The Iceberg that’s Sinking Women Leaders

Only 10% of an iceberg sits above the water. The other 90% — the part that determines where it drifts, how it behaves, what it collides with — stays hidden beneath the surface. I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately, watching news of ice sheets calving in the warming Arctic and Antarctic. But it’s not the melting ice that’s really caught my attention. It’s what the iceberg tells us about ourselves.

Because we do exactly the same thing with people. We watch the 10%. The conversation in the meeting, the promotion that goes to someone else, the colleague who somehow always gets the credit and we try to make sense of it all at that surface level. We shake our heads. We complain the system is rigged. We wonder why on earth someone behaved the way they did, when it simply doesn’t add up.

It doesn’t add up because we’re only looking at the visible tip.

The other 90% is the system itself: the unspoken rules of the game, the assumptions so deeply wired into a culture that nobody thinks to question them anymore. Who gets rewarded. Who gets overlooked. What skills matter, and — this is the part that stings — who you’re allowed to be within that environment. Beneath that again sit the values and beliefs holding the whole structure in place. Align with them, and you rise. Sit at odds with them, and however capable you are, you find yourself perpetually out of step.

This is exactly where so many of the women leaders I work with find themselves. Not lacking ability. Not lacking drive. Simply standing on the wrong side of a system that was never built with them in mind. So they adapt. They soften an opinion here, shrink a little there, condition themselves to fit a mould that was never really theirs. And it works, for a while — right up until the day they look in the mirror and don’t recognise who they’ve become. Or worse, can’t remember who they were before they started adapting themselves to fit in.

That’s the part that troubles me mos. It isn’t the meeting where she got talked over. It’s the slow, quiet erosion happening below the waterline, one small compromise at a time, until there’s a soul-shaped hole where her authentic self used to be.

This is also why so many well-intentioned DEI initiatives struggle to deliver the change they promise. They’re aimed squarely at the visible 10%: policies, targets, training days. Necessary, yes. But if the 90% beneath stays untouched, you’ve patched the tip and left the mass beneath still steering the ship.

Real change, lasting change, has to go below the surface. It means doing the deep work — examining the mental models, the entrenched beliefs, the assumptions so old you’ve stopped noticing them at all.

So here’s my question for you today: when you look at your own career, your own choices, how much of what’s shaping you is actually visible to you and how much is quietly working away, unseen, beneath the surface?