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Reflecting on her leadership journey, Eeva Leinonen describes the perseverance needed to navigate structural barriers to equality, gendered perceptions of women in senior positions within universities and the importance of peer-to-peer relationships and structured leadership development.
Early in my academic career, I asked an experienced university president what he considered the most important qualities for someone in his role. I expected him to emphasise strategic thinking, financial acumen and the ability to inspire people. Instead, he said that the most important requirement was stamina.
I was astonished by his answer, but after decades in senior leadership roles I know that he was right. It is critical to have psychological fortitude as well as physical stamina because without these, other important qualities cannot be fully realised. For me, that fortitude has a particular name.
In Finland, we call it sisu. It is a characteristic of the Finnish people which we hold dear in our national psyche, and it speaks directly to what that university president was describing. Sisu can be defined as extraordinary inner strength and perseverance under adversity. One apt description is that sisu begins where perseverance ends. It is solution-focused and proactive and encompasses moral courage and the capacity to lead through crises. I recognise something of this at play in my own leadership journey and it is a quality I have returned to many times when navigating the more demanding chapters of my career.
Resilience can be pivotal when women navigate structural barriers in leadership. It represents the courage to persist in male-dominated environments and the determination to challenge institutional barriers. It is the key to shattering glass ceilings and, importantly, to remaining relatively intact in that process.
Many senior female leaders have reached their positions through prolonged institutional resistance, including high scrutiny of competence, greater expectations of emotional labour and persistent pressure to maintain likeability while exercising authority. Repeated legitimacy testing and prove-it-again bias are experiences that many women in leadership will recognise, and they require strong emotional resilience and perseverance to navigate without losing one's sense of self.
However, like most traits, resilience has a positive and a negative side. The positive encompasses persistence, courage and endurance, but the negative can exhibit rigidity, inability to change course and even burnout. This is why it must sit alongside self-awareness, strategic agility and the collective strength of a high functioning leadership team.
Many women describe their leadership journeys as quiet persistence rather than overt dominance. There is a sense of quiet power which reflects calm determination, moral courage and relational persistence rather than assertive authority. This aligns with adaptive, relational and values-based leadership which is firm but not domineering.
Quiet resilience can remain largely invisible in both career recognition and institutional functioning. Emotional containment is a form of quiet resilience that involves staying calm during conflict, carrying uncertainty and protecting colleagues from institutional pressures. It is something that is often unacknowledged yet absolutely key to organisational functioning. Organisations tend to celebrate resilience when it appears in heroic narratives, but the quieter, more sustained version is if not more at least equally significant.
Resilience in leadership has a strong gendered element. Female resilience is often perceived differently from resilience in male leaders, not because of capability, but because of gendered expectations and workplace norms. When women show resilience through assertiveness and boundary setting, there can be a perceived trade-off with warmth and likeability.
A male leader standing firm under pressure is often seen as strong and decisive. A female leader in the same circumstance can attract labels such as difficult and emotionally distant. Female leaders can be called overly ambitious rather than determined and capable when showing resilience despite opposition or setbacks.
I have personally witnessed this confusion between outcomes and performance on the one hand, and perceived personality traits on the other. As a senior leader I was given feedback by a male board member about how I should speak and stand so as not to come across like a school mistress, meaning clear, competent and resilient.
As a younger leader, this kind of feedback would leave me feeling discombobulated and unsure how to move forward. In later years, through experience, I have learned to recognise and call out misogyny and acknowledge the discomfort others can feel when female leaders exhibit clarity of thought, resilience and strong performance without overly embracing expected female personality characteristics.
There is a personal and emotional cost to resilience, to holding it together, to containing emotion while managing complexity and pressure. Senior female leaders often operate under heightened visibility and scrutiny, and this can create a gap between what is felt and what can be expressed.
Resilience can become counter-productive when it requires over-endurance and is carried individually rather than collectively. There is also the additional pressure not to conform to stereotypes of fragility and emotionality. This is where trusted peer relationships become important as well as spaces where the role of leader can, albeit temporarily, be set down.
Resilience can be romanticised as a superpower, but to frame it more plainly it is a leadership strength and practice, and sometimes a hard-earned wisdom that enables us to determine when to push, pause or redirect. What accelerates that wisdom is connection, to peers who understand the terrain, to mentors who have navigated it before and to structured programmes that take female leadership seriously as a field of development in its own right.
The EUA Leadership Development Programme is one such space, and the conversations, relationships and insights it nurtures are precisely the kind of collective resource that makes individual resilience more sustainable.
To the women navigating their own journeys I would say: find those spaces and invest in them. And to institutions, national systems and European frameworks I would say: build them, fund them and recognise that developing female leaders is not a pastoral gesture but a strategic imperative.
