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The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.

Leadership desperately needs women.

It seems to me that women have made an awful lot of progress, but they probably remain underrepresented at the highest levels of most organizations, for a variety of reasons. And it's probably going to take a long time to change that.

Women need to be in key operational roles where they run businesses in the organization. Sometimes when organizations focus on leadership diversity, they're mostly in areas like HR or non-operating line functions.

If more women are in leadership roles, we'll stop assuming they shouldn't be.

I used to think that the worst form of discrimination for women was being hit on or hearing something disparaging. What's even more challenging for young women is a very senior male who will take an interest in you, who see themselves as father figures or mentors.

There are still people who have an issue working with a woman director. Women can be viewed as 'difficult' even though they work in the same way as men.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

But I do not believe that the world would be entirely different if there were more women leaders. Maybe if everybody in leadership was a woman, you might not get into the conflicts in the first place. But if you watch the women who have made it to the top, they haven't exactly been non-aggressive - including me.

When men hold the greater majority of all professional positions of power, it is impossible for a woman to advance her career without the support of men.