The Piece Hall: How global tourist attraction has been boosted by female leadership
I’ve spent my career inside boardrooms; leading transformations, shaping culture, and navigating the realities of organisations.
I’ve also spent time outside them; as an expert called in to help fix what wasn’t working. This dual perspective gives me a clear view of one truth; female leaders remain one of the most under-leveraged economic assets organisations have.
Only one in five UK companies is female-led; The Gender Index Report 2026 shows no improvement for two years. This alone demonstrates how under-utilised female leadership is across the UK economy. Yet despite being fewer in number, female-led companies continue to outperform male-led and mixed-led companies in turnover growth.
My work at one of the UK’s cultural gems, The Piece Hall, brings this into sharp focus. The building’s history is rooted in enterprise and reinvention, and today its future is being shaped by leaders who bring breadth, integrity and strategic clarity; many of them women. At The Piece Hall in the past few years; I’ve seen the impact of female leadership no longer having to shrink; governance has strengthened, strategy has sharpened, and ambition has been unleashed.
Proving that when women shape the future, places transform and strong economic outcomes follow.
Yet female leadership is still constrained; not because women lack confidence, but because they operate in systems that question their expertise more, judge their tone more harshly, and expect them to disproportionately handle the “office housework”, and emotional labour required to keep teams functioning; smoothing over conflicts, checking morale and acting as the social glue.
Add to this the fact that not all female talent makes it into the room. The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in the developed world; with parents spending around 26% of their income on childcare, almost three times the OECD average.
Full-time nursery care for a child under two now averages £15,000 a year. It’s no surprise that 43% of mothers reduce their working hours, and one in three women leave the workforce entirely after having a child.
This isn’t about capability; it’s about numbers. When childcare costs outstrip wages, female leadership talent stays at home, not because women lack ambition, but because the finances simply don’t stack up.
The solution isn’t about treating women differently neither, it’s about treating men the same. When emotional labour, relationship building and cultural stewardship are shared evenly across genders, organisations become more balanced, resilient and commercially effective.
Across sectors, I’ve seen the same pattern, when women lead without having to shrink, organisations move faster, think deeper and innovate more sustainably.
They attract and retain talent, and avoid the costly churn that comes from cultures built on bravado rather than balance. Female leaders are an untapped economic engine. It’s time we turned it on.
By Jaxs Palmer Fellow CIPD — HR Director, Leadership Coach & Co-Vice Chair of The Piece Hall