Changing Professional Perceptions

🗣️“You must be more assertive.” Last year, those five words burned into Amy’s memory. She’d walked out of her 2023 review at XYZ Global determined to “step up.” Speak more in meetings. Push harder on decisions. Stop softening her tone so she wouldn’t intimidate anyone. She did exactly that. Fast forward 12 months. Same conference room. Same 2 VPs across the table. 🔇“You’ve become too intense, need to work on softening your approach.” 😑 Amy stared at them, speechless. Wasn’t that what you asked for last year? Which version of me do you actually want? She thought about the past year: 🤔 The time she challenged a flawed budget forecast in front of the CFO, saving the company $3 million, but earning whispers that she was “abrasive.” 🤔 The time she stepped in to rescue a failing project, praised for her “grit” publicly, yet privately told she “dominated the room.” 🤔 The time she finally got invited to an executive offsite, only to overhear a VP say, “She’s great, but can be… a lot.” This is the tightrope trap senior women walk daily: • Be assertive, but not too assertive. • Be collaborative, but don’t fade into the background. • Be visible, but not “hungry.”    The same behavior praised in men (decisive, strong leader) gets women penalized as abrasive or too much. Until you set the narrative yourself, you’re trapped performing for a moving target. If you’re exhausted from balancing on a wire men don’t even see, here’s how to step off it and still rise. 1. Audit the pattern, not just the feedback • Track every piece of feedback, especially contradiction. Patterns reveal bias. If the goal keeps moving, it's not you! • Phrase to use in review: “Last year I was encouraged to increase my presence; this year I’m told to soften it. Can we clarify what success really looks like?”    2. Control the frame before the room does • Pre‑set the narrative in 1:1s and emails leading up to reviews. I.e., “This year I focused on driving results while bringing the team with me, you’ll see that reflected in project X and Y.” • This primes leadership to view your assertiveness as an intentional strategy, not a personality flaw.    3. Build echo chambers, not just results • Secure 2–3 allies who reinforce your strengths in rooms you’re not in. • Promotions happen in the absence, you need people echoing your narrative, not someone else’s. • Phrase to brief an ally: “If my leadership style comes up in review, can you speak to how I challenge decisions but still align the team?”    Women aren’t just asked to deliver results. They’re asked to perform, decode, and reframe, all while walking a wire men don’t even see. If you’re exhausted from balancing between “too soft” and “too aggressive,” stop walking the wire and start controlling the narrative. Join the waitlist of our next cohort of ⭐ From Hidden Talent to Visible Leaders ⭐ https://lnkd.in/gx7CpGGR 👊 Because leadership shouldn’t feel like an impossible balancing act.

I’ve been mentoring engineering leaders recently, and one theme keeps coming up: Engineering is evolving—and so must we. When I worked on Google’s index 2 decades ago, it was just a few billion pages. Scaling to trillions and beyond required a mindset shift. We physically visited datacenters, mapped rack affinity & topologies, hardcoded these for performance—because no off-the-shelf solution existed. Fast forward to today: engineers can spin up a datacenters worth of compute with a config change—or better yet, it happens dynamically. That kind of shift isn’t just about tools. It’s about thinking differently. Now, AI is demanding another leap. You can’t say “I’m just backend developer” or “I only do mobile” or "I only work on models". You are now supervisors. System thinkers. Outcome owners. You are not just writing code—you are orchestrating intelligence. And that requires a new kind of engineering leadership. One that breaks silos, rethinks roles, and embraces the unknown.

Women aren’t weak or slow — we’ve just been carrying too much, for too long. A few months ago, I was coaching a brilliant young woman in her early leadership journey. Sharp, strategic, self-aware — and still, she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was “falling behind.” Why? Because her male colleagues seemed to move faster, take more risks, and rise more easily. But here’s what she forgot: She was not only leading at work. She was also managing a household, caring for aging parents, navigating microaggressions, proving her worth in every room, and still being told to “lean in.” This isn’t about excuses. It’s about context. Women aren’t behind because they’re incapable. They’re behind because they’re overburdened — with unpaid labor, emotional caregiving, cultural expectations, and invisible pressures that rarely get acknowledged. So the next time you think a woman is “not ambitious enough,” pause. Look again. She might just be tired of doing it all. Let’s stop measuring potential through a lens that was never built for women in the first place.

