There is a telling body of research, much of it assembled by organisational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, which points to an uncomfortable pattern in how we choose leaders. We consistently confuse confidence with competence. We select people who project authority and overlook people who actually have it. The result is a persistent over-representation of a particular type: assertive, self-promoting, and frequently wrong.

The irony is that the traits most associated with effective leadership — empathy, intellectual humility, the ability to hold uncertainty without pretending otherwise — are more commonly found in women. Not exclusively, not universally, but measurably more often. Which means that by running a selection process optimised for the wrong signals, organisations are routinely passing over better candidates.

What the pandemic revealed

COVID-19 gave us a rare natural experiment in leadership styles under pressure. Countries led by women — New Zealand, Finland, Germany, Denmark — were broadly more effective in their early responses. Not because female leaders are magical, but because the approach those leaders took — transparent communication, honest acknowledgement of uncertainty, decisive action without false bravado — proved more effective than the alternative. Countries whose leaders performed certainty they didn't have fared considerably worse.

This matters not as a gender argument but as a competence argument. Jacinda Ardern and Angela Merkel were not effective because they were women. They were effective because of specific behaviours that happened to be more common among women in leadership roles.

Role models and what they signal

Leadership is partly about visible modelling. When Queen Margrethe II of Denmark built a monarchy that combined deep tradition with genuine accessibility, she demonstrated something worth studying: that authority and approachability are not opposites. When Margrethe Vestager spent a decade regulating digital monopolies with both rigour and transparency, she showed that holding power doesn't require performing dominance.

These examples matter because they expand people's idea of what leadership looks like. Role models are not just inspirational — they are definitional. They change what people believe is possible.

The mistake to avoid

None of this is an argument for gender quotas that select for compliance rather than capability. The goal is not to replace one form of lazy selection with another. There are plenty of women who have adapted to alpha-male leadership norms and lead exactly as badly as their male counterparts would. Selecting someone based on gender while ignoring the actual competencies is, to borrow Chamorro-Premuzic's framing, just putting a man in a different kind of suit.

The goal is to change what we measure. To assess candidates on the qualities that predict effective leadership — emotional intelligence, the ability to develop others, willingness to acknowledge doubt — rather than on the performance of confidence.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron are worth mentioning here as examples of male leaders who have embodied many of these traits effectively. The point was never that only women can lead well. The point is that the traits we need more of happen to be undervalued, and they happen to be more prevalent in women. Fixing that is not a women's issue. It is a competence issue.

What this means in practice

Changing leadership selection requires changing the criteria explicitly — because gut feel will keep defaulting to the same signals it always has. This means structured assessments that measure relevant competencies, promotion panels that have explicitly committed to evaluating substance over style, and a conscious effort to examine what traits are being rewarded in performance reviews.

It is slower than it sounds. Culture moves at the speed of behaviour, not of policy. But organisations that get this right tend to build leadership teams that are genuinely better — not more balanced in a tokenistic sense, but more effective in the ways that actually matter.