There is a kind of exhaustion for women leaders that has nothing to do with long hours, full diaries or impossible deadlines. It comes from being asked to pass the same test repeatedly, by people who have decided, often on first sight, that your title, record and competence are open for debate.
I have encountered that test throughout my career: as a mathematics education scholar, professor, faculty dean, deputy vice-chancellor and as a black woman who grew up working class to lead a top research university in South Africa.
Each achievement should have settled something. Awards won, the presidential order, a top rating as a scientist and vast experience in executive management ought to be cumulative evidence of capability.
Yet, for black women in institutions still shaped by old ideas of
who naturally belongs at the centre of authority, every new room can reset the clock.
You arrive carrying a lifetime of work but someone else sees a question mark.
When I became vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town in July 2018, the university was in a profoundly fragile state.
The June examinations had been written in tents on the rugby field, amid a heavy security presence.
The campus was emerging from years of turmoil following the #RhodesMustFall movement and related protests that started in 2015 and continued for four years that had exposed deep fractures in the institution and in South African higher education more broadly.
My first responsibility was therefore not to unveil a grand academic strategy but to restore stability, rebuild trust, return attention to teaching and learning and help a bruised institution rediscover its purpose.
That work could not be done through authority alone. It required engagement, patience and a willingness to listen, especially to students who had been at the forefront of protest.
I did not want to defeat student activists; I wanted to reach them.
As an academic, I kept returning to the central purpose of the university: the intellectual project.
When a student activist whose re-engagement with academic life I had encouraged submitted his honours research project, I congratulated him publicly.
To me, it represented something important: a young person who had spent years at the sharp edge of institutional conflict had returned to his studies and completed meaningful scholarly work.
But I had not examined every detail closely enough because at the bottom of the acknowledgements page of the research report was a slogan that I describe as hate speech.
Within a day, the story had shifted. It was no longer that a vice-chancellor had celebrated a student’s academic achievement. It became a claim that I had endorsed the message embedded in his work.
Context disappeared, intention became irrelevant and a gesture I made in service of restoring an academic community was reduced to a single interpretation of a single moment.
That experience taught me something uncomfortable about leadership: women leaders often spend far more energy managing perception than men are required to spend.
We expect leadership to be about substance: strategy, governance, budgets, people, institutional culture and results.
Those things matter deeply. But women, particularly black women, are too often judged through a more punishing lens.
A male leader might be assessed primarily on outcomes but a black woman leader can be assessed on whether one perceived error reveals that she never deserved the position at all.
Her motives are interrogated, her temperament is scrutinised, her competence is questioned and her judgement is treated not as an isolated decision but as evidence in a continuing trial about her right to occupy the room.
This is one of the quieter costs of leadership. It is not always written into policy or spoken aloud in meetings but it shapes how many women lead.
They spend time over-preparing, explaining too much, anticipating every possible misreading, softening an opinion before it is shared and proving competence before addressing the task at hand.
The danger is that we begin to internalise the room’s suspicion.
We start believing that legitimacy is something we must continually request from people who have already decided to withhold it. This is a trap.
The answer is not arrogance, nor is it pretending that bias does not exist. It is a disciplined refusal to build one’s leadership around the need to be endlessly validated.
Let the work answer for itself and let integrity answer. Over time, preparation, consistency and sound judgement will also speak.
This is not easy advice, especially for young women entering professions, boardrooms and institutions where power has a familiar face, voice and history.
The demand to prove oneself is real and it can be draining and isolating, precisely because it is unfair. But we must resist allowing that demand to turn us into performers of credibility rather than practitioners of excellence.
We should also name the double standard early. Silence can protect an institution’s comfort but it rarely protects the women carrying its burden. When black women are subjected to heightened scrutiny, we must say what is happening, not as an appeal for sympathy but as an insistence on accuracy.
The scrutiny is not always a referendum on our ability; it is often a reflection of an institution and a country that is learning what it means to trust black women with difficult decisions, visible authority and consequential power.
Women’s Month should therefore not only be a time for celebrating individual women who have succeeded despite barriers.
It should also compel us to examine the systems that make success more costly for some than for others.
It should ask whether our institutions merely admit women into leadership or whether they enable women to lead without carrying the additional burden of continually defending their presence.
The truth is that South Africa’s institutions are changing, slowly and unevenly, to better reflect the people they serve.
Since institutions are made of rooms and rooms are made of people, policies change before assumptions do and representation may improve before belonging does.
Until every room stops resetting the clock, those of us who have entered difficult spaces owe those coming behind us more than encouragement.
We owe them honesty about the cost. We owe them solidarity when the scrutiny becomes disproportionate and, wherever we have influence, we owe them rooms that are less exhausting to enter than the ones we found.
Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng is the former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town and founder of Perspicuity Advisory and Consulting.