A few years ago, when we were mapping out the leadership structure for what would become EHA Group, I already knew I wanted to start a family. That fact quietly decided a lot of what came next. The role that needed to be most public-facing, most airport-based, went to my co-founder. I built EHA Impact Ventures instead, a smaller, run-from-Cape Town company built around a life I hadn’t fully lived yet.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to: I had more power than almost anyone to make that choice because I was a founder. I could write my own job description. And I still had to trade things away: conferences I’ve skipped this year, a slower travel schedule, and evenings kept for bedtime instead of dinners with partners. If someone with the authority to build her own role from scratch still has to ‘shrink’ her ambitions to fit a family, what does that mean for the woman ten years into her career at a company where the job was designed before she ever walked in the door, by people who never had to think about who’s home for bedtime?
That’s what this piece is about. Most of the roles women are trying to climb into weren’t built to exclude women; they were built by people who didn’t need to build in flexibility, because someone else was managing the rest of their life for them. Travel expectations, always-on availability, the assumption that ambition and physical presence are the same thing – none of it was designed with malice. It was designed by whoever happened to be writing job descriptions and promotion criteria, and for the most part, that’s still disproportionately men, for whom none of this was ever a design constraint. The roles were never actually tested against what a full life outside them requires, so there’s nothing pulling leadership to notice or fix it, unless someone insists.
You can see it inside our own organisation, and I’d rather say so than pretend otherwise. EIV comfortably clears our group’s target for women in leadership. eHealth Africa, our largest entity, doesn’t. EHA Clinics comes closer but also falls short. That’s not a scorecard of who cares more about equity; it’s a map of which jobs were designed around one kind of life. EIV is small enough that I built it deliberately, from the ground up, around flexibility. Clinics draw from a healthcare workforce that’s already majority women, so the pipeline does some of the work for us. eHealth Africa runs on field implementation, disease surveillance, and immunisation planning, work that by design lives in the field and built the way field roles are built almost everywhere: around someone who doesn’t need to be anywhere else.
Widen the lens, and the same pattern holds at a much bigger scale. Across Africa, women make up 58% of the self-employed population (World Bank, 2019) and receive roughly 2% of startup capital (Africa: The Big Deal, annual funding tracking). It’s not just that the market doubts women’s performance; female-founded teams in Africa post revenue growth around 25% higher than male-founded teams, and gender-diverse leadership consistently produces stronger returns. The capital isn’t withheld because women underperform. It’s withheld because the default founder profile, the default definition of ‘investable’, was built around one kind of life and one kind of career path, the same way the job descriptions were.
This is why I don’t think the fix is simply getting more women into the seats that already exist. Representation gets you into the room the way it’s currently built. It doesn’t get you the authority to rebuild the room. That authority is what capital actually buys. When a woman founder gets funded, she doesn’t just get resources; she gets to decide what her own company requires of its managers, how flexible its roles are, and what a ‘high performer’ looks like for someone raising kids. Every woman we back at EIV who becomes a CEO is also, whether she frames it this way or not, someone who now gets to design jobs instead of just surviving inside ones she didn’t design. That’s the actual flywheel: put money and power into more women’s hands, and you get more women rebuilding the structures underneath them, not just occupying a seat inside the old ones. Fixate on 50% representation as the finish line, and you can hit the number without changing a single structure it took to get there.
I don’t have a clean resolution for where I sit in all this. I’ve had a seat at this table since we built it, so representation was never really my problem. What I’ve needed, and what most women climbing into leadership still don’t have, is the power to redesign the job around real life instead of shrinking real life to fit the job. If we’re serious about closing this gap, the goal can’t just be more women in the room. It has to be more women with the power to decide what the room requires, because that’s the only lever strong enough to rebuild systems that were never designed for us in the first place.
So here’s where we’re starting: not with more women in the room, but with more women who have the authority to decide what the room requires. For our portfolio companies, that means giving founders and their teams the power to actually redesign how their organisations work, what flexibility looks like, what support for caregiving looks like, and what a ‘high performer’ looks like for someone managing a life outside the job, not just inside it. To help them do that with evidence instead of guesswork, we built a diagnostic tool that surfaces where a company’s practices and policies are falling short for its female staff and where to start fixing them.
We think every organisation serious about this needs the same starting point, which is why we’re hosting a webinar, ‘Building Workplaces Built for Women,’ to talk through practical approaches to building workplaces where women choose to stay and grow.
If you have a story or case study to bring to that conversation, we’d love to hear from you.
Evelyn Castle, CEO and co-founder of EHA Impact Ventures, writes from Abuja.