The "Good Girl" Career

The "Good Girl" Career

Working for the UN had been the goal for years. So in the late 1980’s when I was initially told that I couldn’t apply to the position I wanted, I dug deeper and discovered that HR was not applying its own policy consistently in a way that had worked directly against my candidacy. 

My desire to be there was simply greater than my concern about what challenging the decision might look like. I put the challenge in writing, cited the relevant regulation, addressed it to the relevant person, and waited. The decision was reversed, my application was accepted and I got the job (because I was the only candidate who had shorthand).

What that experience taught me before I had even set foot inside the system was something that two decades working within it would only deepen: the women who get what they deserve in large, complex organizations are rarely the ones who waited to be given it.

That lesson turns out to be just as true in global corporations, multinational teams, and international businesses as it is in intergovernmental institutions. The architecture of how careers advance in large, cross-cultural organizations, who gets considered for interview, who gets protected, whose name surfaces when opportunity or restructuring arrives, follows a remarkably consistent logic regardless of the sector.

And most high-performing women working across those environments are operating from a strategy that was never designed to navigate it.

The strategy goes something like this: do excellent work, be reliable, support your colleagues, and the recognition will come. It seems reasonable enough, and yet it simply stops precisely at the point where the real career strategy needs to begin, because recognition does not flow automatically from performance in complex organizations.

It flows from visibility, and visibility in multicultural, matrixed, global teams is something that has to be constructed deliberately, with the right people, in the right conversations, well before you need it to count.

The share of women in new senior leadership appointments has now fallen for three consecutive years, reaching 32.8% globally,  and the World Economic Forum and Grant Thornton's 2026 research projects that at the current rate of progress, gender parity in senior leadership will not be reached until 2051. 

Behind both figures is the same underlying reality, namely that high-performing women, in organizations of every kind, are routinely underpowered in the mechanics of how advancement actually works.

What I watched repeatedly across more than 20 years inside international organizations was always some version of the same pattern. Brilliant, experienced women doing genuinely important work, who had built their entire professional identity around being indispensable, and who had never quite got around to building the kind of strategic visibility that makes a decision-maker think of your name unprompted.

Praise, in large bureaucratic organizations of any kind, frequently functions as a substitute for advancement rather than a precursor to it, a way of recognising value without redistributing power. The women who advanced were the ones who had made their value legible, specifically and deliberately, to the people with real influence over their trajectory.

Understanding that distinction is the beginning of a coherent career strategy, and the environments that produce the "good girl" career consistently fail to teach it.

The usual response at this point is to suggest better visibility tactics, a stronger profile, more confidence in meetings, and that framing is too shallow for what the evidence actually shows.

Dr Joe Dispenza's work on neuroscience and human change makes the case with considerable rigour: the patterns of thought and behaviour that feel most natural to you are your programming, neural pathways so well established that operating from them feels like simply being yourself.

The "good girl" career is a deeply conditioned pattern of responses that was rewarded consistently enough, for long enough, that it became automatic. And the science is unambiguous on what that means for anyone seeking genuinely different results: the thinking, the self-perception, and the habitual behaviours all have to shift, because a new strategy operated from an unchanged identity produces, at best, a slightly improved version of what you already have.

What the neuroscience also makes clear is that change of this kind is entirely possible, because if the barrier were the system alone, you would have no leverage. The system is real, and its inequities are well documented, and the part of the story that belongs entirely to you is the decision about who you are willing to become and whether you are prepared to do what that becoming requires. Three questions are worth sitting with honestly before you answer.

Who, amongst the people with genuine influence over your future, could describe your value right now in specific, concrete terms, not simply a general endorsement of your ability, but what you actually solve, what you make possible, and what would be measurably harder without you?

When did you last have a conversation with someone senior that was explicitly about your professional development rather than your current deliverables?

And if a restructuring were announced in your organization tomorrow, would your positioning protect you or expose you?

The discomfort those questions produce is data. It tells you that the strategy which brought you here has reached the edge of what it was built to do, and that something more is now required; a genuine expansion of who you are willing to be in your career, and what you are willing to claim.

That expansion is available to you. The question, as it has always been, is whether you are ready to decide that you are worth it.

On International Women's Day, be fabulous, because you are.

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If any of this resonates, I would love to hear where you are in your career right now. Drop a comment or send me a message.