More women are needed to shape future science and technology – in particular in Finland Less than one third of people employed in science and technology in Finland are women. We score second worst in Europe in engaging girls and women in science and engineering. In the EU, the share is just over 40%. Finland praises diversity, equality, and inclusiveness (DEI) in its strategies and orations, but when it comes to concrete measures to make a change, the results are meager. Aalto University is not an exception from the average Finnish society in recruiting women to leading positions in science, though DEI is an important part of our core values: 27% of new tenure track recruitments, 23% of academic manager positions, and 31% of academic positions involve women. Our KPIs do not include gender balance (nor DEI) to track this development more closely. How to make a change? For a start, recruit more women to leading [academic] positions, committees, science academies, engage academia more with topics important to women, etc., and reward improving the gender balance (NB. this does not inflate quality as often is claimed, but the opposite).  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”.  Also, in #DEI & #gender balance. European University Association Svenska tekniska vetenskapsakademien i Finland Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia – The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters Research Council of Finland | Suomen Akatemia Aalto University Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriö/Undervisnings- och kulturministeriet/Ministry of Education & Culture Opetushallitus - Utbildningsstyrelsen - Finnish National Agency for Education Tekniikan akateemiset TEK

𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰'𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲'𝐥𝐥 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬! At a recent leadership conference, I was shocked to see that only 30% of attendees were women, reflecting a broader issue: the gender gap in leadership. This highlights a significant problem in our workplaces. Statistics reveal that women hold only about 30% of leadership roles globally, and it will take an estimated 132 years to close this gap, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022. Additionally, women are often underrepresented as speakers at conferences, comprising just 30.1% of speakers in a recent study of 98 conferences. So, why is this happening? Traditional gender roles, lack of mentorship, and unconscious bias in hiring and promotions all contribute to the low representation of women in leadership. Women are also more likely to leave their careers mid-way due to these challenges. To change this narrative, organizations can take several steps: 📌Promote Gender Diversity: Actively seek to hire and promote women. 📌Offer Mentorship Programs: Connect women with mentors to provide guidance and support. 📌Provide Bias Training: Educate teams about unconscious bias to create fairer hiring practices. 📌Create an Inclusive Culture: Celebrate diverse voices and ensure everyone feels valued. By pushing for gender parity in leadership, we can foster innovation and better decision-making. It’s time to make gender equality a reality in our workplaces! LinkedIn LinkedIn Creator's Club LinkedIn News India LinkedIn News World Economic Forum World Economic Magazine Womenpreneur India #workplace #equality #genderdiversity #leadership

I’m an Engineering Manager at Google with 20+ years of experience. In the last 6 months, after spending hours and hours live coding across multiple projects, I realized something many software engineers are still not ready to understand: Our jobs are not disappearing. But the version of the job many people got comfortable with already is. Most of the news you read right now will tell you that software engineers are dead or that developers will not be needed anymore. I think that is the wrong conclusion. Software engineers are still needed, but the work has fundamentally changed. Here is what that change actually looks like. [1] Writing code is no longer the whole job For years, many engineers built their identity around being the person who can write the implementation fastest. That is no longer enough. The value is now in deciding what should be built, what should not be built, where the boundaries should be, and what trade-offs are acceptable. [2] Debugging now matters more than coding Most failures are not caused by a missing semicolon or a bad loop. They happen because the environment is wrong. Permissions break. Secrets are misconfigured. CORS fails. Deployments drift. Infrastructure rejects something that looked fine locally. The engineers who grow from here will be the ones who can debug systems, not just write features. [3] Restraint is becoming a senior skill A lot of bad engineering comes from solving a small problem with a giant solution. One UI issue becomes a schema redesign. One slow API becomes a full architectural rewrite. Strong engineers know when to stop. They know when to keep the data model simple, when to aggregate at the edge, and when to avoid turning a fix into a migration project. [4] Verification beats confidence A feature that “didn’t crash” is not the same as a feature that works. This is why testing, logs, structured errors, terminal output, and clean diffs matter so much more now. The future belongs to engineers who verify reality. [5] The role is shifting from builder to owner More and more, the job is becoming: review the direction, check the trade-offs, protect the user experience, catch the risk, watch the cost, and make sure the system still makes sense six months later. Right now, you need: Less ego. More good judgment. More ownership of outcomes. Software engineers are not dead. But the engineers who only wanted to write code and hand off the consequences are going to struggle a lot more than they expect.

I once got feedback that I was “intimidating.” I took it to heart. I spent the next few years trying to be as approachable, warm, and agreeable as I could be. I assumed this was a character flaw that I needed to fix. But years later, I realized something: this feedback wasn’t about me. It was about the system - one that judges women more harshly and polices their personalities more than their performance. And the numbers back this up. 👇🏽 🎯 Women are 7x more likely to receive negative personality-based feedback than men. 🎯 56% of women have been called "unlikeable" in reviews (vs. 16% of men). 🎯 Harvard Business Review found that 76% of “aggressive” labels in one company’s reviews were given to women (vs. 24% to men). This Is the Leadership Double Bind: Speak up? You’re “too aggressive.” Stay quiet? You “lack confidence.” Show ambition? You’re “unlikeable.” Ask for a promotion? You’re “too pushy.” And here’s the kicker - it’s worst for high-performing women. This is why women... ↳  Hesitate to showcase ambition. ↳  Are reluctant to ask for opportunities. ↳  Are leaving workplaces faster than others. So, what can we do? Here are 3 ways we can start changing this narrative today: ✅ Check your language. Is the feedback about personality or performance? If you wouldn’t give the same critique to a man, please reconsider. ✅ Challenge vague feedback. “You need to be more confident” isn’t actionable. Women deserve the same clear, growth-oriented feedback as men. ✅ Support women’s ambition. If certain leadership traits (ex. being assertive) are seen as strengths in men, they should be seen as strengths in women too. Have you ever received unfair feedback? What’s one piece of feedback you’ve had to unlearn? 👇🏽 ♻️ Please share to help end unfair feedback. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor (She/Her) for more insights on conscious leadership. Source: Textio 'Language Bias in Feedback' Study, 2023 & 2024 #EndUnFairFeedback #IWD2025

