Not just a seat at the table

A Women’s Journey from Fighting to Lead, to Leading with Purpose

There is a good chance that wherever you are in your career as a woman right now, you are standing on ground that another woman had to fight very hard to claim. You may not always see her name. You may not know her story. But she existed — and what she went through to get you here matters enormously.

This is the story of two phases of progress. The first is about breaking barriers — earning the right to be in the room at all. The second is about something deeper: building the systems that make sure the women who come after us do not have to fight the same battles we did. Understanding the difference between the two might be the most important thing any of us can do.

Let’s first talk about Breaking Barriers.

Breaking Barriers

The Rights We Had to Fight For

Let us be honest about what was actually at stake. Women had to fight for things that most of us today take completely for granted.

The right to vote — so fundamental, so basic — had to be argued for, marched for, and in many cases suffered for. India granted women the vote in 1950. Switzerland did not do so until 1971. And I recently learnt that even in Canada, women were only granted the federal right to vote in 1918 — and Indigenous women had to wait until 1960. These are not ancient dates. These are within living memory.

The right to own property. The right to open a bank account. The right to get an education. The right to continue working after marriage. The right to be believed. These were not small inconveniences — these were the fundamental conditions of a life.

And yet here is something we do not say often enough: women did not fight alone. Some of the most significant allies in this journey were men who used their platforms to say, loudly and at personal cost, that women must be supported.

The Glass Ceiling: More Than Just a Phrase

When we talk about the glass ceiling, we are describing something every woman who has tried to move up in her career has felt. You can see the top. You can see the people already there. But something keeps stopping you — and the frustrating part is that it is invisible.

Women knew this feeling at work: being passed over for a promotion that went to a less experienced colleague; having an idea ignored in a meeting, only to hear it applauded when someone else said it minutes later; being called ‘too emotional’ to lead, or ‘too aggressive’ when they pushed back with confidence. The glass ceiling was not a metaphor. For most women, for most of history, it was simply their reality.

The Women Who Refused to Be Stopped

But women found a way. Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1966, at a time when the world could barely imagine a woman in that position. Oprah Winfrey was born into poverty, survived abuse, was told she was the wrong look for television, and built a media empire touching hundreds of millions of lives. Serena Williams dominated a sport, survived a life-threatening childbirth, and came back to compete at the highest level — navigating bias every step of the way.

These women did not break barriers because they were untouchable. They broke them because they refused to accept that the barrier was final.

The second part: Building Systems

When Getting In Is No Longer Enough

We celebrated every first. First woman CEO. First woman Prime Minister. First woman to win this award or lead that institution. And those firsts mattered — genuinely. They changed what people believed was possible.

But after a while, something uncomfortable became clear. The firsts kept happening — and then nothing changed around them. Women were getting in, but the systems they were entering were still the same systems built without them in mind. One woman at the top, no matter how brilliant, cannot transform a broken structure alone. The real question was no longer ‘can a woman get to the top?’ It became: what happens to the women who come after her?

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”  — African Proverb

The India Story: What We Inherited, What We Changed

In India, the challenge has been enormous and deeply specific to our culture. For generations, the message given to girls was clear: study just enough, marry at the right age, manage the home, support your husband’s ambitions. A woman with her own ambitions was seen as selfish at best. In offices, women faced an exhausting double standard: be competent but not threatening, warm but not soft, assertive but not aggressive. The bar was not just higher — it kept moving.

But some women refused to accept that as permanent. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in a rented garage in Bangalore in 1978 with almost no money. She was refused loans, told she was too young, too inexperienced, too female. She built one of India’s most successful biotech companies anyway, and has since used that platform to advocate tirelessly for women in science and leadership.

Then there is Sudha Murthy, who in 1974 wrote directly to J.R.D. Tata to challenge a ‘men only’ job advertisement. She got the job. She went on to become Chairperson of the Infosys Foundation and one of India’s most respected philanthropists. She did not just build a career — she built institutions that serve millions. These women did not just get in. They changed what the room looked like from the inside.

From Survival Mode to Strategy Mode

This is the shift I want to talk about most directly. Because many of us have lived it — and some of us are living it right now.

During a Women’s Day campaign at work recently, I had a conversation that stayed with me. I spoke with a senior crew member on a construction site — a woman we are enormously proud of, because being a woman in construction is not the easiest thing to be. She told me, quite plainly, that she has to constantly prove herself. That her work always feels like it is on display. That one mistake gets highlighted in a way that a man’s mistake simply does not. She said she still does not feel it is common ground — that it remains a male-dominated space, and there is still a very long way to go. She said : "A man walks into a job and is assumed capable until he proves otherwise. A woman walks into the same jobsite and is quietly on trial from the moment she enters — here is how I rephrase what she said to me “innocent until proven guilty / guilty until proven exceptional”

I want you to hold that for a moment. Because this is not the 1970s. This is now. Survival mode is not history — it is happening today, in hard hats and steel-capped boots, on sites and in boardrooms and in countless offices across the world.

“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”  — Eleanor Roosevelt

Survival mode is when every day at work feels like a battle. You are constantly proving yourself. Managing your tone, your language, your presence — just to be taken seriously. Afraid to take maternity leave in case your projects disappear. Staying quiet in a meeting because speaking up has cost you before. That is an exhausting way to live. And it is not the end goal.

Strategy mode is different. It is when you stop reacting to the system and start shaping it. You ask: who am I bringing with me? What culture am I creating on my team? What will this workplace look like for the woman who joins five years from now?

The Heart of It

The first phase was about earning our place. Proving we belonged. Surviving systems not built for us. Fighting for rights that should never have been withheld.

The second phase is about something deeper. Now that we are here — what are we going to do with this place? Because the point was never just to get in. The point was always to transform what we got into.

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”  — J.K. Rowling

The argument is that true progress isn’t just about representation — it’s about transforming the systems that marginalised people in the first place.

A Final Word

I want to leave you with something personal. Something that has guided me through my own journey — through the moments of doubt, the moments when the system felt too large and too fixed to ever change.

In the end, the most powerful thing any of us can do — the thing that makes rooms impossible to ignore you and systems impossible to exclude you — is to be so deeply, undeniably excellent that the argument against you simply cannot stand. Not because the world is fair. It is not — and we must keep pushing to make it fairer. But because excellence is a language that even the most stubborn bias eventually struggles to argue with.

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”  — Steve Martin

That has always been my guiding force. I hope it becomes yours too.