The myth of the 'female leadership style'

There's a particular kind of compliment that women in leadership have learned to receive with a polite smile - and maybe an internalised eyeroll. You know the ones. "She's so collaborative." "She leads with empathy." "Her style is much more... nurturing."

It sounds like praise. I don’t doubt it's meant as praise. But somewhere in the subtext, there's a neat little box being built, and women are being gently placed inside it.

The female leadership style, as it tends to be described, includes emotional intelligence, empathy, collaboration, consensus-building. All genuinely valuable qualities, albeit ones that organisations spent decades actively dismissing as ‘soft skills.’ Then the world got complicated, businesses needed them, and suddenly all these less conventional skills were perceived as a female superpower. The archetypal rebrand, some might say.

‘Female style’

What strikes me is how little has actually changed in the underlying logic. Where women were once ‘too emotional’ to lead, they're now praised for emotional intelligence. Where they were dismissed as ‘soft,’ they're now celebrated for collaboration. Progress, perhaps - but progress that still keeps women in a narrow behavioral lane, just a more flattering one.

And even then, the rebrand only stretches so far. Stay in your lane - collaborative, empathetic, endlessly patient - and you're praised. But stray from it by being direct, too decisive, firm on a recommendation, and the language quietly shifts. Assertive becomes abrasive. Clear becomes cold... and I doubt many women in leadership have made it this far without encountering that particular draught.

I'll be honest: I've probably performed the expected ‘female style’ more than I'd like to admit. Defaulting to the ‘collaborative’ register felt safer than the alternative. That's not a critique of the women doing it - it's a fairly rational response to the incentives. But it does mean we've all, to some extent, been participants in keeping the frame alive.

Context determines

So what actually shapes leadership behavior? Context. Almost entirely, context. 

A leader navigating a business in crisis operates differently to one steering a period of sustained growth. Someone building a startup from scratch brings a different energy to someone managing a merger between two legacy networks. In PR especially – where you're adjusting constantly across clients, sectors and pressures – leadership is far more shaped by context than by gender. To pretend otherwise isn't progressive. It's simplistic.

I've led through pitches that needed relentless momentum and client relationships that needed long, slow trust-building. Not because I was performing a style, but because the situation called for it. That's not a female way of leading. That's just… the job.

There's also a subtler problem in how the narrative frames the broader conversation. By positioning women as a corrective to ‘bad; leadership – as if the solution is simply more empathy, more listening, more emotional labour – we oversimplify the challenge. Leadership today doesn't need a softer stereotype to replace a harder one. It needs range.

Flexible leadership

The most effective leaders aren't those who rigidly adhere to a single style. They're the ones who can read the room – knowing when to listen and when to decide, when to absorb pressure and when to pass it on. Some might argue that’s biological, but I argue it’s learned. Through experience, failure, feedback and judgement.

In our industry – one that prides itself on dismantling lazy narratives for clients – we've largely accepted the ‘female leadership’ frame without much scrutiny. Which is worth sitting with.

Using ‘female’ as a prefix isn't a celebration. It's a qualification. It implies that leadership comes in a standard version, and then a ‘for her’ edition. Real progress isn't about championing a female alternative to a male norm. It's about moving beyond the gendered framing altogether,  judging leaders on outcomes, not optics.

The myth of the female leadership style may sound progressive. But right now, reality is far too complex for any single style – gendered or otherwise – to serve us. The goal isn't to celebrate how women lead. It's to stop having expectations about how they should.

Indigo Le Fèvre, Managing Director.