The mega-influencer era just died, and nobody sent out a memo. While brands were busy throwing millions at celebrities with perfect feeds, Nike quietly shifted the game. In 2023, micro-influencers carried 52% of Nike's media impact value according to Launchmetrics data; not A-listers, not mega-stars, but everyday fitness enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Glossier, Inc. built a billion-dollar empire by turning 500+ customers into brand ambassadors, and SEPHORA's #SephoraSquad is pulling record numbers with 16,000+ applications this year alone. So apparently, authenticity fatigue is real. When your audience can smell a paycheck from three posts away, smart brands like ASOS.com and HelloFresh are betting on genuine conversations instead of staged perfection. Nike isn't just working with elite athletes anymore, they're partnering with your local yoga teacher. Glossier, Inc.? They made every customer feel like an influencer. The data backs it up: micro-influencers drive better engagement and ROI. But the real story? Brands are finally realizing that influence isn't about follower counts. It's about trust. And trust gets built in DMs and comment sections, not billboards and Super Bowl ads. The future belongs to brands brave enough to hand their reputation to people who actually use their products. Are you still chasing follower counts, or building real communities?

What if the stereotypes we still believe are the real barriers in engineering? Every time someone says “engineers are all analytic, not creative,” or “you need to wear a hard hat and get your hands dirty to be credible,” it sends a message. One that makes people feel they don’t belong before they even try. Here are a few stereotypes that are long overdue for retirement: – Engineers are always logical, never emotional – Creativity isn’t part of engineering work – Engineering is only for those who are physically strong or rugged – Leadership is about technical seniority, not emotional intelligence These myths don’t just hurt feelings. They discourage curiosity, silence smart questions, and block people who could lead with safety and inclusion in mind. Lots of change is possible when we shift what behaviour we celebrate. When creativity, empathy, and vulnerability are seen as strengths – not liabilities. Our work helps teams recognise these hidden barriers, freeing more people to bring their full selves into engineering spaces. What stereotype do you think is most harmful, and first in need of retiring?

As International Women’s Day nears, we’ll see the usual corporate gestures—empowerment panels, social media campaigns, and carefully curated success stories. But let’s be honest: these feel-good initiatives rarely change what actually holds women back at work on the daily basis. Instead, I suggest focusing on something concrete, something I’ve seen have the biggest impact in my work with teams: the unspoken dynamics that shape psychological safety. 🚨Because psychological safety is not the same for everyone. Psychological safety is often defined as a shared belief that one can take risks without fear of negative consequences. But let’s unpack that—who actually feels safe enough to take those risks? 🔹 Speaking up costs more for women Confidence isn’t the issue—consequences are. Women learn early that being too direct can backfire. Assertiveness can be read as aggression, while careful phrasing can make them seem uncertain. Over time, this calculation becomes second nature: Is this worth the risk? 🔹 Mistakes are stickier When men fail, it’s seen as part of leadership growth. When women fail, it often reinforces lingering doubts about their competence. This means that women aren’t more risk-averse by nature—they’re just more aware of the cost. 🔹 Inclusion isn’t just about presence Being at the table doesn’t mean having an equal voice. Women often find themselves in a credibility loop—having to repeatedly prove their expertise before their ideas carry weight. Meanwhile, those who fit the traditional leadership mold are often trusted by default. 🔹 Emotional labor is the silent career detour Women in teams do an extraordinary amount of behind-the-scenes work—mediating conflicts, softening feedback, ensuring inclusion. The problem? This work isn’t visible in performance reviews or leadership selection criteria. It’s expected, but not rewarded. What companies can do beyond IWD symbolism: ✅ Stop measuring "confidence"—start measuring credibility gaps If some team members always need to “prove it” while others are trusted instantly, you have a credibility gap, not a confidence issue. Fix how ideas get heard, not how women present them. ✅ Make failure a learning moment for everyone Audit how mistakes are handled in your team. Are men encouraged to take bold moves while women are advised to be more careful? Change the narrative around risk. ✅ Track & reward emotional labor If women are consistently mentoring, resolving conflicts, or ensuring inclusion, this isn’t just “being helpful”—it’s leadership. Make it visible, valued, and part of promotion criteria. 💥 This IWD, let’s skip the celebration and start the correction. If your company is serious about making psychological safety equal for everyone, let’s do the real work. 📅 I’m now booking IWD sessions focused on improving team dynamics and creating workplaces where women don’t just survive, but thrive. Book your spot and let’s turn good intentions into lasting impact.