979: Why Leadership Resilience is a Trap for Women | Leadership Mindset

Episode notes

Perhaps we need to stop celebrating resilience. Because we may actually be celebrating toxic resilience. Hear me out. In the corporate world, telling a woman she is resilient is often just a polite way of saying, “ We are going to give you an impossible workload, broken systems, and no support… and we expect you to smile through it .” In fact, if you’re complimenting my resilience, I may question if you were complicit in building and upholding the systems that made my resilience mandatory when yours was not. Somewhere along the way, resilience became high praise for women in leadership. But too often it’s code for “ Figure it out, we’re not going to fix this .” Women are expected to absorb dysfunction, manage emotional labor, navigate bias, and hold everything together without complaint. When resilience becomes a requirement instead of a choice, it stops being empowering and starts being extractive. The truth is, many women develop extraordinary resilience not because they lack capability, but because they are operating inside systems that demand more from them than from their male counterparts.