The authenticity double standard is negatively impacting female leaders

A conversation from before Christmas has followed me into the new year.

I was having a catch-up coffee with a contact – someone I like and respect. We got talking about a mutual acquaintance, a woman in a senior leadership position. Given my own recent move into a new role, my contact was being helpful. Here was someone I could learn from, she suggested. Someone whose style I might study.

What made this leader worth emulating? It wasn’t the qualities themselves – strategic thinking, decisiveness, command of a room – but how she expressed them. She maintained professional distance. She didn’t do warmth. Her gravitas was the traditional kind: cool, contained, authoritative.

The implication, though never stated directly, was clear: this more masculine expression of leadership was the model. The suggestion wasn’t that I lacked strategic ability, but that my way of showing up – warmer, more personable, more openly connected – needed dialling back.

In the moment, I took it as intended: well-meaning advice from someone trying to help. But the comment has sat with me in the weeks since, and not comfortably. I found myself feeling lesser. That my natural approach to leadership was somehow not quite right.

What surprised me most was the timing. The conversation around leadership has shifted significantly. Empathy, compassion, emotional intelligence – these aren’t fringe ideas anymore. They’re in leadership development programmes, in boardroom conversations, in the language of modern management. And yet here was the old playbook, still being passed around as wisdom.

It got me thinking about a strange disconnect in our industry.

The brand playbook

The evidence is unambiguous. Brands that feel human and authentic outperform those that feel cold and corporate.

Liquid Death sells water – arguably the most commodified product imaginable. Yet by rejecting corporate polish in favour of irreverent, punk-rock personality, it reached a $1.4bn valuation in 2024 and generated $333m in revenue. The brand didn’t succeed despite refusing to act like a “serious” water company. It succeeded because of it.

If your brand strategist wouldn’t advise your company to suppress its personality and mimic competitors, why would you accept that advice for your own leadership?

Monzo disrupted banking – an industry defined by corporate distance – by being radically transparent, conversational and human. The result? Over 12 million customers, a £5.9bn valuation, and an NPS score of +70 against an industry average of 30. Customers don’t just tolerate Monzo’s humanity; they reward it with fierce loyalty.

These brands didn’t succeed despite their personality. They succeeded because of it.

Authenticity isn’t a nice-to-have in brand strategy – it’s a commercial imperative. Research consistently shows that the vast majority of consumers consider authenticity before making purchasing decisions, yet only around a third believe brands actually deliver it. The gap represents enormous opportunity.

Stop treating emotion as a brand asset but a leadership flaw

The disconnect

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. We know this. Everyone in marketing knows this. We advise our clients to find their authentic voice, to build genuine connections, to resist the temptation to sound like everyone else.

And yet when it comes to leadership – particularly women’s leadership – we often forget everything we’ve learned.

Yes, the conversation has evolved. Many organisations now champion empathetic leadership and emotional intelligence. But the old advice hasn’t disappeared – it’s just gone underground, passed along in well-meaning coffees and casual mentoring moments, still shaping how women think they need to show up.

The qualities we celebrate in brands – approachability, authenticity, genuine human connection – are frequently the same qualities women leaders are coached to suppress. Be more authoritative. Create distance. Develop “executive presence”, which so often translates to: be less like yourself.

We’d never advise a client to adopt a bland, corporate tone just because their competitors do. Yet that’s essentially what we tell women leaders when we hold up cool detachment as the gold standard.

This isn’t just hypocritical. It’s strategically incoherent.

If we believe that humanity and authenticity build trust, loyalty and long-term value for brands, why would we assume the opposite is true for the people leading them?

The cost

When we push leaders towards a single, traditionally masculine template, we lose more than diversity of style. We lose the very qualities that modern organisations desperately need: the ability to build genuine connection with teams, to create psychological safety, to lead with emotional intelligence in uncertain times.

To be clear: the woman held up as my model is successful. Her approach works for her. The problem isn’t her style – it’s the assumption that it’s the only style worth emulating.

The next time someone suggests you’d be more effective if you were less human, less personable, less yourself – consider the possibility that they’re wrong.

We also send a message to the next generation of leaders about what success looks like – and who it’s available to. When humanity is treated as a weakness to overcome rather than a strength to leverage, we narrow the pipeline of leadership talent before it even begins.

The good news is that much of the business world has moved on. The best organisations now actively seek out leaders who can connect, who lead with empathy, who bring their humanity to work. Which makes the persistence of the old advice all the more frustrating – and all the more worth challenging.

The question

Here’s a thought experiment for every marketing leader reading this. Take the brand strategy principles you apply to your company. The emphasis on authenticity. The understanding that warmth builds connection. The belief that distinctiveness beats conformity.

Now apply them to yourself.

If your brand strategist wouldn’t advise your company to suppress its personality and mimic competitors, why would you accept that advice for your own leadership?

As we set intentions for the year ahead, perhaps it’s time to retire some of the received wisdom about how leaders should show up. The brands we admire most aren’t the ones that contort themselves to fit a template. Neither are the leaders.

The next time someone suggests you’d be more effective if you were less human, less personable, less yourself – consider the possibility that they’re wrong. And that the evidence from your own industry supports it.