The One About Women Reshaping Culture @Work

We talk a lot about women finding their voice, practicing agency, and taking action; we need to and we should. But agency doesn’t live in a vacuum. Agency happens inside systems. And those systems (companies, teams, cultures) all have rules. Some rules are explicit. Most aren’t. And if women want to grow, lead, and belong at work, we need to understand those rules before we can adjust them.

The core for today is simple: how culture shapes women’s careers and how women can reshape culture.

Here’s the thing: workplaces are not neutral. They are designed organisms: shaped by business models, industry pressures, leadership styles, generational expectations, gender norms, cultural backgrounds, and the unwritten assumptions of the people who built them.

Companies “do” culture through mechanisms that sometimes elevate talent and sometimes silently block it. So yes, our individual agency matters. But understanding how the system is designed (the incentives, the power structures, the invisible norms) is what allows women to navigate, negotiate, and ultimately reshape the rules. And today, I want to explore exactly that:

• How do companies design culture?
• How does culture come alive?
• How can women influence or redesign those mechanisms?

Today, let’s start with the juicy stuff. Because the reality is that:

• Culture is designed through mechanisms, not values on the wall.
• Culture’s components are visible things (rituals, communications, patterns, etc.), what leaders say the culture is, and underlying assumptions, the real rules.
• Those assumptions are historically masculine-coded. Women struggle with them because they translate to beliefs like:
  • Leadership = assertiveness
  • Commitment = availability
  • Confidence = talking more
• Culture is shaped by power, not by the handbook. The loudest, oldest, or most rewarded behaviors shape the norm. If women aren’t represented in those power clusters, culture will rarely consider their experience.
• Workplaces were built assuming a male worker with no caregiving responsibilities (gendered organizations).
• Leadership traits were defined around male-coded behaviors, which means evaluation systems reward behaviors men are socialized to display more easily.
• Female leadership thrives only when the culture allows it. In competitive, hierarchical cultures, female leadership is punished through the double bind.
• Culture is an ecosystem: business model + incentives + people = behavior. The pace and pressure of the industry, business incentives, team composition and diversity, and organizational stage and maturity impact and shape cultural norms.
• As we saw in a previous episode, female leadership tends to be transformational (coaching, elevating, and bringing meaning). This translates into “cultural labor”: mentoring, onboarding, cohesion, giving feedback, maintaining team health. It is essential for the ecosystem, but in most cases it is free work women perform, and it is work that is rarely recognized or rewarded.

And it all makes sense once we understand how these studies and research have evolved:

• Before the 1970s, companies were seen as machines. The focus was on efficiency, structure, and hierarchy. Culture wasn’t even a concept.
• During the 1970s, Sociology and Anthropology entered the chat. Academics began saying: “Organizations behave like cultures, not machines.” We started acknowledging that culture exists, but we were still not designing it.
• In the 1980s and 1990s the field took shape. Culture began to be seen as a strategic asset. Leadership started caring about culture but still designed it from a top-down, male-coded lens.
• Starting in the 2000s, innovation and tech companies pushed a new narrative. Teams over hierarchy, autonomy, creativity, psychological safety, and collaboration took over the conversation. For the first time, the field began acknowledging bias, double standards, and systemic inequalities.
• This brings us to the last two decades, the 2010s to the present, where we understand culture as a living system. Culture is no longer a static set of values. It is a dynamic, evolving ecosystem built from incentives, power, leadership behaviors, and lived experiences.

So, what can we as women do when culture was designed mostly by men? Today is the first era where women’s experiences, community, and identity-based leadership styles are finally part of the conversation. What can we do and how can we do it?