Change the System, Not the Women

How to Redesign Power, Culture, and Leadership for True Gender Equity

Tina Yerkes

A Fast Company Book

The Foundation for Genuine Change

Why do organizations that claim to value leadership so often treat women’s leadership as a problem to be corrected rather than an asset to cultivate? When women enter systems never designed with them in mind—systems built on assumptions about availability, career continuity, and a definition of leadership modeled on the men who built them—those systems often respond with resistance. The resulting friction is consistently misdiagnosed as individual failure rather than evidence of systemic mismatch.

Dr. Tina Yerkes exposes how these foundational patterns not only penalize women's leadership but lead to organizations that actively underperform. She challenges leaders to take responsibility for the systems they sustain, honestly examine the patterns at work, and make deliberate change even when it is uncomfortable. Talented women deserve systems that recognize their capabilities rather than demanding constant adaptation to conditions that should never have been acceptable. And organizations that cling to outdated models of power and leadership ultimately limit their own performance, resilience, and ability to compete.

Dr. Tina Yerkes doesn’t diagnose organizations from the outside. With more than twenty-five years inside complex systems—environment, public health, international development, and education—she has led from the inside as COO, general manager, and CEO. She holds PhDs in zoology and executive education from Harvard and Kellogg. She has seen, up close, exactly how organizations are designed to work—and who they are designed to work for.

That clarity built Transformative Leadership Consulting. Through her Equity by Design framework, Dr. Yerkes helps leaders identify the structural conditions driving inequitable outcomes—and redesign them.

When she’s not holding leaders accountable to their own growth and organizations to their own design, Dr. Yerkes can be found helping her three (mostly) adult boys navigate life, being bossed around by her dogs and cats, and enjoying life by the ocean.