By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Two years ago, the World Economic Forum introduced a gender quota of sorts – to raise the percentage of women at its annual event in Davos, which I called “embarrassingly low.”

In 2010, only 17 percent of attendees were women, so the WEF decided that moving forward, for every four men each company sent to Davos, they’d have to send one woman. This year, after two years of the quota system at the elite gathering, well, not much has changed. The percentage hasn’t risen at all. In 2013, only 17 percent of attendees were women.

What’s going wrong?

According to The Guardian’s Jane Martinson, many companies are sending only four men, and forfeiting their last ticket rather than send a woman. And as Quartz’s David Yanofsky wrote, “Comparing the conference’s gender bias to that of the world population–49.7% women–means that one is 66% less likely to encounter a female participant at Davos than almost anywhere else in the world.”

But in truth, the 17 percent ratio is simply business as usual. As Barnard College President Debora Spar wrote last September:

“As of 2012, women accounted for only 16 percent of partners at the country’s largest law firms and 15 percent of senior executives at Fortune 100 firms. They constituted only 10 percent of the country’s aerospace engineers, 7 percent of its Hollywood directors, and 16 percent of its congressional representatives. And they still earn, on average, only 77 cents to every man’s dollar.”

The Davos gender gap is just a representation of a larger problem – a global leadership gap that leaves fewer women in charge of a world that sorely needs them. After all, if some of the best leaders aren’t making it to the top simply because they are female, that means some sub-par leaders are taking their place simply because they are male.

Apparently, our institutions would willingly withstand underwhelming leadership rather than do the hard thing and look beyond the “think leader, think male” stereotype – and this should call into question every other lazy decision these institutions have implemented.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

When we think of leaders, we usually have a few ideas in mind about what they look like and how they act. If you asked a random person on the street to imagine a CEO, they would probably think of a person who is male, white, tall, straight, decisive, genial, and a jumble of other traits that come together to form the CEO archetype.

Another trait most leaders share is executive presence. It’s a trait that’s difficult to define, but you either have it or you don’t, and we know it when we see it.

It is precisely that intangibility that makes feedback on executive presence so hard to process. How can people who don’t automatically conform to the leadership stereotypes above attract and maintain power? And when women receive feedback on executive presence at work, are they simply receiving advice on how to act more stereotypically male? In other words, where do the male leadership stereotypes end, and the executive leadership traits begin?

According to Lauren Leader-Chivée, Senior Vice President at the Center for Talent Innovation, it is possible to detangle executive presence from the cult of masculinity. By understanding the foundational components of executive presence, she believes, women and minorities can better navigate the often contradictory messages around what makes someone “leadership material.”

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