Reframing power: What equity means in tomorrow’s leadership

On March 10th, The Gallery Seoul had the privilege of hosting a panel with four leaders representing both the private and public sectors:

Kumjoo Huh, founder of the International Women’s Forum and distinguished business leader; H.E. Gareth Weir, Deputy Ambassador of the United Kingdom to the Republic of Korea; H.E. Emilia Gatto, Ambassador of Italy to the Republic of Korea; and Jim No, former Global GM/SVP of Dr. Jart+ at The Estée Lauder Companies.

This was a great occasion to approach the topic of gender equality from a different angle, mixing personal experiences with the more formal dynamics of the workplace. The discussion began with a simple but provocative question:

Is it still relevant to talk about female leadership?

All the speakers agreed that we are experiencing a pushback on women’s rights, and for that reason the question should not be whether we should talk about it, but rather how.

What seems to be most missing today is the togetherness. Partnerships that cannot be one-directional or gender-based: they must be inclusive, we need to challenge existing paradigms together, and to question conventions and beliefs in order to dismantle these calcified and retrograde narratives. It is about shifting the narrative around gender roles - or rather, dismantling the idea that gender commitment should be separated at all.

Starting from leadership at the highest level, the panel observed how simply promoting women to top positions does not necessarily have a consistent impact on what is often called the talent chain. In other words, changes at the top of leadership do not always influence the recruitment structure, which still remains deeply shaped by old-fashioned social values.

For this reason, the panel emphasized that the promotion of gender equity must move along three essential lines: leadership training, equality in recruitment processes, and de-bias training. Experience shows that it is entirely insufficient to push women into positions of authority if they are then left alone to fight and constantly reaffirm their own professionalism. This clearly encourages the persistence of attitudes that belong more to a previous generation: a time when aggressiveness was considered a necessary trait for those pioneering women who were trying to access positions of power (mentioning examples specifically in foreign affairs). They often had to emulate existing male authority rather than work toward identifying their own color of leadership.

Building on this, another point that received much attention was parental leave. It seemed evident to everyone, both to those who had experienced it directly and to those who had witnessed their partners go through it, that one of the most crucial moments in a woman’s career remains the birth of children. Despite the wonder of family life, the miracle of life, and the excitement it brings, structurally it still represents an obstacle in a woman’s professional path.

And this happens regardless of country or cultural background. Society almost everywhere expects care work to fall on the female side of the world. Women often become the “family showrunners,” forced to carry both the professional load AND the emotional responsibility of caregiving . And this did resonate with me: the feeling of having the brain divided in two, half for the child, half for the rest of the world.

This is not only the result of cultural influence or social conditioning. Laws themselves often fail to guarantee that fathers can equally support the arrival of a child. By “equally,” is meant a real fifty-fifty division of parental leave, or an equivalent duplication of that time. How much would strongly advocating for mandatory parental leave for fathers make the difference? Or is it more about preparing families to embrace such a challenge, namely a genuine fifty-fifty reorganization of care work and responsibilities?

For a long time, an unbalanced distribution of roles within the family has been taken for granted. For this reason, reformulating that division becomes not only a social or institutional challenge but also an internal one for the couple, if not for the extended family as well. In other words, it becomes clear that we need new models, even within the world of care work and our micro social structures.

From the shared experiences of the panelists, it also emerged that while the mental and organizational load of family life is still largely expected from women, on the other hand, men are still expected to guarantee the family’s economic security. For this reason it is impossible not to mention the strong power of the “man box,” which also restricts men by binding their roles to performance and heavy social expectations. 

Things are changing, we kept repeating, but the pace at which these changes are happening reveals a huge delay. For this reason,leadership should be considered an opportunity to mature not only within a corporate environment but first and above all on a personal level.

I would like to rephrase that thought, which resonated with me so deeply: the way we perceive and allow the feminine within our own inner selves is at the core of real maturity in gender equality.

The panel concluded with very practical suggestions to strengthen and revise existing structures in corporate: we must work on transparency in evaluation criteria, offer more formal sponsorship rather than simple mentorship, and guarantee accountability in order to produce long-lasting change. At the same time we must also confront which criteria we use as they often rely on past models, which makes the challenge of transforming that foundation even harder.

We closed the panel with the feeling that we had only just begun sharing. Memories from the COVID years, or from the early stages of each panelist’s career, sparked mutual reflections about the advantages and disadvantages that gender still carries today. It sometimes feels as if we are perpetuating the existence of each other’s cages, waiting for someone to step out and dismantle them.

For that, the discussion brought us back again to the core of the problem: the world needs people who do not simply advocate for gender equality but who actively defend it on a daily basis; making emotional diversity acceptable, opening conversations about structural bias, and refusing to stand aside feeling overwhelmed or powerless. 

Personally, I see a particular hope in father-daughter relationships. Not only because of the stories shared during the panel, but because I believe that within that loving exchange there is a space where gender barriers can truly be dismantled and where the defense of these principles can become tangible. It is within that intimate and affectionate core that rights often feel most necessary, and I trust that fathers may become new advocates of the kind of role-modeling that is desperately needed.

After all, the greatest revolutions in history have started with someone taking a stand, with some Rosa Parks out there sitting in a forbidden seat and saying, loud and clear:

“Damn… no.”