Let me start with a question I have asked myself many times over. What is it that women actually do? Not in a dismissive sense, quite the opposite. I mean it in the fullest, most honest way. Because if you really sit with that question, the answer is almost laughably vast. We grow humans inside our bodies, we birth them, we feed them, we raise them. We manage households that run like small enterprises. We remember everyone's doctor's appointments, school deadlines, aging parents' medications, and what needs to be restocked in the fridge all simultaneously, all invisibly. And then, after doing all of that, we show up at work, at community meetings, at volunteer drives, and we lead. We contribute. We build.
I am not saying this to earn applause. I am saying it because for years, this extraordinary capacity was framed as something ordinary. Expected, even. The ability to hold ten things at once, to feel what a room needs before anyone has spoken, to anticipate, to adapt, to nurture while simultaneously strategising one of this was seen as a leadership skill. It was just called "being a woman."
Well. I think it is time we reframe that.
The Home is Where Leadership Begins
I know something about navigating impossible circumstances. At 24, with a three-month-old I could not hold, I was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery, therapy, and months of recovery followed. And through all of it, there was a kind of quiet coordination happening that I can only describe as deeply feminine not because men cannot do it, but because I had been training for it my entire life without realising I was training. The capacity to keep going, to manage what is in front of you, to hold others steady while you are falling apart yourself these are not small things. And they are not separate from leadership. They are leadership.
Running a home is not "just" running a home. It is project management. It is crisis response. It is emotional labour and logistical precision and financial planning and conflict resolution, all rolled into something that does not come with a job title or a salary. Women who manage families are already leaders. They have been leading all along. The office, the boardroom, the community committee these are just different stages for the same skill set.
The question was never whether women could lead. The question was whether the world was paying attention.
Emotional Intelligence Is Not a Soft Skill. It Is the Skill.
For the longest time, emotional intelligence was the attribute that polite people mentioned in performance reviews before moving on to something they considered more serious. It was the qualification that came with an unspoken asterisk nice to have, but not quite leadership material.
I disagree with that, rather strongly.
The ability to read a room. To understand what someone is not saying. To know when a team is burning out before they know it themselves. To deliver hard feedback in a way that a person can actually receive and act on. To hold space for complexity for the colleague going through a divorce and still needing to deliver a project, for the community member who is brilliant but overlooked, for the young woman who does not yet see her own potential. These are not peripheral skills. These are the skills that determine whether a team coheres or fractures, whether a community grows or stagnates, whether institutions transform or simply persist.
Research increasingly affirms this. A McKinsey study found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report consistently shows a strong correlation between gender parity in leadership and national economic performance. These are not coincidences. When emotional intelligence, empathy, and collaborative thinking are elevated in leadership culture as they tend to be when women lead the outcomes improve for everyone.
Women have been cultivating emotional intelligence across generations. Not because we are wired differently, but because the world asked it of us. We were required to read moods, manage relationships, navigate power without holding it. What was once a survival mechanism has become, in the context of modern leadership, an extraordinary advantage. And yet we have been apologising for it, softening it, leading with our credentials before daring to mention that we actually care deeply about the people we work with.
I stopped apologising for it. I encourage every woman I know to do the same.
Where Women Lead: What the World Is Showing Us
There is something that shifts when women move into community leadership. Not because men cannot lead communities well many do. But because women bring a particular lens: the long view, the inclusive instinct, the awareness that no community thrives when parts of it are left behind. We tend to ask who is not in the room. We tend to think about the child who will inherit the decision we are making today. We tend to build consensus rather than simply assert authority.
The evidence is not anecdotal. Across the world, countries that have committed to women in leadership have seen measurable, meaningful change.
Rwanda presents perhaps the most striking example. After the devastation of the 1994 genocide, women stepped into the vacuum of leadership and rebuilt. Today, Rwanda’s parliament is over 61% women the highest proportion in the world. And the country’s trajectory on healthcare, education, and economic recovery has been remarkable by any measure. Women did not just participate in rebuilding Rwanda. They led it. Correlation does not always mean causation, but when the pattern is this consistent, it demands attention.
India: The Paradox We Must Hold Honestly
And then there is India. A country I love deeply, a civilisation of breathtaking richness and complexity and one that holds a paradox worth sitting with.
We worship Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity. We invoke Durga, the warrior, the protector, the one who slays what cannot be tolerated. We revere Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and wisdom. The feminine is not marginalised in our spiritual imagination it is worshipped as the supreme source of power, abundance, and intelligence.
