The Call Was Never Coming from Inside the House

Every other day there is another panel, another post, another event devoted to the same prescription. Women need to be more confident. We need to shake off imposter syndrome. We need to embrace our power, own our voice, step into leadership with less hesitation and more self-belief. The language changes, the graphics are updated, the headshots are new, but the problem statement remains identical.

And I just keep wondering who these women are.

I spend almost all of my time working with women. Different ages. Different countries. Different industries. Some loud, some measured, some allergic to small talk, some magnetic on a stage. Not all of them are the type to dominate a room, but all of them know exactly how capable they are. They are aware of their intelligence. They are aware of their track record. They are aware of the work they have done to get where they are.

So when I’m told the barrier is confidence, I’m lost. Because the explanation may be convenient, but it just isn’t true.

It cleverly shifts the problem inward. It suggests that what looks like exclusion might simply be a personal issue. That women’s stalled advancement can be explained by personality rather than by the way institutions are built and maintained. It shifts the weight from the room to the individual standing inside it.

And it avoids a more uncomfortable observation: confident women are not rare. What is rare is a context that rewards them the way it rewards confident men.

Recently I was invited to speak on “internal glass ceilings.” I agreed, with the caveat that if the premise was that women are secretly blocking themselves, the conversation would be brief. I could have walked on stage and said that internal glass ceilings make for tidy metaphors but poor analysis, and then walked off again.

Instead, the organizer and I had a longer discussion. A serious one. About what happens when structural barriers are rebranded as individual shortcomings. About the appeal of telling women to smash something inside themselves rather than pointing the axe towards the people and institutions in power.

It's a seductive lie though. Because if the obstacle lives within us, then we can be coached out of it. We can be trained, polished, encouraged. We can learn to project more authority, to negotiate harder, to mirror the behaviours that have historically been rewarded in men.

Unfortunately, mirroring is not the same as being received the same way.

A confident man is read as decisive. A confident woman is often read as abrasive. The identical behaviour travels through different filters. And those filters are not psychological. they are social. they are institutional. they are sustained by norms about who looks natural in power and who looks like they are trespassing.

Calling that an “internal” ceiling makes it sound as if the crack runs through us. It doesn’t. It runs through the structure. And structures protect themselves.

Because if the problem lives inside women, the solution can be sold to women. And if the problem lives inside the institution, the institution is implicated. And institutions rarely volunteer themselves for indictment.

So, over time, an entire ecosystem has formed around the safer version of the story. There are coaches who specialize in executive presence. Panels on imposter syndrome. Corporate budgets earmarked for empowering female talent. Leadership programs designed to help women navigate systems that remain fundamentally unchanged.

All of it framed as progress. None of it requiring the criteria to move anything.

It is a far more comfortable project to refine women than to confront the architecture that ranks them. You can host a summit. You can sponsor a workshop. You can point to participation numbers and call it momentum.

And no one has to give up a seat.

That is the genius of it.

It looks like support, but it functions like maintenance.

Using individualization as a shield is not new. It is one of the oldest preservation tactics in the book.

When structural problems become uncomfortable, they are reframed as personal shortcomings. Poverty becomes a budgeting issue. Burnout becomes a resilience issue. Climate collapse becomes a recycling issue. The pattern is familiar: shrink the scale of the problem until it fits inside an individual body, and suddenly it feels manageable. Suddenly it feels apolitical.

Gender power follows the same script.

If women are underrepresented, we are encouraged to examine our confidence. If we are underpaid, we are told to negotiate better. If we are overlooked, we are advised to be more visible, more strategic, more assertive without crossing whatever invisible line marks us as “too much.” The focus narrows to behaviour, tone, presentation. The system itself fades into the background, as if it were neutral terrain rather than constructed hierarchy.

This is what makes the confidence narrative so effective. It doesn’t deny inequality outright. It acknowledges friction, then quietly relocates its source. It offers improvement without confrontation. It promises mobility without demanding redistribution.

And like the climate story that centers individual carbon footprints while corporations dominate emissions, it directs moral energy downward. Women are given techniques and trainings and carefully branded programs, while the institutional mechanisms that determine pay, promotion, and authority remain largely untouched.

It feels active. It feels responsible. It even feels empowering. But it absorbs the pressure that would otherwise travel upward.

Once responsibility is individualized, the institution no longer has to answer for its design. Once the ceiling is described as internal, the builders of the building disappear from the conversation.

The preservation is not abstract. It protects something.

Power is not a vague social mist that floats around harming everyone equally. It sits somewhere. It accumulates somewhere. It translates into promotions, equity, salary bands, decision rights, reputational capital. It determines whose mistakes are recoverable and whose are disqualifying.

When women are told the barrier is confidence, the focus remains on self-adjustment. The evaluation system is spared. The promotion pipeline is spared. The funding committee is spared. And that sparing is not neutral.

For every woman passed over despite being qualified, someone else receives the role. For every woman underpaid, someone else retains the difference. For every instance where a woman’s assertiveness is labeled abrasive, someone else’s identical behaviour is labeled leadership.

These shifts are measurable. Roles change hands. Salaries diverge. Authority concentrates. Someone advances. Someone does not.

The language of “everyone benefits from equality” is persuasive because it feels generous. It suggests harmony. It suggests that fairness is universally aligned with self-interest. In some domains that is true. More diverse companies often outperform. Societies with higher gender equality tend to be healthier and more stable.

But power, in its most immediate form, is rarely abstract. A board seat is not a concept. It is a chair. One person sits in it.

A promotion is not theoretical. It alters compensation, authority, trajectory. When that seat changes hands, someone no longer occupies it.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable. The idea that inequality is not just inertia or misunderstanding, but advantage. That some people benefit materially, socially, psychologically from the status quo. That equality is not stalled because it is confusing, but because it is costly to those currently positioned above.

Once you see that, the confidence narrative feels less like misguided encouragement and more like insulation. It keeps the conversation focused on women’s interior lives while leaving the distribution of advantage largely undisturbed.

But if the ceiling isn’t inside us, then the solution isn’t either.

Which raises a harder question: if the work keeps asking women to adjust, to lean, to negotiate, to brand themselves more effectively — who is ever asked to relinquish anything?

If equality depends on the goodwill of those who benefit from inequality, then it was never structural change to begin with. It was conditional access, a temporary widening of the door, granted at the discretion of the people already inside.

And discretion given can be withdrawn.

This is why I am not interested in the language of “getting men on board” as the foundation of progress. People are welcome to support equality. Of course they are. But equality is not something to be granted by the very structure it is meant to transform. A system that must approve your equality still positions itself above you.

And that is the quiet trap inside so much of the confidence conversation. It trains women to perform readiness for power without interrogating who defines readiness in the first place. It asks us to become more palatable to institutions that remain fundamentally unexamined. It tells us that if we just calibrate correctly, the room will respond differently.

As if “the room” is neutral, and not a set of decisions already made. Decisions that reflects the values, incentives, and histories of the people who built it. And if those foundations are left untouched, no amount of self-belief will alter the way behaviour is interpreted once it crosses the threshold.

Women do not need to be more confident. We need systems that do not punish confident women. We need evaluation criteria that are not elastic for some and rigid for others. We need power to be redistributed, not merely applauded.

And that work does not begin inside women’s heads. It begins in rooms where decisions are made, money is allocated, titles are assigned, and standards are set.

The crack never ran through us. It ran through the structure.

And structures change when pressure is applied to their foundations, not when the people inside them are told to stand straighter.

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