There is a version of the women in leadership conversation that I find useful and a version I find exhausting. The useful version talks about what actually happens inside organizations when women lead, and what changes. The exhausting version is mostly about how hard it is.
I am less interested in how hard it is. I have been leading Universal Events Inc. since 2014. I know how hard it is. What I am more interested in is what the work has taught me about doing it well, because that is the part of the conversation that has real value for the women who are coming up behind me.
The Credibility Tax Is Real. Pay It Once.
Every woman who leads an organization in a field where she was not expected to lead pays a credibility tax. It is the extra proof required, the references checked twice, the accomplishments that need to be stated out loud instead of assumed. This is real. It is also manageable if you understand it correctly.
The mistake I see women leaders make is paying that tax continuously. Every meeting. Every new relationship. Every time someone in the room is not sure yet. The better approach is to pay it once, clearly, and move on. State your track record. Let it stand. Then get to work.
At Universal Events Inc., our track record speaks before I enter a room. Twenty years of nonprofit event production. More than twenty US markets served. Great Place to Work certified four times. LEAD National Partner of the Year. When I meet a potential partner now, I do not need to earn the table. I need to find out whether we are a fit. That shift took years to make but it was worth making.
Building a Women-Led Firm Means Hiring for the Long Game
I have always hired women at Universal Events Inc. Not because of a policy. Because the talent was there and the industry had not caught up to it yet. Some of the most capable nonprofit event strategists I have ever worked with came to me from fields that were not taking them seriously. They came with skills, work ethic, and something harder to train: investment in the mission.
Women who work in cause-driven fields tend to be there on purpose. That is not a generalization. That is a pattern I have observed over two decades of building a team. When the work is genuinely about something, about a cause, a community, a family that benefits from what we produce, the people who last are the ones who came because the work mattered to them.
Leading a women-led firm in a service industry also means building the kind of culture where people stay. Not because they have to. Because they want to. Great Place to Work does not certify an office. It certifies an environment. Getting that certification four consecutive times tells me we are building something that holds up over time.
The Mentorship Obligation
I feel strongly about this one. Women who get to leadership positions in cause-driven industries have an obligation to reach back. Not a vague obligation. A specific one.
I try to be findable. That means being present in conversations about nonprofit leadership, about women-led firms, about what the field looks like when it works well. It means being willing to have the conversation a younger woman in the field needs to have, even when my calendar is full. The lighthouse does not choose which boats to illuminate. It stays on.
The practical version of this is simpler than it sounds. Return the email. Take the call. Be honest about what worked and what did not. The path I walked has cleared some of the terrain. The least I can do is leave the trail visible.
What Leadership Actually Looks Like From Inside It
Leading a firm through twenty years of cause-driven work in the Bay Area has not always been linear. There were years when the market contracted and we had to build differently. There were partnerships that did not work and had to be ended with integrity. There were moments when the right decision was the harder decision.
What held through all of it was a clarity about why the firm exists. We exist to serve the missions that matter. Every decision gets measured against that. It does not make the hard calls easy. It does make them clear.
That is the thing I would tell any woman building a leadership path in this field. Get clear on why your work exists. Not what it produces. Why it exists. The strength that comes from that clarity is not borrowed from a credential or a title. It is yours, and no room can take it away.