And yet. India ranks 129th out of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (2024). Women constitute only around 13% of members of the Lok Sabha. The gap between the goddess we honour and the woman we empower is, to put it plainly, significant.
The spirit is there. The potential is undeniable. When women lead, communities tend to become more human. More connected. Less transactional. That is not a small thing. In a world that is increasingly fragmented, increasingly digital, increasingly fast the capacity to create genuine human connection is not a nice-to-have. It is the thing that holds us together.
The Balance Question (And Why I Am Done Pretending It Is Simple)
People ask about work-life balance like there is a formula somewhere that nobody has shared with you yet. There is not. What there is, is a constant negotiation. A continuous recalibration. Some seasons you lean into work. Some seasons your family needs everything you have. Some seasons if you are me you are in a hospital for two weeks and all the carefully arranged pieces of your life need other people to hold them, and you discover with some humility and a lot of gratitude that they can.
What I have learned is that balance is not an achievement. It is a practice. And what women have that I think is genuinely undervalued is the capacity to hold multiple things simultaneously not sequentially, not one at a time, but all at once and to know, intuitively, which one needs the most attention right now. That is not multitasking in the shallow sense. That is a sophisticated, adaptive, moment-to-moment intelligence that we have honed across lifetimes.
The honest truth is that I have not always balanced things gracefully. I have dropped balls. I have been too much in one place and too little in another. What I have not done is stopped. Stopped trying, stopped contributing, stopped believing that what I bring matters. And I think that, refusal to stop is itself a kind of leadership.
Harmony Is Not the Absence of Conflict. It Is What Comes After.
There is a narrative that says women bring harmony to leadership and I want to be careful with that, because harmony can be misread as compliance. As smoothing things over. As the absence of challenge or discomfort.
That is not what I mean, and it is not what I have seen. The women I know who have made the greatest impact on their communities, their organisations, their families, are not the ones who kept the peace at all costs. They are the ones who named the difficult thing in the room. Who pushed back on the decision that nobody wanted to question. Who stayed in uncomfortable conversations instead of finding a polite way out. Harmony, the real kind, is not the starting point. It is what you build after you have had the courage to be honest.
When women are in leadership genuinely in it, not tokenistically placed in it organisations and communities tend to have that kind of harmony. Not because conflict disappears, but because there is enough emotional safety for people to speak, enough trust for disagreement to be productive, enough care in the room to make sure the resolution serves the whole and not just the loudest voice.
Closing: The World I Want to See
There is a quote from Anaïs Nin that I come back to often: "I see the world as I am." I wrote about it once because it has always felt true to me. We do not see the world objectively. We see it through everything we are everything we have survived, everything we have built, everything we have been asked to carry.
Women have been shaped by a particular kind of survival. By the expectation to do more than their share without claiming credit for it. By the demand to be competent and warm and self-effacing all at once. By the experience of being in rooms where their ideas circulated back to them through someone else's voice and were only then taken seriously.
And yet. We are still here. Still building. Still investing in communities, in institutions, in each other. Still raising children who we hope will inherit a more equitable world. Still showing up to the meeting, still mentoring the younger colleague, still asking the question that needed asking.
The world I want to see is one where women do not have to fight to be in the room. Where emotional intelligence is recognised as the sophisticated capability it is. Where leadership is judged by the quality of connection it fosters and the breadth of community it serves, not only by the decisiveness of its commands. Where the skills women have been practising their whole lives in homes, in kitchens, in hospital waiting rooms, in school corridors, in community halls are finally, unambiguously, called what they are: leadership.
We are not waiting to be empowered. We are already empowered. What we are waiting for what we are actively working towards is a world that knows how to recognise it.
About the Author
Geetha Solaraj is a compassionate Counselling Psychologist, Certified Neurodiversity Practitioner with many years of experience supporting individuals, and overcoming their life's challenges. Having personally navigated the complexities of a cancer diagnosis at the young age of 24, she understands the strength and resilience required to rebuild one's life. This first-hand experience and her work supporting clients to explore their emotions and develop coping strategies have deepened her commitment to helping others. She has recently published her book on this (link below). With a unique ability to press pause in the chaos of her own life, she adeptly wears many hats—be it expressing herself through art, curating style, dancing to the rhythm of life, or weaving words as a writer. Geetha is not just a psychologist; she is a multifaceted professional whose diverse skill set includes her passion for Neurodiversity & Inclusion, NLP Master Coach, Mentoring Students of Psychology, and offering spiritual insights.