“41% of people questioned in the G7 believe there are differences between men and women on the cerebral level.” It’s grisly outside, cold, dark, and it’s raining, but the room is packed. It’s the Women Leader’s Night, an annual conference at HEC Lausanne organized to inspire women to break the cage of glass and become leaders. Six stood before the crowd, waiting to tell their stories. Stories of adversity, doubt and perseverance, stories of leading with and through change, and most importantly, how intersectionality can be used to your advantage.
Kick in the Door before they can Lock it.
As this event was organized by HEC Lausanne, all of the speakers have a background in Law or Economics, some got bored in one job and switched to another, some stayed in the same field all their career, but one thing popped up in every speech, no matter if she was working in consulting or software : at every pivotal turn in their careers they all had to do the same thing. Open the door yourself. Especially in finance, women are not freely given space to strive, and thus it is imperative to be ambitious, even though nobody else will approve of it.
One of the Speakers, Tatiana Carruzzo started at Credit Suisse and developed symptoms of burnout after some time. When a colleague of hers deserted the company, she joined him and landed a new post at a different bank. As opposed to her position at Credit Suisse, this new job felt fulfilling, and when her boss resigned, she met the moment and applied for the opening he had left behind. At the time, she was unsure if this system that she knew inside out would accept her at its helm or continue pushing her aside as an other, but trying alone is a step most women do not take, but is necessary to achieve success. Even more bafflingly, a study has found that men apply for jobs if they qualify in half of the requirements, whereas women tend to only apply if they meet all of the requirements, which leads us to the second most mentioned point: apply even if you are not the perfect candidate. Without this type of confidence, none of the speakers would have landed their positions.
The Hidden cost of Success
“A bad leader comes in first and leaves last,” is what my therapist said, “because then they go on vacation in the psych ward.”
Another unanimous agreement among all speakers was the collection of hidden drawbacks of success. Be it imposter syndrome after a promotion, burnout in a position that doesn’t suit your needs and strengths or feeling alienated by a system that was never built for you.
The most significant and defining one of these detriments, however, was the feeling of guilt, perpetuated by motherhood and collective expectations of mothers. In Western society, a mother staying at home to raise the kids was the norm for most of the modern age, and a mother going back to work after giving birth challenges these traditions, but not without a response. Neighbors chitchatting about being a terrible mother, colleagues at work asking if you don’t feel bad for leaving the kids at the daycare or bosses expecting you to wind down to 40% workload, all of the present speakers who were also mothers agreed to feeling guilty a lot of the time, almost exclusively because of their work.
However, it was also affirmed that even though their careers require constant psychological negotiation, maintaining them while experiencing the joys of motherhood was worth the struggle many times over.
Redefining Leadership in your own Terms
What shone through most in all the stories and anecdotes that were shared this evening was the transformative power in leadership. Because these companies and institutions were built by old white men for old white men, the needs of different individuals at different stages in their lives were cast to the wayside, creating hostile environments except for tenured men who enjoy seniority on their way to retirement.
However, when women leaders start reshaping the corporate landscape in a way that pertains to their needs, many others will come out of the woodwork, affirming their efforts. One example for this was Heike Kammerer-Vercelli, who had to drop the kids off at school at 8:30 and be in Vevey for a meeting at the same time, prompting her to call for permanent rescheduling of the meeting to 9:00, because this allows her to drop off her kids and then drive to work. The old men running the company had never realized this was a problem, because their kids had all already finished school, but many younger employees of the company applauded this decision because they too had been struggling with work and school occupying the same time slot but never felt heard enough to put their needs forward. A traditional approach to this problem might be putting off change until you’re senior enough to call for it, but by that time your problem got a degree and a job at a start-up and now you’re just as old with tattered skin, and even worse, there’s always someone more senior, someone who knows the founders a bit better, someone who was there before you. And that is why change needs to happen in the moment.
What is important in these positions is to find a unique approach to leadership, which comes about by acting on the needs of people, creating support systems and confronting harassment.
Final Words
It is 7:32, the apero is ready. The speakers seem different, less tense, more talkative and not at all media trained. In a world where old men carved their rules into the mountains, the corporate career ladder seems impossible to be summitted by a woman, but these six have shown so much more today. It was not a space for perfect role models or morality. After all, an undisclosed speaker had worked for Nestlé for 17 years, but instead, it was room of trail blazers showing younger ones how to go farther with the tools and knowledge they had acquired.
Domenic Schwander
Sources
- Women Leader’s Night Lausanne 2026
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