Be it Sarina, Greta or Taylor, hear female leaders roar!

No, I am not talking about the fans watching England in a World Cup final for the first time in almost sixty years. I am talking about a monumental shift.

A shift that is seeing women begin to not only break through the glass ceiling but smash it to pieces.

Patriarchy, I have bad news for you.

Women in leadership are the world’s most powerful force today.

Greta Gerwig is officially the highest-grossing female filmmaker of all time, breaking every revenue record with Barbie - now heading to become Warner Bros’ top movie box office (ahead of Chris Nolan’s Batman) and one of the top 50 highest-grossing movies of all time with $1.2bn global box office revenue and going.

Unprecedented? Yes.

Coincidence? No.

Taylor Swift is creating seismic effects with her way of challenging the music industry, launching her singles and, last but certainly not least, her Eras Tour becoming the first tour in the history of the business to gross over a billion dollars and causing a seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake in Seattle.

Unprecedented? Yes.

Coincidence? No.

Sarina Wiegman has led the much-loved Lionesses to win the Euros (the first major honor any England team has won since 1966) and now the World Cup Final! Let me write this again. The World Cup Final! This is also Wiegman’s second.

Unprecedented? Yes.

Coincidence? Nooooo.

None of the above is a coincidence. What do all three have in common? Well, they are all women, of course. Dig a little deeper, and something more interesting emerges.

Each embodies a new emerging style of leadership.

When you listen to Wiegman and her players talk in interviews, for example, note how they rarely talk about themselves. They talk about their teammates; they offer praise for the contribution of others. Wiegman’s philosophy is centered around the death of personal ego and instead focuses on shared goals and team building.

We are witnessing the dawn of a new leadership era set by ferociously talented and wonderfully empathetic women (as well as a new generation of men hungry to change things too).

One that values we v me.

One that inspires rather than instills fear.

One that prioritizes empathy over alpha commands.

One that unites when things get hard instead of blame.

One that is based on ‘shared’ (shared ambition, shared passion, shared joy, shared success, shared loss) instead of ‘individual.’

One that lifts everyone around them and fosters psychological safety - the single important driver of team and business success.

And when you look at these traits, it’s no surprise why these women have achieved such success in leadership. We know that 85% of job success comes from well-honed soft skills such as empathy, humility, persuasiveness, entrepreneurial spirit and resilience. These are the very skills these female leaders excel in.

Yet despite all this success and the science that shows this new leadership way is a better way, something startles me despite how the world is beginning to stand up and pay attention. Women’s full potential has yet to be fully realized. I am sure you may have seen the stats, but let’s remind ourselves how outnumbered women are across the board…

• Women CEOs still only run 10.4% (v. 2.8% in 2015) of Fortune 500 companies and 8.2% (v 4% in 2015) of S&P 500 companies.

• Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021.

• Last year, US startups with all-women teams received 1.9% (or around $4.5bn) out of around the $238.3bn in venture capital allocated, according to the latest PitchBook data.

• Women comprise 70% of the advertising industry’s junior to manager positions but only 37% of leadership roles (Souce: WACL 2023).

The inconvenient truth is female leadership is standing out more than ever before.

But this is not happening because the world is more equal now. The numbers above don’t lie. The truth is female leaders are grabbing every opportunity to lead by the balls and smashing it with a new leadership style, utterly different from the legacy one in place.

The conclusion, therefore, is an obvious one.

It’s time to accelerate equality in leadership if we want to supercharge success and keep breaking records.

It’s time for more top companies to embrace women in CEO positions and their bolder new leadership styles.

It’s time for VCs to invest more in female founders.

It’s finally time for more female leaders to roar.