--- title: The Future of Female Leadership description: At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders. canonical: https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-03-11T04:42:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-11T12:43:55.424Z article:section: World og:title: How Businesses Can Support Women as Leaders og:description: At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders. og:url: https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05a3408806ad5c5/69b0c66c2230c541bdfb4237/2265827121.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: How Businesses Can Support Women as Leaders og:type: article twitter:card: summary twitter:title: How Businesses Can Support Women as Leaders twitter:description: At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05a3408806ad5c5/69b0c66c2230c541bdfb4237/2265827121.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Mar 11, 2026 # Want More Women in Business Leadership? These Are the Real Changes Needed ## Video: The Future of Female Leadership: Inclusion and Power in a Changing World Panel [Watch (HLS stream): The Future of Female Leadership: Inclusion and Power in a Changing World Panel](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/QYJErRZJ.m3u8) (25:46)  _Published 2026-03-11. At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders._ by [Tharin Pillay](https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/) ## Tharin Pillay Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. On Tuesday, at TIME’s 2026 [Women of the Year](https://time.com/collections/women-of-the-year/) Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on the future of female leadership, moderated by TIME’s deputy editor and head of creative for Time Studios, Kelly Conniff. The conversation covered the structural and psychological shifts necessary for female leadership to flourish and explored where motherhood, corporate equity initiatives, and AI fit in an increasingly polarized world. Despite being a wide-ranging discussion, it had at its heart one question: What can businesses do to support women as leaders? According to Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Moms First, and one of TIME’s 2026 [Women of the Year](https://time.com/collections/women-of-the-year/7377888/reshma-saujani/), “the biggest thing in women’s leadership that’s been left out is motherhood,” which modern social structures are not built to accommodate. Saujani pointed to the fact that childcare can cost more than a mortgage and to early school start and end times—which impose asymmetric burdens on working mothers—as evidence that the experience of American motherhood is broken by design. “For 250 years, we’ve been conned,” she said, arguing that society wields judgement against mothers of every archetype—”the helicopter mom, the anti-vax mom, the mom who breastfeeds”—as a means of subordination. “They humiliate us to take away our power,” she said. But, Saujani argued, coming together and rejecting false binaries (like “girl boss” versus “trad wife”) can produce real change, including increased access to affordable childcare and paid leave. Narratives need to change for culture to change, she said—and cultural change is necessary to shift policy: “If you don’t value something, you don’t invest in it.” Leslie Cafferty, senior vice president and chief communications officer of Booking Holdings, agreed that expecting women to fix systemic problems themselves, without involving the rest of society, simply doesn’t work. It’s for this reason, Cafferty argued, that women-only leadership training programs don’t necessarily work. “If you are asking the party that is underrepresented to go talk about and fix the problem themselves, you cannot effect change,” she said, adding that so-called “soft skills,” which have historically been associated with women, are necessary for all leaders in today’s environment. ([Booking.com](http://booking.com), which is part of Booking Holdings, was a sponsor of the TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum.) So, if training programs aren’t the solution, how to get more women into leadership roles? “You have to see it to be it,” said Debby Soo, CEO of OpenTable, a tech company owned by Booking Holdings at which more than half of the executive team members are women. “I make it a point to be very vocal about what the life is of a working mom,” she said, describing a typical morning juggling taking a call, putting on her child’s socks, and making breakfast. “We’re not like ducks, just looking placid,” she said. “It’s hard.” For that balance to work, workplaces have to be flexible on when and how work gets done. “I hire women because we’re really good at doing the impossible,” added Soo, who grew up as the only child of Taiwanese immigrants. Dara Treseder, chief marketing officer at Autodesk, said she sees technology as another way to help make that balance happen, and argued that all women should be working out how to integrate AI agents into their workflows. “AI has the tremendous opportunity to help us, but it’s up to us to lean into those skills,” she said. Treseder shared that she had built a personal agent to help her to be a “more curious mother,” and that in the workplace too, she was using AI to foster her capacity for curiosity without judgement. “When we’re curious, we introduce psychological safety,” she said. Treseder observed that, for leaders, the future will entail “not just managing people, but managing people and AI.” (Still, she is fundamentally team human: “AI is lifting the floor, but it is human ingenuity and creativity that is going to raise the ceiling,” she said.) And men have a key role to play, too, Saujani pointed out—especially at a time when some forces that seek to constrain women’s rights are preying on male loneliness and insecurity, and suggesting women are to blame. “Don’t fall for the \[argument\] that this is a zero-sum game, because it’s not,” she said. “So we have got to find ways to bring men into the conversation and have empathy for one another, or we're just as bad as they are.” Cafferty added that diversity in boardrooms and on corporate leadership teams is not just “nice to have,” but “necessary for the survival” of businesses, pointing to years of data showing that diversity is [correlated with](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/diversity%20and%20inclusion/diversity%20matters%20even%20more%20the%20case%20for%20holistic%20impact/diversity-matters-even-more.pdf) improved business outcomes. Moreover, she noted, “if you’re not opening up opportunities for women in your company, they will leave.” Treseder closed the panel with a personal anecdote. “The first time I got pregnant, I was excited because it was something I was looking forward to, something I wanted,” she said. “But immediately after the excitement, my second feeling was fear—I’m ashamed to say—because I was worried about my career.” She gave credit to her boss at the time—a man—for responding with unbridled enthusiasm and support to the news of her pregnancy, and to her company for providing leave and childcare. Even so, the realization that she felt this way, despite her already senior position, made her consider what other women throughout the organization were facing, she said: “It made me rethink how systems work.” _The TIME Women of the Year Leadership Forum was presented by Target, Booking.com, Toyota, Deloitte, and Maker’s Mark._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/"},"headline":"How Businesses Can Support Women as Leaders","datePublished":"2026-03-11T04:42:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-11T12:43:55.424Z","description":"At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders.","url":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/","keywords":["Women of the Year"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05a3408806ad5c5/69b0c66c2230c541bdfb4237/2265827121.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tharin Pillay","jobTitle":"Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/"}],"creator":"Tharin Pillay","articleSection":"World","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd05a3408806ad5c5/69b0c66c2230c541bdfb4237/2265827121.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/world/","name":"World"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/women-of-the-year/","name":"Women of the Year"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/","name":"How Businesses Can Support Women as Leaders"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Future of Female Leadership: Inclusion and Power in a Changing World Panel","description":"At TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, four industry leaders gathered for a panel discussion on what businesses can do to support female leaders.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/QYJErRZJ/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2026-03-11T01:44:03.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/QYJErRZJ.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/","duration":"PT25M46S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/collection/women-of-the-year-forum-and-gala/2026/how-businesses-can-support-women-as-leaders/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```