The FTSE Women Leaders Review 2026 celebrates significant and positive change in addressing gender imbalance in the board room, with public and private companies in the FTSE 350 at or near a 40% target for appointing women onto boards.

The picture is not yet universally positive, and the research team behind the review expects a levelling out of the pace of change. The focus moves also to executive director roles, which at just 15.4% of women is slower progress than that for female NEDs, which is now near parity at 49.5% of women. The report shows what progress can be made, and, crucially, why it is vital not to lose sight of the ambition, especially in light of the positive gains.

The rationale for the benefits of better gender balance is now well known. Gender diversity significantly improves innovation, creativity, sustainability and relevance, and reflects society.

From a governance perspective, mixed-gender boards are more rigorous as they tend to demonstrate better process discipline and relational vigilance. This last aspect alone has a significant impact on reducing groupthink, by encouraging dissent and stabilising disagreement through taking account of minority perspectives, not just the loudest voice in the room.

What gets in the way?

What, then, might still be getting in the way of even better gender balance, and through that even more effective governance and executive behaviours?

Some time ago I went to a Sunday BBQ with a female client. Senior leaders from across the business, many of them women, attended at the behest of the ‘boss’. Not going wasn’t really an option. Showing up was important.

The sun shone, conversation was convivial, generally work oriented, yet what was striking is how complicit everyone was in the company culture. People made jokes about the chaos, the long hours, the inefficiencies, the expectation to be ‘always available’. They were proud of it, wearing it like a badge.

This shows up in what rapidly becomes normative behaviours, from late-night last-minute emails, breaching ‘wellness days’, and panicked data demands that sidelined whatever current task someone (most likely junior) might be tackling, and so on. Senior executives on holiday routinely have out of office messages stating that they are still available through WhatsApp. This alone undermines trust in everyone else’s ability to be allowed to get on with their jobs in their absence. The feeling of being overwhelmed was commonplace, and entirely normalised. The idea of the ‘Heroic Leader’ is baked in.

While there might be times in one’s career when motivation and reward appear to warrant the other costs associated with heroic striving, on balance, this is neither healthy nor productive in the long run, at both the individual and organisational level.

By contrast, another colleague remembers a former boss who made a point of arriving early, getting on with the tasks at hand and focused on outcomes, and leaving bang on five. From time to time, they would stay later and wander the offices and told people to go home. It gave everyone else permission to do the same. It’s one of the world’s most successful banks, by the way.

In high-speed organisations, like banking or technology where expansion and innovation are key drivers, or in volatile markets or where FOMO appears to have gripped the sales function, modelling healthier behaviours such as the boss that leaves on time, or really going on holiday and being unavailable, feels counterproductive, especially if no one else is doing it. The psychological cost of adopting healthier behaviours can be enormous.

Male Coded-Traits Persist

Gender bias and structural power shape modern boardrooms, which still prize traditionally male-coded traits, such as assertiveness. Sheryl Sandberg’s important book Lean In recognised this and sees the first wave of change as adopting some of these male-normative behaviours as a staging post for shifting culture further down the line.

In a hyper competitive landscape, the boundary between professional excellence and personal erosion become blurred and can drift quickly into the normalisation of harm. People in high-pressure roles gradually accept overwork, emotional volatility and impossible expectations as ‘just part of the job’.

This is reinforced by unpredictable rewards, from bonuses, public praise such as ‘we’re so glad you’re here, we know how you feel’, and occasional breakthroughs, which keeps the dopamine hit going long enough to make it all feel ok. What’s really happening is that this hypervigilance keeps the body in a permanent state of fight, flight or freeze, just like the ping on your phone. Other clinical studies show clearly that constant cortisol flooding in this way interferes with judgement and decision-making. At a chronic level, the body’s immune system is also seriously compromised.

Ungoverned, the physical and social cost can also be significant, and organisations that unintentionally foster a Hero Culture create a system of reinforcement for overwork. We might see this in managerial language, such as ‘stretch targets’, and ‘high accountability’ or where people are publicly admired for self-erasure, working through holidays and being always on.

This can then manifest in clinical level harm, from chronic stress, anxiety disorders, and sometimes family breakdown and burn-out. There are physical markers of high functioning stress, too, jaw tightening and teeth grinding, tight chest and aching shoulders, and a general sense of the body being ‘on edge’, where physical and psychological safety dissolves. These symptoms appear in tribunals and occupational health reviews.

Internalised guilt, especially among women, can become a primary regulator of behaviour, with leaders self-policing and competing in self-sacrifice, fearing that any limit-setting will be viewed as a lack of commitment.

Relational Labour is Marginalised

These are male-normative structures, and the foundational theories of motivational behaviour were built on male sampling, traits such as competitive drive and visible dominance can still be embedded in promotion and leadership evaluation systems. With that, women in particular face a double bind, not just because they are often carrying substantial domestic demands, but because being assertive can lead to social penalties, whereas being communal, which tends towards better outcomes, can result in being overlooked.

This relational labour is often marginalised. Listening, emotional regulation, and trust building, historically coded as feminine, is treated as secondary and we often hear them described unhelpfully as ‘soft skills’.

Resilience

It’s worth commenting on resilience and making a distinction between resilience as a corporate overlay where the focus is on endurance within a broken system, and developing resilience by paying attention to systemic health and somatic (how the body and nervous system is responding to the environment) recovery.

It’s not unusual to see such things as well-being initiatives become tools for normative control. While framed as supportive, they can feel transactional and performative, adding further demand. We’ve all been on mandatory online wellbeing courses and had to cram them during the evening.

Conversely, resilience as a developmental leadership skill focuses on sustainable performance, not just endurance. Sports performance psychologists understood this distinction long ago. By example, we see this enacted where leaders demonstrate co-regulation. The ability to remain calm and assertive creates a contagious sense of safety for the team.  Put another way, leaders bring the weather with them, for good and bad. 

Good governance looks to system diagnostics over individual scoring, and insights from the FTSE Women Leaders Review suggests that these developmental resilience skills are more likely to be legitimised when there is a critical mass of gender diversity at board level.

Cultural Shifts

There are better governance frameworks, deliberatively designed to recognise the broader reach of complementary behaviours that counter male-normative models. In short, balancing the board as a starting point. Strength level behaviours are not about relentless drive. The ability to refuse false urgency and to slow down decision making reduces the risks of harms that are invariably unevenly distributed, and women are often the most at risk.

Embracing this broader scope is essential governance work, and at Bvalco we see that in action. Where boards have a critical mass of women on the board and in leadership roles, companies tend to function and perform better.

As often is the case, change starts at the top, although increasingly we are seeing a younger generation coming up that don’t accept the old ways. Boards that interrogate how and why authority is more easily granted to some identities than others, is one way in to begin a powerful cultural change. Asking, ‘whose confidence is recognised here and whose hesitation is penalised’ can also be transformative.   Relational labour is core work, not a side bar issue, and boards and leadership hold a shared accountability to prevent hypervigilance and burnout.

The bottom line

If we start with the question of the benefits of boundary setting, not the costs, then everyone will be better off, men and women, even the shareholders.

Leaders must become much more risk aware, and even they need uninterrupted time at home on a Sunday.