Representation at the Top Begins With the Pathway Below

Leadership representation is often discussed at the moment of appointment. A board notices that few women are present. A church realises that women carry much of the ministry but hold little decision authority. A college celebrates high female enrolment while its senior academic pipeline remains narrow. The institution then searches for an exceptional candidate and calls the problem solved when one is found.

That approach begins too late. Representation at the top is the accumulated result of what happens below: who receives stretch assignments, whose work is visible, who is sponsored into consequential rooms, how criteria are written, whether care responsibilities are treated as disqualifying, whose mistakes are recoverable and who is presumed ready before the evidence is examined.

A Harvard Business Review article published on 10 July returns to a remarkable research sequence. In 1965, HBR surveyed 2,000 executives about women in management. Researchers revisited closely related questions in 1985 and 2006, and the new article extends that long view. The original prejudice was explicit: many men judged the executive suite inappropriate for women regardless of competence. The language has changed substantially, but the value of the sixty-year comparison is that it asks whether institutions have changed as deeply as their public vocabulary.

Leaders should therefore move beyond asking whether they personally support women in leadership. The governance question is whether the institution's operating…