Confident or “difficult”? Depends who you ask
“Leadership is about helping others win.”
Last week I ran a session for Capsticks LLP on gendered leadership. 109 people attended, and around 20 of them were men. And at the end, the outgoing Managing Partner, Martin Hamilton, described it as "the best conversation on leadership we've had at Capsticks."
That’s going on the wall!
I would love to share the key messages from the session with you, because leadership in the legal profession is, in many ways, still catching up. When you find an example of it being done well, it’s worth talking about. Not just as proof of what is possible, but as a reminder to anyone working somewhere less enlightened that it does not have to be this way.
The data is not subtle
Whilst women now make up 63% of solicitors in England and Wales, we only hold 35% of equity partnership positions. In the US, women represent just 24% of equity partners.
And yet, in a Harvard Business Review analysis of 360-degree feedback data, women outperformed men in 17 out of 19 key leadership competencies. Taking initiative, acting with resilience, driving for results. 17 out of 19! Not a small margin.
What’s clear from this is that we are not underrepresented at the top because we are underperforming. Far from it.
The double-bind
Here's what the research does show: women are caught in a no-win situation that psychologists call the double-bind. If you are assertive and confident, you get called aggressive and difficult. If you lead with warmth and collaboration, you are seen as likeable but perhaps not quite partner material.
Men, by contrast, are not caught by this. A man who leads with assertiveness is seen as assertive. A woman who does the same thing is seen as aggressive. Same behaviour, different judgement, depending on who is demonstrating it. That is the double standard at the heart of the double-bind.
I asked the group whether they had ever been penalised for being assertive, direct, ambitious or confident, traits routinely praised in men but questioned in women. Usually when I ask this question, I am asking it to a room full of women, and the answer is an overwhelming yes.
This time was different. We had men in the room too. And what happened in the chat was, I think, the most straightforward illustration of the double-bind I have ever seen in a live session. The women who responded said yes. The men who responded said no, without exception. Not because the men were wrong or the women were exaggerating, but because that is precisely how the double-bind works. The standard is different depending on who is trying to meet it.
And it is not just the women in that room. Here is what women in my own community have told me, and what I heard repeatedly in the research for my chapter in Beyond Bias (Globe Law and Business, 2025).
"I had sharp elbows. But all I did was set high standards and get things done."
"I was called aggressive for simply responding to blunt emails with the same energy."
"I was told I wasn't very approachable. Why? Because I wasn't smiley enough."
If one of those comments sounds familiar, that's because it might be yours.
This is not a personal failing. It is a documented, replicated, systemic pattern. It was identified by researchers in 1973 and it is still playing out in law firms today.
The reframe
A few years ago, I was part of a pitch to deliver training to a large UK regulatory body. It was worth over £100,000. My male colleague and I had prepared well. The presentation had gone well.
But as we were packing up to leave, I noticed something in the lead decision maker. I could just tell that she was slightly hesitant and disquieted - something hadn't quite landed. My colleague didn't pick up on it, but I did.
I spoke directly to it. I told her that we understood what they were trusting us with and that we would treat it with the care it deserved. The atmosphere in the room changed immediately, and we ended up winning the tender.
My colleague said to me on the way back: "You won us that tender. I hadn't picked up on that at all."
It wasn't won with legal acumen alone, although that played a part. It was won with emotional intelligence, with the ability to read a room, and with the kind of awareness that I had spent years dismissing as a nice-to-have rather than a genuine professional skill. The contract was worth over £100,000. Make of that what you will about how soft that skill actually is!
What the research actually says
In a landmark meta-analysis of 45 studies, researcher Alice Eagly found consistent differences in the way men and women tend to lead.
Men were more likely to use what researchers call a transactional leadership style: managing through reward and punishment, hitting targets gets you recognised, missing them has consequences. It is built on compliance and control, and if it sounds familiar, that is probably because it describes the leadership culture in a great many law firms. Given that men have run most of them for most of their history, that is perhaps not a coincidence.
Women, by contrast, were significantly more likely to use a transformational leadership style: leading through inspiration, investing in the people around them, articulating a shared purpose, noticing when someone is struggling and doing something about it. Building the kind of trust that makes teams genuinely high-performing, rather than merely compliant.
Here is the part that matters. Transformational leadership consistently and measurably outperforms transactional leadership on every measure that matters to a law firm: team engagement, long-term performance, retention, innovation, resilience. Not by a small margin, and not in isolated studies, but repeatedly, across decades of research.
The qualities we may have felt pressure to tone down are not weaknesses. They are the most effective leadership traits we have, and the evidence has been there for years.
What Rachael Heenan said
I was joined in conversation by Rachael Heenan, Senior Partner at Capsticks, who said this:
"I realized early on that I wasn't going to lead like the men who came before me, and that was okay. When I showed up as myself, people responded. That's when the real impact started to happen."
And on the question of what leadership actually looks like: "Leadership is helping others win. It's putting things in place so that others can succeed, and giving them the credit."
The conversation with Rachael left me thinking, not for the first time, that the legal profession is sitting on an enormous amount of untapped potential. Because when you lead in a transformational way, you don’t just perform better yourself - you bring out more in the people around you. And if more law firms understood that this style of leadership is not just better for people but better for the bottom line, perhaps more of them would lead that way.
Capsticks is proof that you do not have to choose between commercial success and a culture where people actually thrive. You can have both. In fact, the evidence suggests that one is the reason for the other.
What I want to leave you with
I want to end with a question I asked the group towards the close of the session, which you may find helpful to ask yourself.
Think of a moment when you led, influenced or achieved something at work simply by being yourself, not by performing a version of yourself, not by trying to fit the model of the lawyer you thought you were supposed to be. What were you doing, and what made it work?
It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be something you'd put on your CV. It might be a conversation with a client that changed the direction of a piece of work, or the way you noticed a colleague was struggling before they'd said a word. It just has to be a moment when you showed up as you, and it worked.
And when you think about what made it work, I'd be willing to bet it wasn't something you'd describe as a skill. It was probably just you, doing something that comes naturally, something you might have dismissed as nothing special precisely because it felt so easy. That is worth paying attention to. The things that feel effortless to you are often the things that are extraordinary to someone else, and they are almost certainly the qualities that made that moment work.
That moment is evidence - that you already know what it feels like to lead as yourself and to be effective doing it. The next time you feel the pull to shrink yourself, to be more contained or more palatable, I want you to go back to that moment and remember what it felt like to be that version of yourself, because that is your greatest professional asset.
Who you are is not a liability. It never was.
Rachel
Ps. If you'd like me to run this session for your law firm, I'd love to hear from you. Get in touch at rachel@femalelawyersclub.com.