Beyond Gender: The New Rules of Leadership
Leadership has no gender.
But many of the rules we still use to recognise it do.
We have spent decades encouraging women to become more confident, visible and decisive.
For decades, we have tried to create greater equality by helping women succeed within leadership systems largely shaped before they entered them.
Women have been encouraged to become more confident, assertive and ambitious.
Men have been encouraged to become more empathetic, collaborative and vulnerable.
All useful human qualities.
But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking how women and men need to change to become better leaders, what if we questioned the gendered rules we still use to decide what leadership should look like?
→ Because confidence is not masculine.
→ Empathy is not feminine.
And leadership was never meant to be a performance of gender.
The Leadership Rules We Inherited
Most of us were taught to recognise leadership long before we ever became leaders ourselves.
→ Confidence looked like leadership.
→ Decisiveness signalled strength.
→ Ambition was admired—although not always equally in everyone.
→ Empathy was considered valuable, provided it did not slow down the meeting.
These rules were rarely written down. They did not need to be.
We inherited them.
I have come to think of them as peer pressure from dead people.
We absorbed them from the leaders we saw, the behaviour organisations rewarded and the different words used to describe the same qualities in women and men.
→ One person was confident. Another was difficult.
→ One was decisive. Another was controlling.
→ One was empathetic. Another was too emotional.
Same behaviour. Different box.
We did not create these rules individually. But we may still be following them automatically—when we hire, promote, give feedback or decide who “looks like leadership material.”
And now AI is learning from the language, decisions and examples of leadership we have already created.
That makes this more than a conversation about the past.
Used without awareness, AI can make it easier for us to repeat the old rules—only faster and at scale.
Used intentionally as a reflective partner, it can help us notice the assumptions hiding inside our choices.
So before asking AI who has leadership potential, perhaps we need to ask ourselves:
What have we been taught leadership is supposed to look like—and who might that picture still exclude?
What Does Beyond Gender Mean?
Beyond Gender is a leadership philosophy that challenges the idea that human qualities belong to one gender.
Beyond Gender does not mean that gender no longer matters.
Gender still affects opportunity, safety, pay, visibility and how the same behaviour may be interpreted very differently depending on who displays it.
We should not stop talking about inequality.
But equality will remain limited if we continue dividing human qualities into masculine and feminine categories.
When empathy is described as feminine, we do more than compliment women. We quietly suggest that empathy belongs less naturally to men.
When decisiveness is described as masculine, we do more than recognise men. We make women prove that they possess a quality that was human all along.
We also create a rather impossible leadership performance:
→ Be decisive, but collaborative.
→ Confident, but humble.
→ Empathetic, but never emotional.
→ Vulnerable, but please continue to look completely in control.
Beyond Gender invites us to stop asking whether someone leads like a woman or a man.
A more useful question is:
Can this person recognise what the situation needs—and respond with awareness rather than gendered expectations?
That question matters even more as organisations begin using AI in recruitment, performance reviews and leadership development.
AI can help us examine patterns in language and decisions. But if the criteria we give it are shaped by yesterday’s ideas about what leadership looks like, technology may make those old ideas appear wonderfully modern—and conveniently objective.
The goal is not to remove gender from the conversation.
It is to remove gender from the limits we place on human potential.
What Gendered Leadership Costs Us
For years, I told everyone that I was a terrible baker.
Not merely someone who did not bake very often. A genuinely terrible baker.
I said it so frequently that it became part of my identity—almost as though there might be a surprise baking competition and I needed to manage expectations well in advance.
Then one day, a friend arrived at a gathering once more with one of her beautiful homemade cakes. I noticed how much pleasure it gave her—and everyone else.
And, rather inconveniently, I felt envious.
It made me wonder why I had held on so tightly to the story that I could not bake.
Was it true?
Or had refusing to bake become a small act of rebellion against the traditional box of what a woman was supposed to be?
The irony was that while proving I did not belong in that box, I had denied myself something I actually wanted.
So I learned to bake.
I changed the story. Now I tell everyone:
“You know I always bring cake.”
This may sound like a small story about cake.
It is really a story about permission.
Gendered expectations do not only influence how other people judge us. They can shape what we permit ourselves to develop, express and even enjoy.
→ Some of us learn to fit the box.
→ Others build an identity around refusing to fit it.
Either way, the box may still be running the show.
And perhaps the cost reaches much further than the workplace.
Many people grow up carrying the painful feeling that they are not masculine enough, feminine enough—or somehow the right kind of person at all.
