Chanél Oldfield | Chief Executive | CAPACITI | mail me |
I was promoted three times before I ever asked for a promotion. Each time, it happened because the person above me left. Someone needed to hold the work together. I stepped up, and I didn’t campaign or pitch myself for the role. I just did the job that needed doing. Eventually, the title caught up with the work.
For years, I thought that was simply my story. Now I think it’s a pattern worth naming. I see it repeated across almost every woman I’ve mentored in tech, finance and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). We rise by being useful, not by being seen. And usefulness, on its own, rarely gets you into the room where strategy gets decided.
The leadership behaviours we reward
There’s a version of leadership we still reward without admitting it. It has a shape, and it’s loud and certain. It fills a room before it’s asked to. When a man walks in with that energy, we call it conviction or gut instinct. Increasingly, if it’s combined with compassion, we call it “servant leadership”.
When a woman shows up with the same certainty or kindness, the language changes. She’s not decisive. She doesn’t like being challenged. She’s not compassionate, but emotional. The behaviour hasn’t changed. The word attached to it has. And it hasn’t changed positively.
I’ve watched this play out in something as small as a sentence structure. A woman opens with, “Sorry if this is a silly question, but…” and asks something sharp and necessary. A man in the same meeting asks the identical question, cold, with no preamble, and gets nods. Neither of them was wrong to ask. But only one of them had to apologise first for taking up the space to speak.
Rethinking the confidence gap
This is where I think we get the diagnosis wrong. We talk about a “confidence gap” in women, as if the fix is a workshop on posture and pitch. I don’t believe that’s true. I’ve sat across from soft-spoken women with an absolute command of their material. Yet they couldn’t get a hearing in a room built to recognise volume as competence.
The women who do break through in commercial and technical spaces often aren’t the ones who found their confidence. They’re the ones who learned to perform it in a register the room already trusts. That’s not progress. It’s merely translation.
It’s worth asking why this shows up harder in some sectors than others. Consider nonprofit leadership, education and the humanities. My own experience tells me that these sectors have made more room for women at the top. I don’t think that’s an accident.
Why some sectors make more room
Somewhere along the way, we decided those sectors were softer and less commercially serious. Therefore, they became more forgivable ground for women to lead on. Tech, finance and STEM offer a different experience. Nobody wrote a rule keeping women out of the boardroom in those industries. Nobody needed to.
The consensus did the work quietly enough that most people in the room would deny it exists. This is also where the confidence gap becomes misleading. It places the burden on women to change themselves rather than asking organisations to examine what they reward.
I received an early education in a culture that split women into two categories. You were either the fun one or the hard one. There wasn’t a version of “capable and warm” available to choose from. I chose neither.
I spent years afterwards still feeling like I had to re-earn the authority that was already mine on paper. This continued even once I was formally in charge. Being told I was “too in the detail” was framed as a flaw. Being in the details was how I actually knew what my team could do and where the business needed to go. Nobody described a man’s attention to detail as a character defect.
Recognising leadership before the title
If I had to give one piece of advice to leaders, I would make it this. And I mean the men still holding most of the structural power to do this. Get better at recognising women who are already doing the job of leadership before you give them the title for it.
I didn’t rise because I demanded visibility. I rose because, a few times, someone senior noticed the work before I had to ask them to. That kind of advocacy costs the advocate very little. Yet it can change the entire trajectory for the person on the other end of it.
What gives me real optimism is watching a new generation of women move through STEM and tech pipelines. It isn’t a change in women that gives me hope. It’s a slow change in what gets recognised.
I’m starting to see quieter, less performatively confident candidates get pulled into leadership conversations. A decade ago, they might have been overlooked. That’s not women getting louder. It’s rooms getting better at listening. Perhaps that is the shift we need most. We don’t need women to close the confidence gap by becoming someone else. We need workplaces to become better at recognising competence in all its forms.