With this perspective, women can work with the challenges from a position of strength and act more strategically.
Third, understanding how gender norms can mask the value and visibility of women’s leadership skills can help women to claim their value and make their leadership skills and contributions more visible.
And, finally, women need to work to challenge and interrupt these gender assumptions, not in ways that will set them at odds with their staff, peers, and bosses, but in ways that are thoughtful, deliberate, and constructive. This is not simply self-serving; it can benefit the organization as well. Women pushing back constructively on organizational norms and assumptions will help organizations to bring greater diversity to their leadership pools, cultivate and retain more leadership talent, and give greater recognition and support to leadership competencies that are critical for their success but remain undervalued. At the same time that this helps the organization be more effective, it also creates more opportunities for women to advance into leadership positions.

Reclaiming Your Leadership Value
Women’s leadership skills can be invisible for many reasons. The challenge is to claim value for those skills. Claiming that value involves negotiation, not in the traditional sense of making deals – although that might be a possibility – but rather in changing perceptions about you and your skills and accomplishments. Here are seven strategies that have been used effectively by other women:
Recognize your value. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. We fail to see how we get in our own way, how we diminish our contributions or jump in to help other people and let them claim all the credit. Stop and look at your assets – what do you bring that others cannot.
Make your value visible. What we contribute to our organizations is

not always obvious – performance does not generally speak for itself. For people to appreciate your contributions, you need to make them visible – to show clearly how your efforts made a difference.
Withdraw your value. Sometimes your contribution increases in value when you withdraw it. Such a move can carry some risks so it is usually best to talk through with people the consequences of withdrawing from a project, not actually doing so.
Enlist support to bolster your value. Touting one’s value directly may be difficult. Allies can help by attesting to your value and contributions.
“Turn” statements that diminish your value. In negotiations, particularly when one’s ‘fit’ for a leadership job is at stake, there may be a natural tendency to downplay or minimize the value you are claiming, because it does not fit the norm for a potential incumbent. Be prepared to name this tendency when that is happening, correct it with another version of your skills and talents or divert it to focus on a fresh discussion of what skills and experience are best for the job.
Build your value into your job. Sometimes women’s leadership skills are seen as a ‘free commodity’ that goes under the name of helping or being a team player. That value will be invisible unless you negotiate it as part of your job that gets evaluated in the same way as other responsibilities.
Claiming your value is a strategic campaign. Change never comes overnight. Having your leadership skills recognized is a slow process built from individual steps. Each opportunity to claim value contributes to changing perceptions of your leadership skills and suitability for significant
leadership jobs.
( Deborah M. Merrill-Sands andDeborah M. Kolb. The authors are Co-Directors and faculty at the Centre for Gender in Organizations. They also teach in leadership programs for women in the Executive Education Program at the SIMMONS Graduate School of Management)