Our mental models of leadership are shaped quietly.
Who runs the meeting. Who gets introduced as the expert. Who people instinctively turn toward when decisions need to be made. The more often we see certain kinds of people in positions of authority, the more those images settle into our collective imagination as the default.
Those defaults matter more than we think.
My career began in Beirut, Lebanon. In an industry and country that many might assume was male dominated, my experience was the opposite. The strongest voices in those rooms were mostly women. Our company was managed by a woman. My creative directors were women. Our go-to producers were women. The people setting creative standards, challenging ideas, and holding teams accountable were women.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it.
Leadership just looked like the people doing the work well. Meetings were rigorous, expectations were high, and the work had to stand up on its own. The fact that many of the people holding that line were women didn’t register as unusual. It felt normal.
It wasn’t until later in my career, after moving to the United States, that I started to find myself in rooms where I was the only woman at the table.
The realization didn’t arrive with drama. It was subtle—but it was clarifying.
When something has always felt ordinary, its absence becomes surprisingly visible.
That’s when the conversation about representation began to make more sense to me—not as symbolism, but as something structural. The people we see in positions of authority shape the picture we carry of who belongs there.
In advertising, that picture has historically been narrow. When I entered the U.S. market, only about 3% of creative directors were women. Today that number has grown to roughly 29%, thanks in part to industry efforts like The 3% Conference and initiatives such as Free the Bid.
That’s part of why Sullivan has felt like such a natural home for me. Nearly 70% of our leadership team are women, including our founder and managing partner, Barbara Apple Sullivan. It’s not something that gets announced or spotlighted—it’s simply built into the foundation of the firm.
From a creative standpoint, that kind of environment shows up directly in the work. When a range of perspectives is visible and respected in the room, ideas tend to get stronger. Assumptions get challenged earlier. People are more willing to question the obvious answer and push ideas further.
The women who shaped my early career weren’t interested in being symbols. They were exacting, direct, and deeply committed to the craft. They asked hard questions, pushed ideas further, and expected everyone around them to meet a high bar. What they modeled wasn’t representation as a concept, but leadership as a practice.
Women’s History Month often highlights milestones and achievements, and those stories matter. But another, quieter measure of progress is when the presence of women in positions of authority stops feeling like a milestone at all.
The goal isn’t to make women in power remarkable.
It’s to make them unremarkable.
To reach a point where leadership no longer fits a single inherited picture—where the question isn’t who belongs here, but simply who is best for the work.
Because when the picture changes, so do the possibilities for everyone who comes next.
And the conversation can return to where it should have been all along: the work.