Advised to Death, Sponsored to Nowhere

The system isn’t broken. It’s just not working equally for everyone, and there’s a difference.

I write this as someone who has lived parts of it and spent years watching the same patterns repeat across the Salesforce ecosystem, in teams that care, in cultures that try, and in an industry that is still, despite its best intentions, leaving capable women in a holding pattern.

Early in my career, a senior sales role opened up. There were two of us in the frame. Our numbers were almost identical, same quota attainment, same pipeline metrics, similar tenure. By any objective measure, it was too close to call.

He got it. The feedback I received, when I asked, was a blend of things that were impossible to argue with and impossible to act on: he had more presence, he came across as more ready for the step up, and he was a natural fit for where the team was heading. Nothing concrete. Nothing I could point to in a spreadsheet or fix in a training course.

I was told to keep developing. So I did. I took the feedback seriously, found another mentor, and worked harder on my visibility. What I did not understand then, and wish I had, is that the problem was never my development. It was that nobody with real influence was making the case for me when it counted. That is a very different problem, and it requires a very different solution.

I don’t tell this story to cast blame. The people involved were not bad actors, and the organisation was not hostile. But that experience is not unique to me. It plays out across our industry constantly, in decisions that are entirely reasonable on the surface and quietly unequal underneath.

You are not the problem

Across the Tech Industry, women tend to be advanced on demonstrated performance while men are advanced on perceived potential. The result: women prove it first, men grow into it. When this gap appears, the default response is more development: another course, a coaching programme, a stretch assignment. The implicit message is that the barrier is a skills gap. The research is clear that it is not. Women in mid-senior roles are, on average, more qualified than their male counterparts. The barrier is perception, access, and advocacy. No training course closes those gaps.

Mentorship is not enough

Women access mentorship at higher rates than men. It has become the default investment organisations make in female talent, and it has a ceiling. The distinction that matters is between a mentor and a sponsor. A mentor speaks to you about your career. A sponsor speaks about you to decision-makers in rooms you are not in. Sponsorship requires someone to stake their own credibility on your potential. It is the thing most statistically linked to pay progression and promotion, and it is extended far less equally than mentorship.

Sponsorship networks form along lines of trust and familiarity. In an industry where senior positions are still predominantly held by men, this creates a structural disadvantage that requires no ill intent to sustain, just the absence of deliberate effort to change it.

Visibility is a strategy, not a personality trait

The advice women most commonly receive early in their careers, be collaborative, build consensus, be easy to work with, is not wrong. But it is incomplete. At more senior levels, the qualities that attract sponsors and signal readiness, directness, claiming credit, and showing up in high-stakes conversations are often the same ones women have been coached away from. Meanwhile, the coordination and relationship work that disproportionately falls to women is valuable and largely invisible in the ways that drive advancement. Excellence, on its own, is not a visibility strategy.

What I wish someone had told me sooner

Stop counting your mentors and start asking who is advocating for you, specifically, in decisions you are not part of. If you cannot name someone with real influence who is actively in your corner, that is the gap worth closing before anything else.

Do not wait to be ready. The version of ready, you are aiming for does not exist. Readiness in our industry is largely a story told in retrospect by people who were given the chance before they felt prepared.

Make your work visible deliberately. Name what you contributed. Say what you are aiming for next. Do it in the rooms and conversations where it will be heard, not just in performance reviews.

And seek sponsors, not just mentors. Build relationships with people who have influence and who see your potential. Then give them something concrete to advocate for. Sponsorship is earned through trust and results, but it also has to be cultivated. It rarely just happens.

You are probably more ready than you think. The question is who knows it.