What if some of the distress surrounding gender today is intensified by something deeply human: our need to be allowed to become ourselves fully without every quality, interest or way of being treated as evidence of which gender box we belong in?
What if more people felt free to say:
This is who I am. These are the qualities that belong to me. They do not make me more or less worthy of being recognised as myself.
This does not offer a single explanation for the deeply personal and complex questions people experience around gender and identity.
It does invite us to consider whether the boxes themselves have become far too small for the range of human beings trying to live inside them.
The same cost appears in leadership.
A woman may soften her directness to avoid appearing difficult. A man may hide uncertainty because he has learned that leaders should know the answer. Others may distance themselves from empathy, ambition, vulnerability or authority because those qualities do not fit the person they have decided they are allowed to be.
The cost is not only unfair judgement.
It is reduced human range.
Leaders may become highly skilled at performing the version of leadership the system recognises while leaving behind the very qualities a particular situation needs.
Organisations lose that range too.
They lose ideas that were never voiced, questions that felt unsafe to ask and leadership potential that did not arrive in the expected packaging.
Quite a lot of human potential gets left in the car before the meeting begins.
And now AI is entering recruitment, performance reviews and leadership development.
If we ask AI to assess people through past decisions, descriptions and performance data, we need to remember that those records may already reflect an edited version of who people felt permitted to be.
Used intentionally, AI can help us notice patterns in the language, assumptions and decisions we have normalised.
But it cannot decide which parts of ourselves we have quietly edited out—or why.
That requires reflection.
Perhaps the real question is not only whether gender stereotypes cause us to judge people differently.
Perhaps it is:
Who might we have become if we had never been told which qualities belonged to us?
The New Rules of Leadership
If the old rules taught us what leadership was supposed to look like, the new rules ask what leadership needs to do.
That is a rather important difference.
Leadership today cannot be reduced to becoming more assertive, more empathetic or more anything all the time.
→ Sometimes the situation needs clarity.
→ Sometimes curiosity.
→ Sometimes courage.
→ Sometimes restraint.
And occasionally, the wisdom to stop talking and let someone else finish the sentence.
The leaders of the future will not be those who perform one recognised leadership style particularly well.
They will be those who can access a wider range of human qualities—and recognise which one the moment requires.
1. Stop Gendering Human Qualities
Confidence is not masculine. Empathy is not feminine. Courage, intuition, logic, vulnerability and decisiveness are human capacities.
2. Stop Confusing Familiarity with Potential
We tend to recognise leadership more easily when it arrives in packaging we have seen before.
3. Read the Room—Not the Rulebook
No leadership quality is right in every situation.
→ Courage may be needed in one moment, restraint in another.
→ Sometimes leadership means making the decision.
→ Sometimes it means admitting that someone else sees something you do not.
4. Notice What Is Running You
The same behaviour can come from very different places.
→ Are you making the decision because clarity is needed—or because uncertainty makes you uncomfortable?
→ Are you asking for more input because collaboration matters—or because you are avoiding responsibility?
5. Choose What the Moment Needs
Leadership range is not about becoming a different person whenever the wind changes.
It is about having access to more of who you already are—and choosing the quality the people and the situation need from you now.
Where the Idea Began
For decades, I worked to advance women in leadership.
I helped women become more confident, visible and willing to claim their space. I founded communities for women entrepreneurs, spoke about gender equality and served as Vice President of the Association of Women Business Leaders in Iceland.
Then something stopped adding up.
The more we talked about empowering women, the more we sometimes reinforced the very gender boxes we were trying to escape.
The turning point came in March 2018 at the Impact Leadership 21 Global Summit at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
My business partner, Nicholas Haines, was speaking about why meaningful change remained so difficult.
He said:
“It’s because we keep putting people into boxes.”
That sentence changed the direction of my work.
I began to see that gender was not only creating boxes around women. It was creating boxes around everyone.
We were trying to create equality while leaving the old walls exactly where they were.
Quite an ambitious renovation.
That was the beginning of Beyond Gender.
Finishing the book was another matter. I started it four times and repeatedly stopped around chapter three or four. Apparently, having something to say and being ready to say it are two entirely different hobbies.
Then my granddaughter, Helena Bryndís, was born in February 2023.
Looking at her, I knew why I needed to finish.
I wanted her to grow up knowing that her gender could never define which qualities belonged to her, what kind of leader she could become or how much of herself she could bring into the room.
And if nobody else ever read the book, perhaps one day she would.
Beyond Gender: The New Rules of Leadership was published in December 2023.
