these programs not only have gender-neutral language but also expand on what constitutes effective leadership. For example, empathy, perseverance, and emotional intelligence can often be underrepresented in traditional leadership programs. It is important to balance programs with more relational skills, incorporate diverse leadership styles, and normalize vulnerability in leadership.
The way to get more women into CEO roles is not by setting quotas. It’s about fundamentally challenging our thinking in a grassroots way. That means revisiting the qualities and behaviours that we reward, questioning whether we overemphasize certain traits, and redefining what effective leadership looks like. This will broaden our leadership lens, open the door for more women to advance, and also build leadership teams that reflect today’s diverse workforce. Quotas might change the numbers, but a different mindset will change the system.
I can appreciate that this opinion may be taken with a grain of salt when it comes from a 40-year-old white male who hasn’t experienced the same career roadblocks. I can at least point out where I think there are blind spots and how we can create some reflection points to chart the path forward. When I’ve analyzed leadership development programs, they look fairly equitable from the 40,000 birds-eye view. However, as they say, the devil is in the details.
Practical Tools
Gender Decoders analyzes the language in your job descriptions or leadership program documents to identify words that are subtly coded as masculine or feminine. The tool highlights these gender-coded terms, allowing you to adjust the language to be more neutral and inclusive. A widely recognized tool is Gender Decoder for Job Ads (by Kat Matfield).
https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com
Future Articles
While this article primarily focuses on gender and the impact of gender bias in leadership development programs, it’s important to acknowledge that bias doesn’t exist in isolation. Intersectionality adds further layers of complexity. We’ll explore intersectionality in greater depth in a future blog, as it deserves its own focused discussion.
About the Author
Greg Hussey is a human resources professional with 15 years of progressive, diverse experience. He has a passion for helping organizations develop their people, working closely in building a culture of high-engagement and performance through people and culture initiatives.
Greg specializes in partnering with executive leadership teams to deliver impactful people strategies. He is passionate about building high-performance cultures and thrives on delivering HR programs that are strategic and operationally effective. Known for his proactive, results-driven approach, Greg enjoys project-based work, particularly in areas such as employee engagement, organizational development, and strategic planning. Whether he’s leading an HR transformation initiative or supporting leadership through change management, Greg brings insight, structure, and energy to every engagement.
Greg holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Co-op) from Memorial University of Newfoundland and an MBA from the University of Alberta’s School of Business. He is also a Chartered Professional in Human Resources (CPHR), reflecting his commitment to continuous development in the HR field.
Keep an eye out for our future blog posts, where we’ll address relevant and current trends in the field of people and culture.