The women I have worked with over the last five years were not held back by a lack of skill. They were held back by a lack of structures that made their skills visible and their confidence possible.
I did not understand that distinction clearly when I started. I thought the work of supporting women at work was about mentoring them: helping them get better at the things they already did, giving them frameworks and advice and encouragement. That is part of it. But it is not the whole picture.
The fuller picture came into focus through a series of conversations, initiatives, and small moments that I did not originally frame as leadership work at all. I thought I was just trying to make the environment better. It was only later, when I looked back at what those efforts had added up to, that I understood what they actually were.
What Listening Revealed
When I co-founded the Women Welfare Volunteers initiative at SatSure, the intent was simple: create a space where women could talk openly about what was and was not working. Open Door Days, where women could come and speak confidentially about workplace concerns, career questions, or simply things that were weighing on them.
What those conversations revealed, consistently, was not a capability gap. It was a confidence gap. Women who were doing excellent work and did not know it. Women who had strong opinions in meetings but waited to be invited to share them. Women who had navigated significant challenges, maternity leave, career transitions, difficult team dynamics, and come back unsure of whether they still belonged in the rooms they had previously occupied.
They did not need to be taught skills. They needed structures that made it safe to use the skills they already had.
The Things That Actually Helped
Some of the things that helped were not what I would have predicted.
Encouraging women to present at internal knowledge-sharing sessions mattered more than I expected. Not because the presentations themselves were the point, but because standing in front of a room and explaining something you know deeply does something to your relationship with your own expertise. It makes it real in a way that doing the work quietly does not.
Declining to speak on someone's behalf, and coaching them to speak for themselves instead, mattered. Even when it was uncomfortable for them in the moment. Even when they would have preferred I stepped in.
Advocating during promotion conversations, bringing evidence of someone's impact into rooms they were not in, mattered. Not because women needed someone to fight their battles but because the systems for recognising contribution are not always designed to surface the kind of contribution women often make.
And the smaller things mattered too. An office that had what people needed without them having to ask for it. Meeting structures that created space for quieter voices. Hiring practices that took seriously the structural reasons why certain candidates might not show up in conventional pipelines.
None of these things are dramatic. That is partly the point. The confidence gap is not closed by one big intervention. It is closed by many small ones, accumulated over time, that collectively say: you belong here, your work matters, and you do not have to earn the right to take up space.
Does Any of This Count?
Writing this, I am aware of a question some people will have. Does creating a swear jar or running an open door session or coaching someone before a presentation constitute leadership? Or is it just being decent?
I asked myself that question while putting together a formal application recently that required me to articulate what I had done over five years in the area of women's leadership. The process of writing it made me see, more clearly than I had before, that yes. It counts.
It counts because the women who came through those open door conversations went back into their roles with something they did not have before. It counts because the woman who interviewed internally for a PM role and got honest feedback has a clearer sense of her own direction. It counts because the team member who presented her own work to a room full of senior stakeholders knows something about herself that she did not know before.
These are not grand gestures. They do not make headlines. Nobody will give you an award for declining to speak on someone's behalf when it would have been easier to just do it yourself.
But they matter. And they accumulate. And the women whose confidence was built, even partially, by having a structure that saw them and supported them, they go on to do the same for other people.
That is how culture actually changes. Not through policy. Through the small, consistent, sometimes invisible choices of people who decide that making the environment better is part of their job, even when it is not in their job description.
Capability was never the issue. Creating the conditions where that capability could be seen, exercised, and trusted: that is the work. And it is worth doing even when nobody is watching.