But the book was not the end of the idea.
It opened a much bigger question:
What becomes possible when we stop asking people to fit the boxes we inherited—and begin seeing more of who they already are?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
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We often repeat the same patterns because, rather inconveniently, they are still doing something useful for us.
Taking responsibility for everything may make us feel needed. Avoiding conflict may help us remain accepted. Controlling every detail may create a sense of safety—although the people around us may have another word for it.
Exploring Boxes describes these familiar interpretations and responses as boxes. Most were not created because something was wrong with us. They developed because, at some point, they helped us feel safe, valued, understood or included.
The trouble begins when a familiar response becomes automatic. We stop noticing that we are choosing it. It simply feels like who we are—or how the world works.
That is why telling ourselves to “stop doing it” rarely works for long.
A more revealing question is:
What is this pattern still protecting or providing—and do I still need it to do the job?
We do not change a pattern by judging it.
We begin by becoming curious about why it keeps turning up for work.
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Criticism rarely arrives alone. It tends to bring our history, identity and insecurities with it—along with several pieces of emotional hand luggage we had forgotten we packed.
Someone says:
“This part could be stronger.”
But what we hear may be:
They do not trust me.
I am not good enough.
I am losing control.
Perhaps I should update my LinkedIn profile.The feedback is the event. Everything that happens inside us afterwards is our interpretation of it.
Exploring Boxes helps us notice the difference.
Defensiveness is not necessarily a character flaw. It may be an automatic attempt to protect our competence, status, belonging or sense of safety. The problem is that while we are busy defending ourselves, we may completely miss what was actually said.
The aim is not to become so wonderfully self-aware that criticism never bothers us again. Good luck with that.
It is to create enough space to ask:
What was actually said—and what did my boxes add to it?
Sometimes the most uncomfortable part of feedback is not the feedback itself.
It is the story we manage to build around it in under three seconds.
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People rarely resist change because they woke up that morning and decided to become the difficult person in the room.
What looks like resistance may be someone trying to protect their competence, status, belonging, independence—or the reassuring feeling that they still know what on earth is going on.
Perhaps they have seen a similar bright idea fail before. Perhaps the change threatens something that matters to them. Or perhaps nobody thought to involve them until the PowerPoint was finished and the decision had already been made.
Exploring Boxes invites us to look beneath the behaviour.
Instead of asking:
Why are they resisting?
We might ask:
What does this change look like from the box they are looking through—and what might they be afraid of losing?
This does not mean every objection is wise or every change should be stopped. Sometimes resistance is resistance.
But when we label someone negative, difficult or stuck in the past, we may climb rather comfortably into a box of our own.
Understanding what the other person is protecting does not remove the need for change.
It may, however, make an honest conversation about it possible.
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Human beings are remarkably quick at working other people out.
One difficult conversation and someone becomes difficult. One emotional moment and they are too emotional. One hesitation about a new idea and suddenly they are resistant to change.
Very efficient. Not always terribly accurate.
Labels help us make sense of a complicated world. They can give us language, identity and belonging.
But a label can also become a box.
Once we have placed someone in it, we start noticing everything that proves us right—and become strangely blind to whatever does not.
The person may not have changed.
Our view of them has simply become smaller.
Exploring Boxes does not ask us to stop categorising people altogether. We are human. We would probably create a box for people who refuse to use boxes.
It asks us to remember that our label is an interpretation—not the whole person.
A useful question is:
What might I notice about this person if I became curious again?
Labels become dangerous when they stop helping us understand people and start deciding, in advance, who we believe they are—and what we believe they can become.
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Yes. In fact, our strengths often make excellent hiding places for our blind spots.
Responsibility is useful—until we take responsibility for everything.
Confidence helps us lead—until we become certain we are right.
Empathy connects us—until we use it to avoid saying what needs to be said.
Decisiveness creates momentum—until nobody else gets a say.
Independence serves us beautifully—until asking for help feels like a personal failure.The tricky part is that the strength still feels like a strength from inside the box.
Exploring Boxes describes how the same quality can move through the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
In its Good expression, it supports us and the people around us. In its Bad expression, it begins to limit our choices. In its Ugly expression, it can control, exclude or harm others—usually while we are still busy explaining how helpful we are being.
The strength is not the problem. We do not need to get rid of it.
We need to notice when we are using it because the situation calls for it—and when we are using it because it is where we feel safest.
A useful question is:
Is this strength serving the situation—or is the situation now serving my strength?
Awareness allows us to keep what is valuable without letting our favourite strength run the entire show.