There is a particular kind of meeting I have sat in many times. The room is professional and well-intentioned. The people in it are serious and increasingly diverse, at least visibly. A woman makes a point: precise, well-evidenced, grounded in experience. The room receives it politely. A few minutes pass. Someone else makes the same point. The room leans forward.

Most women in leadership will recognize this moment. It’s one that repeats consistently enough across sectors, geographies and organizations to tell us something important: getting women in the room and giving women genuine influence in that room are two very different things.

According to a recent McKinsey and Company survey, women now hold 29 percent of C-suite leadership roles globally. That is progress, and I don’t want to diminish it. But it prompts a difficult question: Of those women, how many can genuinely shape what happens, and how many have a seat at the table but limited power over what is actually decided there?

Presence is not the same as power

Mary Wollstonecraft argued – more than two centuries before this survey was created – that admitting women to existing institutions was not the same as transforming them. The question was never whether women could hold authority, but whether authority itself needed to be reimagined. That distinction feels as alive today as it did then.

Influence is the capacity to shape decisions, reframe problems and change the direction of an organization. It does not automatically follow from a title or mere appearance. It is built through sponsorship, visibility and opportunity. Research from McKinsey and Company shows that women receive less of all three, even when they are equally committed and equally qualified.

The language of representation has always carried with it an ambiguity. To represent can mean to stand in for, to advocate on behalf of or simply to appear. Contemporary institutions have become remarkably adept at delivering the third while deferring the first two indefinitely.

The invisible load

There is a further dimension that rarely enters these discussions, perhaps because it sits uncomfortably with the framing of leadership as a purely professional category. Deloitte’s ‘Women at Work 2025’ report documents what many women know from the inside: that the working day does not end at the office door; that health is managed in silence for fear of appearing less capable; that caring responsibilities are absorbed into private time in ways that have no organizational visibility and no compensating recognition.

The separation of the public world of work from the private world of care has always rested on an assumption that someone else is handling the latter. For most of history, that someone was a woman. What has changed is that we now expect women to participate fully in the public world, while still assuming that caring responsibilities will be handled behind the scenes. The result is not equality but a more demanding form of inequality: the same structural disadvantages, plus the expectation of performing as though they don’t exist.

An estimated two million work days are lost annually in Australia alone to the absence of adequate carer’s leave and flexible arrangements. This figure is a symptom. The condition it points to is a society that has not yet decided whether it genuinely values the work of care or whether it merely wishes to appear to.

The question we need to ask

There is a version of the diversity argument that stops too soon – the version focused purely on getting women into existing structures, without asking whether those structures themselves need to change.

If women gain influence only by fully adapting to systems not designed with them in mind, performing authority in prescribed ways, absorbing invisible loads gracefully and leaving the unwritten rules intact, then we are merely making representation work without making institutions better.  And making institutions better should be the goal.

The collaborative, iterative, systems-oriented approaches that women often bring are not softer alternatives to real leadership. They are frequently a more accurate account of how good decisions are made: more attentive to complexity, more honest about uncertainty, more inclusive of the knowledge that hierarchy tends to suppress.

The question is whether organizations will let these approaches genuinely change how things work, or just accommodate them at the edges.

Three shifts toward progress

From my experience across sectors, three changes stand out as genuinely transformative rather than cosmetic:

Stop using hierarchy as a proxy for credibility. Judge ideas on their merits. Build decision forums where diverse perspectives are actively expected, not just tolerated. The best insight in the room should not have to wait for the right person to repeat it.

Broaden what credible leadership looks like. Collaborative and systems-oriented approaches are not a consolation prize. They are often what produces more durable outcomes. Organizations that recognize this will make better decisions, not just more inclusive ones.

Design for inclusion from the start, not as an afterthought. Women should not have to retrofit themselves to processes not built for them. Inclusion needs to be embedded in governance, decision-making and commercial frameworks from day one, not bolted on later.

So, what next?

Fifteen years into my own version of this journey, I am clear that getting women into leadership positions is necessary but not sufficient. What matters is whether they can genuinely shape what happens once they are there.

The rooms where decisions get made were built with certain people in mind. Their protocols, their rhythms, their unwritten rules about who sounds authoritative and whose judgment counts as rigorous: none of this is neutral. Changing who sits in the room without changing how the room works is progress that stops exactly where it starts to feel uncomfortable.

When organizations redesign how influence works by valuing expertise over hierarchy, recognizing diverse leadership styles and removing the barriers that quietly limit who can contribute, they do more than advance women. They make better decisions. They build more resilient institutions.

The room can be changed. History suggests it does so slowly, until the cost of not changing becomes impossible to ignore. We may not be there yet, but we are getting closer.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.