Why "Women in Leadership" Is the Wrong Question

Every time I am on a panel about women in leadership, someone asks a version of the same question: are women uniquely positioned to lead in the AI era?

I understand why the question gets asked. But I think it is set up wrong. And the way it is framed does a disservice to leaders of both genders.

Two gaps, not one

The most honest version of this conversation starts with two education gaps, one on each side.

Women, in many educational systems and family contexts, receive a message early that closes certain doors: you are not the math person, the technical person, the strategic analyst. The message is rarely explicit. It arrives in the way a teacher calls on boys more readily. In the way the girl who is drawn to physics is quietly steered toward biology. In the way analytical confidence is simply not cultivated with the same intention. The result: a population of highly capable women who have closed off cognitive frameworks their brains could absolutely have built.

Men receive a different version of the closing message: feelings are secondary. Long-range thinking about people, about community, about what happens to those who are not in the room, about the downstream human consequences of a decision: these get deprioritized in favor of immediate performance and measurable output. The empathic and ethical dimension of leadership gets trained out.

Both are education gaps. Neither is fixed in nature.

What the AI era specifically demands

When you are directing multiple AI agents, evaluating their outputs, deciding what to trust and what to question, and integrating technical capability with ethical judgment, you need both sides of the toolkit.

You need the analytical foundation to evaluate what the agents produce. You need the empathic and ethical judgment to understand what those outputs should be used for, and what they leave out.

A leader who has only one of these was manageable in the previous era. It is not manageable in this one. The AI era does not make empathy more important than analysis, or analysis more important than empathy. It makes both non-negotiable at the same time.

The confidence finding

Research from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon, published at CHI 2025 and drawing on 319 knowledge workers, found that the strongest protective factor against AI-induced decline in critical thinking is self-confidence in your own cognitive ability.

Women, on average, carry less of this confidence. Not because their cognition is weaker. Because the education gap above is real, and being told you are not the analytical one accumulates over time. The confidence deficit is not a personal failing. It is an educational outcome.

This matters because the leaders most at risk of deferring to the tool rather than directing it are the ones who have been taught, implicitly or explicitly, that their own thinking is the weaker link. Closing the analytical gap for women is not only a justice argument. It is a performance argument.

The reframe

This is not a gender conversation. It is an education conversation.

Sponsor the analytical woman. Give her the technical project, the financial model, the strategic mandate. Let her build the confidence that comes from doing rigorous work and seeing it land.

Sponsor the empathic man. Give him the people-first brief, the ethical review, the stakeholder complexity that requires holding more than the output. Let him build the confidence that comes from navigating human complexity well.

Both are development conversations. Neither is a conversation about inherent capacity.

One asymmetry worth naming

There is one asymmetry in this era that is worth being precise about.

One of the specific risks of deep AI integration is what I would describe as meshing with the machine: the gradual loss of attunement to feeling, to the people in the room, to the signals that are not in the data. The MIT research on alpha and beta weakening under frequent AI use points to a physiological mechanism for this. When the brain offloads internal processing, it does not only lose analytical depth. It loses the quieter signals too.

The capacity that guards against this, presence, attunement, reading what is not being said, was historically trained out of men and, in many contexts, protected in women. Not because women are more intuitive by nature. Because the social and professional expectations placed on women often required them to maintain it.

In this particular era, that capacity is under unusual pressure. And the people who were historically penalized for developing it may now be structurally advantaged in maintaining it.

This is not "women are better leaders." It is something more specific: one educated capacity is under the specific pressure this era creates, and the educational history of the two genders means women may enter that pressure with a larger reserve.

What this doesn't change

That asymmetry sharpens the argument for closing both gaps. It does not replace it.

Women with strong analytical foundations and strong empathic foundations are not just resilient to one failure mode. They are complete. The same is true for men who have done the work to close both sides.

The complete leader is not a female archetype or a male archetype. It is a human one. And it is available to anyone willing to build it.

Why this matters now

For most of history, an incomplete leader was a bounded problem. The analytically thin leader made slower, narrower calls. The empathy-thin leader damaged the people in the room. Real costs, but contained.

AI removes the containment. A leader now directs not only people but systems that act at scale and speed. The gap that once cost you a single bad decision now gets amplified by a tool that will execute it a thousand times before lunch.

And the two gaps fail in precise, opposite ways against that tool. The leader without the analytical foundation cannot evaluate what the machine produces. Confident, fluent, wrong output is exactly what they are least equipped to catch, so they defer to it, and the people taught that their own thinking is the weaker link defer the most. The leader without the empathic and ethical foundation can judge the output but aims it at the wrong ends, optimizing quickly for things that should not be optimized, with no felt sense of who it lands on.

At the same time, the tool is eroding both capacities. Analytical depth thins under cognitive debt. Attunement thins as we mesh with the machine. So this is the rare moment when the demand for completeness is rising and the supply is being drained at once.

That is why this is not a fairness footnote. In the AI era, closing both gaps is what decides whether a leader directs the intelligence or is quietly directed by it.

The real question

I closed both gaps the slow way. Electrical engineering gave me the analytical architecture; years in sales I did not want built the part the engineering degree had not. Then an MBA, then a company. I did not do it alone. I was mentored and encouraged to keep closing both gaps, over time and often uncomfortably, and it changed what was possible.

That path is open to anyone who decides to walk it, at any age. The young people we are forming become adults who can build what they were not given, and those of us already in leadership, hiring, and mentorship have a real role to play in making it easier to find. But the first move is simpler than any of that. Stop asking whether women are uniquely suited to lead in the AI age. Ask whether each of us, of either gender, has built both halves of the leader this era now requires. That is the question. The other one was always the wrong one.