Warm Authority: The Tightrope Women CEOs Walk

CEOs today face an increasingly complex operating environment: they are tasked with navigating volatile global trade policies, geopolitical tensions, and the rise of AI. The role of CEO has become more challenging—and important—than ever. Organizations need great CEOs who are equipped to lead in unpredictable times. For women CEOs though, they face an additional, invisible challenge that their male counterparts rarely experience—the leadership double bind.

The double bind: Caught between contradictory expectations

Women CEOs have additional demands placed on them. Unlike their male counterparts, women CEOs are expected to be ambitious but not too ambitious; confident but not overconfident. Our research confirms this double bind. We carried out a comprehensive analysis of news articles covering 750 CEOs across the FTSE 100, S&P 500, and Euronext 100 companies, finding that women CEOs were twice as likely to be described as both “too ambitious”—for instance ruthless or self-interested—and “lacking ambition” compared to their male counterparts. They were also three times more likely to be characterized as "lacking confidence" than men CEOs.

The same contradiction applies to authority. Women CEOs must demonstrate clear authority to be respected as leaders, for example by showing they’re decisive or assertive. But, at the other end of the spectrum, if women CEOs are too authoritative, they risk being perceived as aggressive, or even unlikeable.

This expectation is part of entrenched narratives that shape how society—and the media—perceive women's expertise and leadership.

The authority gap—what is it and why does it matter?

The term ‘The Authority Gap’ was first coined by Mary Ann Sieghart, author of The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About it and Founding Partner of The Authority Gap Consultancy. She describes it as “The extent to which we're still much more prepared to accord authority to men than to women. And when I say authority, I mean both in terms of expertise and in terms of power and leadership. This authority gap manifests itself in countless ways—from being interrupted more frequently in meetings to having ideas attributed to male colleagues or facing more stringent scrutiny of their decisions.

Warm authority: Navigating the tightrope

In a recent RRA webinar that explored the media’s representation of women CEOs, Sieghart discussed that there’s a price to pay when women leaders are confident, assertive, and decisive—as this authority becomes associated with a sense of hostility. To combat this, women CEOs are expected to overlay an enormous amount of warmth in their leadership style to be given the ‘right’ to display authority.

For many leaders, exuding warmth is part of their natural leadership style. But this is not the case for everyone and introduces causes for concern. Leaders might feel pressure to present themselves in a way that’s inauthentic to them, meaning they expend energy in the wrong places. When forced to overlay warmth cues that don't align with their natural style, they cannot lead from a place of genuine strength. Secondly, if they’re forced to soften their communication to avoid being perceived as aggressive or unlikeable, it may dilute their message.

Sieghart notes: “Women are 10 times more likely to be described as abrasive than men, while men are three to four times more likely to be described as confident than women.” Women and men are often displaying the same characteristic—confidence—and yet it’s viewed very differently.

Put simply, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. As Hetty Pye, co-founder of RRA Artemis said in our webinar: “Women face an ever-oscillating bar, and it’s almost impossible to hit it just at the right line.” They’re constantly required to recalibrate their leadership approach to exhibit just the right amount of authority, adding humor or being self-deprecating to add warmth, and balance the authority they exude.

Warm authority manifests in women’s CEOs leadership in a couple of different ways:

Softening communication with apologetic language and qualifiers

Women CEOs frequently modify their language to appear less threatening while maintaining authority—a linguistic tightrope their male counterparts rarely walk. Women executives often add hedging phrases such as ‘I think’, ‘sort of’, and permission words such as ‘just’. When women executives soften their language, it can create the perception of uncertainty even when the executive has complete conviction.

Managing emotional expression

Women CEOs often aren’t afforded the same freedom as their male counterparts to express emotions such as frustration, enthusiasm, disappointment, and passion. Instead, they self-regulate their emotional expression within much narrower parameters.

To avoid being perceived as ‘too emotional’ or not emotional enough’, women CEOs often monitor not just what they say, but how they say it. This can include paying careful attention to their tone, facial expressions, and even body language.

From recognition to action: Targeted approaches for systemic change

The solution doesn’t lie in women executives overlaying warmth cues. Organizations have a crucial role to play in dismantling the double bind and creating environments where all leaders can thrive authentically. The approaches that follow were specifically selected because they address the double bind at critical leverage points: how we define and measure success.

How we define success for CEOs

Organizations must explicitly recognize and value different leadership approaches. This means moving beyond traditional definitions of authority that favor masculine-coded behaviors. For instance, organizations that reward aggressive negotiation tactics may undervalue collaborative problem-solving approaches . A reframed leadership model would recognize consensus-building as equally strategic and powerful, eliminating the need for women executives to add artificial warmth to make these skills palatable.

This reframing requires organizations to examine their cultural narratives around power and influence, acknowledging that leadership effectiveness manifests in multiple forms beyond command-and-control models. By expanding their definition of valuable leadership behaviors, organizations not only create space for women CEOs to lead authentically, but also gain competitive advantage through accessing a broader spectrum of leadership capabilities previously undervalued in their talent ecosystem.

“The CEO archetypes of the past limit the talent pool of developed, qualified CEOs, at a time when the world needs to tap into a range of great leaders fit for today’s world. We encourage boards to proactively identify new success profiles and advocate for both expected and unexpected candidates, with conviction.” added Margot McShane, co-founder of RRA Artemis and co-leader of RRA’s Board & CEO Advisory Practice.

How we measure success for CEOs

Performance evaluations often perpetuate the very biases that create the warm authority dilemma. A structured approach to feedback fundamentally changes how leadership effectiveness is measured, shifting from subjective personality assessments to objective, outcome-based criteria. This means replacing vague questions with specific metrics: "What percentage of strategic initiatives did they successfully implement?" or "How effectively did they communicate organizational vision as measured by employee understanding scores?"

This shift toward objective, behavior-focused metrics creates an evaluation framework where leadership effectiveness is judged by tangible impact. By anchoring assessments in concrete outcomes and observable behaviors, organizations can begin to dismantle the gendered expectations that force women CEOs to continually modulate their authentic leadership style, freeing them to focus their energy on what truly matters—delivering results.

As we discussed in our recent report, Why Women CEOs Leave Sooner, and how boards can help all CEOs thrive, boards should proactively check biases when publicly discussing, internally evaluating, and before considering dismissal of a CEO of any gender.

Dismantling the tightrope

When we force our most senior women leaders to operate within artificially narrow constraints, we limit their impact and diminish what they can contribute to our organizations. If boards and other key stakeholders on the other hand encourage women leaders to show up authentically and unleash their own, unique leadership style, they will create the optimum conditions for impact and sustained organizational performance. By addressing these double standards, valuing authentic leadership, and expanding our leadership models, we can create environments where all leaders—regardless of gender—can lead from their genuine strengths.

The tightrope that women CEOs walk doesn't need to be made more navigable—it needs to be dismantled altogether—in turn freeing them up to focus on driving impact and performance. Only then can we truly leverage the full spectrum of leadership capability in our organizations and create the conditions for all CEOs to thrive.

Authors

• Margot McShane co-leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO Advisory practice, and is the co-founder of RRA Artemis. She is based in San Francisco.
• Hetty Pye is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board & CEO Advisory practice, and is the co-founder of RRA Artemis. She is based in London.
• Dean Stamoulis is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Board and CEO Advisory Practice. He is based in Atlanta.
• Shannon Knott is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates Leadership Consulting Practice. She is based in Durham, NC
• Natasha Treschow is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ CEO & Board practice. She is based in London.