I have been named to the Women in Leadership Top 100 2027. I want to explain why I said yes to it, because the reason is not really about the recognition itself.

The number that should annoy you

Women make up 26% of the people quoted, featured or talked about in the world’s news. That is according to the 2025 Global Media Monitoring Project, run by UN Women and WACC, which has tracked this figure for thirty years. In that time, it has moved nine points. When women leaders are quoted in the news at all, they are more often positioned as eyewitnesses to something than as the authority explaining it.

Read that again next to how many women are actually running things. The leadership is there. The public record of it mostly is not.

Why this is happening now, of all years

This is not an old problem slowly fixing itself. According to Grant Thornton’s Women in Business 2026 report, which surveyed 4,265 mid-market businesses including over 300 in the UK, the share of female chief executives in the UK mid-market dropped from 24% to 17% in a single year. That is the lowest figure in eight years.

At the same time, the same report found that 91.9% of leaders now weigh a company’s gender equality record before they will apply for a role there. Investors are starting to ask the same question of the boards they sit across from.

So the demand for visible women leaders is going up right as the visible supply of them is going down. That is not a coincidence anyone should sit quietly with.

What visibility actually does

None of this is really about a certificate. A published, dated, independently indexed record does something a private track record cannot. It shows up when someone searches your name before a board appointment. It sits underneath your bio when a journalist is deciding who to quote for a story. It is the thing your own case studies and speaker profile can point back to.

I spend most of my working life telling B2B clients that operational strength, which is never documented, does not win tenders, board seats or media coverage on its own. It felt inconsistent to skip putting my own leadership on the record while telling other people to do exactly that.

Where this goes from here

If you are a woman leading a business, a team or a board and you have never had your own leadership documented anywhere public, this is worth acting on, not admiring from a distance. The work you have already done does not need to be bigger before it is worth recording. It needs to be found.