How the ’empathy trap’ keeps women out of leadership roles

Power has a way of narrowing progress—and the narrowing follows a pattern.

Early in my career, a senior colleague took credit for ideas and work I had shared while onboarding him to the team. It wasn’t subtle: same thinking, same framework, different owner. When I raised it, I was told to assume good intentions. When I pushed for accountability, I was told I was being “testy.” The behavior was never examined. The outcome was never corrected. I have since seen the same logic repeat across organizations: good intent is treated as a substitute for accountability.

This is not a rare story. This is a system caught in the act.

Women now earn the majority of college degrees in the United States and enter the workforce at near parity with men. Yet they hold only about 29% of C-suite roles in corporate America. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research shows the gap begins much earlier: for every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 87 women are promoted. The gap compounds at every subsequent level until, by the time leadership roles narrow into P&L ownership and executive authority, women are significantly underrepresented.

The problem is not awareness. It is permission for inequity to persist.

The Inequity Awareness–Accountability Gap

What’s happening is a structural breakdown that I think of as an Awareness–Accountability Gap. Organizations develop awareness of inequity but fail to translate it into results. The gap persists through three recognizable and reinforcing patterns.

The first is the empathy ceiling, in which empathy comes to function as an endpoint rather than a baseline for leadership. Once a leader expresses awareness through language, identity, or stated intent, scrutiny recedes. Leaders perceived as “getting it” are questioned less, even when hiring and promotion outcomes for women remain unchanged.

The second is intent inflation. Organizations routinely over-credit leaders for intent while under-pricing the cost of inaction. Leaders earn credit for expressing the right values even when advancement outcomes remain flat. When intent is rewarded without regard to outcome, intervention becomes optional.

The third and most operationally consequential pattern is ambiguity transfer: when unclear ownership gets converted into invisible cleanup labor and pushed onto those without the formal authority to assign, decline, or be rewarded for it. In practice, this burden often settles in middle management and below—the layers expected to translate strategy into execution while managing interpersonal fallout, timeline drift, and cross-functional confusion. That matters because management is also where women’s advancement often starts to stall. At the same time, women in these layers are too often excluded from the business development conversations, strategic calls, and opportunities that generate the sponsorship required to move up. According toMcKinsey’s research, only 31% of entry-level women report having had a sponsor, compared with 45% of men.

How the Gap Recruits Its Defenders

As a Go-to-Market (GTM) and marketing leader, I work regularly with a concept called the growth loop—a behavior that is rewarded, reinforced, and normalized until it becomes self-sustaining. The Awareness–Accountability Gap works the same way.

When leaders perform empathy and express good intent, they receive immediate positive reinforcement: trust, goodwill, credibility. That reinforcement lowers scrutiny, which reduces pressure for action. Over time, even the people most harmed by the system can begin to favor awareness because it preserves stability. For women already navigating higher qualification thresholds and narrower margins for error, insisting on accountability can register as friction rather than leadership. In those conditions, accommodation becomes easier than escalation.

The rise of the “girl dad” as a workplace identity captures this dynamic neatly. In some workplaces, being a “girl dad” has become shorthand for progressive intent—a signal that a leader “gets it.” But understanding inequity and interrupting it are not the same act. When organizations accept identity as evidence of commitment, they complete the loop: awareness signals virtue, virtue generates protection, and the demand for measurable outcomes quietly dissolves.

The “girl dad” is not the problem. The organization that treats the identity as proof of action is.

The path toward closing the gap is accountability

First, track advancement velocity: time to first P&L role, promotion rates relative to male peers, and retention of high-performing women at key inflection points. What gets measured with consequences gets changed.

Second, stop awarding credit for awareness alone. Leaders should be evaluated not on whether they say the right things, but on whether women advance, stay, gain authority, and receive credit under their leadership.

Third, make sponsorship visible. Political capital is finite, and where it is deployed reveals more about leadership than any expressed value. When a leader sponsors someone, record the outcome: Did the person get the role? The visibility? The credit?

Fourth, assign ownership to ambiguity. When decisions are delayed, deferred, or left intentionally vague, organizations should ask a simple question: who is absorbing the downstream cost? Who is aligning stakeholders, repairing fallout, updating timelines, and carrying unresolved work forward?

Proximity to women is not the same as stewardship of women. Accountability, by contrast, requires leaders to redistribute power, absorb conflict, and make loss visible. Avoiding that disruption is not harmless. It produces stagnation and, over time, compounds into poorer leadership decisions, diminished performance, and weaker organizational capacity. The cost is not abstract. Research points to trillions of dollars in lost productivity and reduced economic potential when poor leadership drives disengagement.

Organizations that claim ownership of culture must also own who gains power as that culture hardens into structure. Until awareness is paired with accountability for outcomes that are measurable, tracked, and consequential, inequity will persist behind the language of progress.