Aging Into Leadership: In a System That Devalues Women

This final piece explores the very personal reckoning of growing older; wiser, more strategic, more deeply experienced; in a system that still tries to erase or soften your voice.

Leadership for women, particularly in nonprofit and service sectors, is often conditional. It’s rewarded when it’s quiet, or when it supports someone else’s authority. But when you start to speak plainly, set boundaries, or claim space, the system pushes back.

When Growth Becomes Inconvenient

The personal cost of becoming more effective in a space that resists your power is heavy. You’re asked for strategy, insight, and clarity; but when you deliver, there’s no positional authority or compensation to match it. Instead, you’re met with discomfort, deflection, or attempts to dilute your message.

You begin to notice how the roles you’re offered were never designed to grow with you. They expect you to plateau, to stay agreeable, to remain in support mode. But you’re evolving; sharpening; becoming more clear about what’s needed and how to get there. And suddenly, you’re seen as “too much.”

The Loneliness of Growing into Power

Outgrowing the structures around you can be isolating. The peers you once leaned on don’t understand your shift. The system doesn’t acknowledge your authority. You’re not quite “inside” the rooms of power, but you’re no longer willing to play by the old rules either.

It’s disorienting. But it’s also liberating.

Because once you stop waiting to be invited, you start building your own table.

The Broken Glass

This series doesn’t aim to fix the system in three essays. Instead, it offers language and witness to those operating in the gap; building futures they’ve never been allowed to fully belong in. It’s a reminder that your leadership is not the problem; it’s the correction the broken sector desperately needs.