Hello beautiful soul
Years ago I sat on a leadership team genuinely trying to build an organisational culture without ridiculous hierarchy (I know, radical, right!?)
We agreed, as a team, not to use big titles like Chief. We wanted people to feel empowered, not managed from above.
So the women did exactly what we agreed.
I put People Practice Lead on LinkedIn. My actual job was Chief People Officer. It did not matter. We had made a decision as a team and I stuck to it.
That was not the case for some of the men on the team.
They called themselves whatever made sense to them. Publicly. No second guessing. No committee meeting in their own head about whether it was allowed or if they were telling a lie. No agonising over what people would think or whether it was technically permitted or whether someone might pull them aside later and question it.
This is not about those men specifically, I love them dearly. But it is a textbook example of something much bigger.
Women observing every rule to the letter. Men doing what made sense to them and not even registering it as a decision.
He was not lying by the way. He was telling the truth about his role. He just did not carry the weight of wondering what people would think. Because it never occurred to him that they would think anything at all.
That gap. That invisible weight. That burden. That is what I want to talk about today.
Because it did not start on that leadership team. For me it started much earlier.
In my first proper leadership role, I was working as the Director of a recruitment company. I was leading a team. I was turning over north of £500,000 in revenue as a consultant also. I was operationally overseeing the business. Director was the accurate description of those collective activities.
But 26 year old me called herself "Consultant", because it felt audacious to claim the bigger title. What if someone look at my work and decided that the title was a lie?
So I stuck to the version that did not make a claim I was not sure I was allowed to make. The version that kept me safe from being questioned, challenged, found out.
I was not lying. I was just making myself smaller than the truth.
And I had been doing that for years by then.
When I was 17, 18 — before university, I wasworking in an office — I started wearing glasses and little suits. Because I was a small girl and I did not think anyone would take me seriously without them. I built a costume. I created a version of myself that looked the part because I did not trust that the world around me believed I deserved to be there.
But I didn't do any of this because I was bonkers. I did it because I could see the mircoscopic flickers of surprise when I entered a meeting as a young woman.
You see them too. Don't tell me you don't my darling.
Here is what I have come to understand about all of it.
The rules that govern how women move through the world are different. Not written down anywhere. Not officially enforced. But felt. Constantly. In a thousand tiny ways every single day.
Do not claim too much. Do not take up too much space. Do not be too direct. Do not be too loud. Do not present yourself as something bigger than the room has decided you are yet.
And most of us — because we are sensitive, because we are attuned, because we notice everything — pick up on every signal. Every slightly cooled energy. Every raised eyebrow. Every moment when the room shifts because we said the thing or took the space or called ourselves the thing we actually are.
And then we internalise it.
We take that signal and we run it through our internal committee and we come out the other side with a verdict. I need to be quieter. I need to be smaller. I need to be less direct. I need to earn the title before I use it. I need to wait until nobody could possibly question it.
And meanwhile the man across the table updates his LinkedIn and does not think about it again.
And I want to name something here that we do not say enough.
This fear is not irrational.
It is not just conditioning. It is not just the internal committee running its tired old program. It is a rational response to watching what the world does to people who claim space it had not yet decided to give them.
And with a heavy heart, I need to mention Jason Arday, who was a Black British academic. A Cambridge professor. If you are British you will instantly know who I am talking about.
This is a man who had climbed every rung of a system that was not built for him and reached the top of it. And when his story became complicated — when the press decided there was something to unpick — they unpicked him. Publicly. Ruthlessly. With the particular smug cruelty that the British media reserves for people who had the audacity to become more than the system allows for.
I don't care what the British media believe Jason did or didn't do, I care that our brother is not here anymore.
And I care that this is the same system that keeps white men at the top and many others out. The same system that has a particular way of dealing with people who step outside what it has decided they are allowed to be.
To every woman who has hesitated before updating her title, before claiming her expertise, before calling herself the thing she actually is — that hesitation is not weakness. It is wisdom about a world that has shown us, repeatedly and recently, what it does to people who get too visible too fast in the wrong way.
But the answer is not to stay small, my darling. The cost of us continuing to live like this is simply too high. We have to be a part of changing the system.
My life changed when I stopped performing a version of credibility that had nothing to do with who I actually am. And slowly, quietly, I started letting the costume (and the power suits) fall away.
Piece by piece. Title by title. Rule by rule.
And what I have found on the other side of that is not chaos. It is not people respecting me less. It is not the thing I was afraid of.
It is just me. Clearer. Fiercer. More myself than I have ever been.
That instinct has got fiercer and fiercer and fiercer with every year that passes. And what you see from me today — the way I show up, the way I speak, the way I take up space — is that instinct fully alive.
The invisible rules were never officially yours to follow.
You just thought they were.
So here is your permission slip — not that you need one from me, but in case it helps to hear it out loud.
Call yourself the thing you actually are. Update the profile. Use the title. Take the space. Stop waiting for someone to confirm that you have earned the right to tell the truth about yourself.
The men who claimed the titles were not braver than you. They just were not carrying the same invisible weight.
Women Who Lead is the place where we figure out which rules were ever actually yours and which ones you picked up along the way without realising. Six months. Seven women. The inside game and the outside one.
The September cohort is forming now. Hit reply if something in this landed and you want to say hello and hear more.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. Here's my video from this weekend on this very topic. Click here or below.
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