Women Leaders and Strategies to Empower and Overcome Challenges

My motivation for this chapter is to explore how gendered stereotypes around emotions have shaped women's leadership experiences. For centuries, emotions were miscast in medicine as a female ‘affliction’, fuelling perceptions of women as irrational and unstable. These narratives persist today, particularly in male-dominated fields like STEM, where women leaders face a double bind: emotional expression is judged as weakness, but restraint is seen as cold and uncaring. Drawing on theories linking emotion, gender, and culture, this chapter examines how societal roles shape emotional expression and highlights practical challenges women encounter in STEM. We conclude with strategies to cultivate emotional intelligence as a strength that benefits individuals and organizations alike. From a personal perspective, I have often struggled with emotional expression as I've experienced criticism for being too bubbly or smiley and not being taken seriously but adjustments to be more ‘professional’ were met with comments that I'm mean and prickly. Now at a mid-career level, I have experienced all ranges of work culture and can attest to the power of supportive, open-minded leadership. Great leaders are not specific to a particular gender, but the intersection of gender and culture with respect to emotional intelligence is impactful and, I believe, the key to shifting how we accept ourselves as humans and level up our collective ability to be collaborative, creative, and innovative in a way that honours contributions from diverse backgrounds.