South Africa has become good at counting women in leadership. We count how many women sit on boards, how many occupy executive positions and how many have entered senior management.

These numbers matter. Representation is one of the clearest ways of identifying progress in a society in which women were historically excluded from positions of economic and institutional authority.

But perhaps we have reached the point where counting women is no longer enough.

The more difficult question is not simply how many women are in leadership but how much power women are able to exercise once they get there.

Who controls significant resources? Who influences strategy? Who leads the assignments that create organisational visibility? Who is included in succession planning? And who participates in important decisions before those decisions have effectively been made?

A woman can occupy a leadership position and still remain distant from the centres of institutional power.

That is the uncomfortable conversation Women’s Month should invite us to have.

Representation and power are not the same thing

South Africa has made important progress.

Grant Thornton’s Women in Business 2026 research reports that women occupy 47.3% of senior management positions among South African mid-market businesses surveyed.

Yet Statistics South Africa reported that in the second quarter of 2025, only 6.8% of employed women were managers, compared with 10.7% of employed men.

These datasets measure different populations, so they should not be directly compared. But together they illustrate something important: significant progress in some parts of the economy can coexist with persistent inequality elsewhere.

This raises a deeper question about how we define transformation.

If transformation is measured only by the number of women who reach leadership positions, we measure the destination without examining the journey.

And it is the journey that determines who gets there.

Leadership is built before the appointment

When organisations struggle to find women for executive or board positions, we often hear that there are not enough suitably experienced or “board-ready” candidates.

But board readiness does not begin when a vacancy is advertised.

It is accumulated over years.

Before the boardroom comes the strategy meeting, the budget discussion, the risk committee, the difficult negotiation, the major programme, the executive presentation and the assignment that everyone knows will create visibility.

These experiences build judgement, confidence, networks and credibility.

Throughout my professional journey, I have observed something simple but important: capability grows when it encounters responsibility.

You learn to manage complexity by being trusted with complexity. You develop strategic judgement by participating in strategic decisions. You learn governance through exposure to governance.

This creates a paradox.

Women are often told they need more experience before they can be considered for significant leadership opportunities. Yet institutions control access to many of the opportunities through which that experience is acquired.

We cannot demand governance experience while rationing governance exposure.

We cannot demand strategic leadership experience while repeatedly allocating women operational responsibilities.

If we are concerned that too few women are “ready”, we must also ask who had the opportunity to prepare them.

Readiness is not merely an individual attribute. It is also an institutional outcome.

Perhaps women are not the problem to be fixed

This matters because much of the advice given to professional women focuses on what women should change.

Be more confident. Find a mentor. Network more. Negotiate harder. Improve your executive presence. Obtain another qualification. Speak up.

There is value in this advice. Women, like all professionals, should invest in their development.

But when a problem is structural and the solution is consistently directed at individuals, we risk asking women to adapt endlessly to institutions that remain largely unchanged.

A woman can acquire another qualification. She cannot assign herself to a strategic programme.

She can improve her confidence. She cannot appoint herself to a decision-making committee.

She can expand her network. She cannot place her own name into a succession discussion happening behind a closed door.

At some point, the question must shift from “What else should women do?” to “What should institutions do differently?”

Mentorship opens minds. Sponsorship opens doors.

This is where sponsorship becomes important.

Mentorship helps people develop. Sponsorship helps ensure that development becomes visible where opportunities are allocated.

A mentor may tell a woman, “You are capable of leading.”

A sponsor tells decision-makers, “She is capable of leading.”

That distinction can change a career.

Some of the most consequential conversations about our careers happen when we are not in the room.

“Have we considered her?”

“Give her the assignment.”

“She can lead this.”

Opportunity often begins with somebody who has institutional credibility being willing to say your name.

This does not undermine merit. It allows merit to be seen.

We need better measures of transformation

If organisations genuinely want to understand whether they are developing women leaders, they should measure more than representation.

How many women lead strategically significant programmes? How many control meaningful budgets? How many are in credible succession pipelines? How many receive governance exposure and senior sponsorship? Where are women leaving the leadership pipeline, and why?

These are not merely human-resources questions.

They are questions of governance and institutional sustainability.

A board that knows how many women it employs but does not know who is being prepared to lead the organisation in five or ten years has only half the picture.

Women’s Month should ask a harder question

Representation remains essential. Women cannot influence institutions from which they are excluded.

But representation should be the beginning of transformation, not its final achievement.

A photograph of a diverse leadership team can tell us who was present. It cannot tell us who controlled resources, whose judgement carried weight or who influenced the final decision.

That is why the next phase of women’s advancement must examine not only representation but the architecture of opportunity and power: who receives opportunity, who accumulates experience, who gains access to influential networks and who is ultimately trusted to decide.

Perhaps this is the question South African organisations should answer this Women’s Month:

If women are increasingly getting seats at the table, are we equally willing to redistribute the opportunities, influence and institutional power that determine what happens around it?

Because transformation will not be complete when women are simply visible in powerful rooms.

It will be complete when seeing women exercise power in those rooms is no longer remarkable at all.

Dr Nomusa Dube is a programme management, strategy and governance professional with more than 14 years’ experience in the public and private sectors. She writes in her personal capacity.