What leadership looks like—when you’re a woman

She was told she wasn’t assertive enough to lead. Then when she took initiative, she was told she was too aggressive. She was asked to mentor new hires, mediate difficult conversations, and manage an entire internal project—but when she requested a formal leadership title, she was told she didn’t yet “act the part.” She asked what that meant. They said, “It’s just a feeling.”

This isn’t a confidence issue. It’s not a personality mismatch. And it’s not about needing more leadership coaching. This is a design flaw in the system itself—one that shows up in early-stage companies, fast-scaling teams, and startups that pride themselves on being progressive. Rebecca Schaumberg, a professor at the Wharton School, doesn’t mince words: leadership is defined differently for women than it is for men. And the difference isn’t only in perception. It’s structural, behavioral, and invisible—until it breaks.

In Schaumberg’s research, women leaders aren’t just judged more harshly. They’re judged by different rules entirely. Leadership behaviors—assertiveness, vision, decisiveness—are interpreted differently when coming from women. Assertiveness becomes abrasiveness. Vision is questioned as ambition without follow-through. Decisiveness is seen as coldness. On the flip side, communal or empathetic behavior—encouraging peers, sharing credit, defusing conflict—is rarely interpreted as leadership when performed by women. It’s seen as support work. Invisible labor. Helpful, but not promotable.

What this means in real terms is that many early-stage teams end up operating with two separate and unequally valued tracks of leadership. One is formal, high-visibility, and rewarded with decision-making power. The other is informal, essential to the team’s cohesion, and quietly relied on—but structurally ignored when titles, promotions, and influence are distributed. In most teams, the latter disproportionately falls to women. That’s not just a gender equity issue. It’s a velocity problem. If you build your company on invisible labor, the system slows down. If you reward visibility over effectiveness, you start mistaking style for substance. And if your best leaders are carrying the weight without the title, they will eventually walk.

Early teams don’t set out to build unfair systems. But that’s exactly what happens when leadership is left to emerge “naturally.” When expectations aren’t defined, when decision rights are granted inconsistently, and when power structures are assumed instead of designed, bias creeps in through the cracks. And in startup culture, where everyone is moving fast, it’s easy to confuse bias for instinct.

In startups, leadership is often framed as a set of visible traits—confidence, charisma, clarity under pressure. But those traits are socially coded. In many cultures and contexts, a confident woman is still read as aggressive. A soft-spoken man is read as thoughtful. A woman who says “no” is difficult. A man who says “no” is decisive. The problem isn’t that these interpretations exist. It’s that early teams don’t interrogate them. They rely on shorthand. They promote based on instinct. They give power to the person who speaks first, instead of the one who’s been quietly solving real problems. And over time, those decisions become patterns. Those patterns become norms. And those norms become the system.

When this happens, leadership becomes performative. Not in a malicious way—but in the sense that only certain behaviors are recognized and rewarded. If you’re not loud, if you’re not directive, if you’re not visibly pushing your agenda, you’re not seen as a leader—even if the team relies on you to function. That’s how women end up running the engine room of a startup but still get passed over for captain. They’re not invisible. They’re just misread by a system that hasn’t been designed to see them.

This misreading creates real consequences. It affects who gets funded, who gets promoted, who stays engaged, and who burns out. Schaumberg’s work shows that women often internalize these mismatches as personal failures. They believe they need to “develop a stronger presence” or “work on tone” or “build more confidence.” But in truth, what they’re up against isn’t a lack of ability—it’s a system that doesn’t know how to register their leadership in the first place.

When women leaders try to shift their behavior to meet these expectations, they often find themselves caught in a double bind. If they’re too assertive, they face backlash. If they’re too accommodating, they’re overlooked. And if they try to thread the needle—being strong but not cold, warm but not weak—they often find that the feedback just shifts again. The bar isn’t higher. It’s moving.

Founders and team designers need to understand that this isn’t just a bias issue. It’s a systems issue. If your leadership model relies on visibility, projection, or performative confidence, it will always skew toward people who are already coded for authority. If your feedback loops are informal or vague, women will receive more personality-based feedback and less outcome-oriented feedback. If your team doesn’t distinguish between emotional labor and strategic labor, you will reward the wrong behaviors and miss the right leaders.

To fix this, early-stage teams need to stop relying on emergence and start building intentional leadership pathways. That starts with defining what leadership actually is. Not what it looks like, but what it enables. A leader is someone who creates clarity, unblocks work, aligns the team, and delivers repeatable outcomes. That can look like many different things. It can look like quiet systems work, or strong facilitation, or heads-down execution. What matters is the system impact—not the style.

Once you define leadership functionally, you need to make the criteria visible. That means mapping leadership responsibilities to actual outcomes. Who owns decision rights? Who is accountable for delivery, not just coordination? Who gets to say yes, and who only gets to recommend? These are structural questions, not personality judgments. And when the structure is clear, bias has less room to hide.

Equally important is building better feedback systems. If women are consistently receiving vague or personality-driven feedback, they are being denied the data they need to grow. Effective feedback is behavior-based, tied to outcomes, and actionable. It should focus on what worked, what didn’t, and why—not how someone “came across.” And it should be delivered with consistency across gender, personality type, and role.

Early teams should also track leadership progression, not just performance. Many women in startups end up in glue roles—coordinators, informal team therapists, middle-layer fixers. These roles are crucial to keeping the company running. But they often don’t come with title progression, power, or recognition. That’s not sustainable. If someone is carrying cross-functional weight, they should have decision rights. If someone is leading delivery, they should have visibility into strategy. And if someone is shaping team behavior, they should have a seat at the leadership table.

This isn’t about tokenism or equity optics. It’s about designing a company that can scale without burning out your most effective operators. Leadership shouldn’t be a performance. It should be a function. And functions need structure.

One of the most powerful questions a founder can ask is this: Who on my team is already being looked to for leadership, but hasn’t been formally empowered to lead? If you can answer that honestly—and design around it—you will unlock velocity and trust in ways that no org chart tweak or culture workshop ever could.

The reason this issue shows up so often in startups is because early-stage environments reward familiarity. Founders move fast. They rely on instinct. They trust what feels like leadership. And what feels like leadership is often what they’ve seen before—usually male, usually confident, usually loud. But leadership isn’t a vibe. It’s a responsibility. If you don’t define it clearly and structurally, you’ll replicate legacy patterns by default. And your team will suffer for it.

Leadership must be deconstructed, not just celebrated. It must be taught as a role, not assumed as a trait. It must be backed by systems, not left to perception. And it must be inclusive not just in theory, but in structure—in how power is distributed, how decisions are made, how trust is earned, and how people are held accountable.

Rebecca Schaumberg’s research doesn’t point to a crisis of confidence among women. It points to a failure of recognition. Women are already leading—often more effectively, more empathetically, and with greater complexity than their peers. The system just hasn’t caught up. But founders can build differently. And they must.

Because the future of your company doesn’t just depend on your product or your pitch. It depends on whether your leadership model can actually see the people who are already making it work.