Leadership is often encoded as male. Why?

The only reason we encoded leadership attributes as masculine in modern history was that men were the only ones allowed to lead.

Obviously that was disastrous for women but it also did men a great disservice.

Patriarchy is bad for everyone.

Limiting the ways we can show up - and bullying other people out of their space and power - is not the way to bring out the best in any leader or organization.

And also having a literal race to see which billionaire has the biggest rocket is just embarrassing.

Whenever you Google Image Search “CEO” or “negotiation” or even “leadership”, you tend to see masculine versions of power - or even just men! And with the advent of AI, its only gotten worse.

But it’s important to remember that just because most of the public communicators of the past were men, doesn’t mean that they ‘own’ the way you show up - as a woman or a man or a non-binary person today.