Female Leadership Isn't a New Idea. It's the Oldest One We Keep Erasing.

On formation, faith, and the model hiding in plain sight.

I didn't go looking for a leadership model. I was born of one.

Mary of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph, and the mother of Jesus. In Filipino homes, Mary is not a footnote. She is not a statue in the corner collecting dust. She is in the language of grief and gratitude. She shows up when families fall apart and when they come back together. She intercedes and holds things together without making a speech about it. She has been doing this for centuries, quietly, consistently, without a framework, without anyone calling it what it is.

Leadership.

I am a cradle Catholic who left. I read Siddhartha, wandered, and found something real in nature, relationships, and the practice of just being present. Then I had kids and found myself back in the pews. Not because I had answers. Because I needed something to return to. What I found when I came back wasn't the institution. It was something that had been forming me the whole time, and that I was now choosing, consciously, with eyes open.

A good foundation doesn't close you off. It holds you steady enough to stay curious about everything else. That is what I came back to. That is what I am teaching my kids.

Mary made a choice. An enormous one, without a plan, with so much uncertainty, in a context that didn't make it easy. She said yes anyway. She led with love and conviction. Firm when it needed. Compassionate when needed. She didn't wait for permission, a title, or a framework. She built something that held.

My mother did the same thing.

She is, quietly, the chief financial officer of our family. She made investments that put all four of her kids through college. She made sure there was enough, not just financially, but in every way that matters. She got her master’s degree while raising four kids because she believed in education so completely that she lived it.

When my aunt and uncle were hospitalized on separate occasions, she was the first call they made. She showed up. She helped navigate the hardest moments without making those moments about her. She opened her home to family in need, and she always fed those who were hungry (and my Filipino readers can relate, she even fed those who weren’t, because that’s what your nanay does). All her siblings came to her when life happened, and life always happens.

She also showed us, by example, that you are never too busy to give compassion. That being a mother is not a ceiling. That you are more than one thing, and you do not have to choose between being present and being ambitious. She modeled that before anyone gave her credit for it. I did not have to go looking for a model of consequential leadership. I was born of it, because of her.

And this is what is bothering me lately…

We say we are searching for better leaders. We fund leadership programs and buy frameworks and fill conference rooms with consultants who teach presence, humility, relational trust, the willingness to take a loss for the greater good, and building something that holds.

Go to any leadership conference, masterclass, or webinar. Someone will invoke servant leadership with the same reverence as a priest. Someone will talk about presence and sacrifice and holding things together. They will put it on a slide. They will sell it as new thinking.

Mary has been modeling every single one of those qualities for two thousand years. She is in the homes of Filipino families and Latino families, and Catholic communities across the world. She has been there the whole time. Nobody in that conference room says her name.

And then we go home to women who have been doing exactly that for generations. In kitchens and communities and immigrant households and faith traditions across every culture on earth. We just never called it leadership. We called it personality. We called it culture. We accept it as what women do.

That is not an accident. It is a choice. A slow, structural, centuries-long choice to define leadership in the image of the people who already had power. And then spend generations wondering why the model keeps producing the same results.

The matriarchs in my family built trust through presence. They knew when to hold firm and when to let something go. They didn't need credit to do the work. The family cohered around them. It always has. That is not personality. That is not a coincidence. That is leadership, passed down so quietly it looked like something else entirely.

That is not oversight. That is erasure.

We are living in a moment where female leadership is still treated as a niche category. A subset. A special topic for a breakout session. Where representation at the top remains an exception that requires explaining. Where policies that claim neutrality still manage, consistently, to diminish the women trying to lead within them.

And now we are watching something more deliberate. DEI policies are being struck down. Rights revoked. Representation initiatives are being framed as an unfair advantage. Progress is being repackaged as the problem. This is not a correction. It is a continuation of the same centuries-long choice to keep the model unnamed, unsupported, and underfunded. It is harmful to organizations. It is harmful to communities. It is harmful to our progress as a society and as a human race.

This piece is my rebellion against that.

I am writing this for my daughter, so she knows she comes from a line of leaders. So she understands that the authority she carries was not granted by a system that noticed her. It was built by women who led before anyone was watching, who held things together before anyone thought to call it leadership, who chose conviction over comfort and showed up anyway in a world that was not always paying attention.

I am writing this for my son, so he knows what real leadership looks like and where to look for it. So he grows up understanding that the loudest person in the room is rarely the one holding it together. So he learns to recognize the kind of leadership that doesn't announce itself, that builds trust through presence, that holds things so well, you might not notice it until it's gone.

And I am writing this for anyone who has ever been formed by a woman they never thought to call a leader. You don't have to be a mother to carry these lessons forward. But if there is one thing we all share, it is this: we came from one. And somewhere in that, is everything you need to know about what leadership at its best actually looks like.

We don't need to invent a new model. We need to look at what has been in front of us the whole time and finally call it what it is.

Name it. Protect it. Pass it forward.

She has always been there. It's time we said so out loud.