By Business & Finance 
To mark International Women’s Day 2026, senior executive women share their thoughts on the Give to Gain principle. Elaine Purcell is Chief Marketing Officer at AIB. She reflects on female leadership, the importance of sponsorship, and how leaders can create meaningful opportunities for women to advance.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2026 is Give to Gain. In a business context, what does this mean to you as a leader?
To me, Give to Gain is a reminder that the best leadership is generous leadership. It’s recognising that leadership is not a zero-sum game. It’s about not hoarding information, access, credit, or opportunity. The best leaders I have worked with gave away visibility. They opened doors. They made room. And in doing so, they built stronger teams and better businesses. If you give people trust, stretch, candour and backing, you get better thinking, more resilience and far more ambition than any command-and-control model will ever produce.
Looking at your own career, what opportunities or support were most pivotal in accelerating your leadership journey, and how are you now paying that forward?
My career has taken me across different cities, sectors and leadership cultures, and the moments that changed everything were rarely neat or perfectly timed. They were the moments when someone placed a bet on my potential before I was entirely comfortable. I benefited from leaders who gave me two things at once: high standards and genuine belief.
They were candid when I needed to improve, but they also created air cover so I could take risks without being punished for learning in public. Those experiences taught me that confidence is often built after the opportunity, not before it. I try to pay that forward in a very deliberate way. I am careful not to confuse mentoring with sponsorship.
Mentoring is advice; sponsorship is using your voice when it counts. It is one thing to advise someone privately; it is another to advocate for them when opportunities are being allocated. I also try to normalise confidence gaps, because I have seen too many brilliant women wait until they feel 120% ready, while others step up at 60%.
Where do you believe organisations are still falling short in advancing women into senior decision-making roles, and what tangible actions would you prioritise?
I think many organisations have become quite fluent in the language of progress, but less disciplined in the mechanics of it. Women are often highly visible in development programmes and less represented in the commercially critical roles that become feeder tracks to the top.
The actions I would prioritise are practical. First, make the promotion criteria explicitly clear. Second, inspect who gets the career-making assignments or projects. Third, hold senior leaders accountable for sponsorship as an output, not as a sentiment. Talent does not advance on encouragement alone. It advances on opportunity.
In today’s economic climate, how can businesses ensure that equality remains a strategic priority rather than a secondary consideration?
This economic climate is exactly why equality must stay strategic. When conditions are volatile, you need the best decision-making you can get, and that comes from diversity of perspective and experience, and the ability to challenge groupthink. Equality should sit inside business planning, talent reviews, succession pipelines and leadership KPIs.
At AIB, I am proud to work in an organisation that is recognised for strong female leadership and that takes inclusion seriously. AIB knows that leadership diversity strengthens thinking, culture and customer relevance. In financial services, especially, where trust matters so much, who is around the table shapes what gets seen, what gets solved and what gets missed. The work is never done, but when equality is treated as part of the operating system, it is harder to sideline.
What is one practical commitment you believe every business leader should make in 2026 to truly embody Give to Gain?
Pick one exceptional woman in your organisation and materially change her trajectory this year. Not by cheering her on, but by doing something consequential. Put her forward. Back her publicly. Give her a commercial challenge with real visibility.
Give to Gain only means something when it costs you a little: a little time, a little political capital, a little deliberate intention. That is when it stops being a slogan and starts becoming leadership. If every senior leader did that with intent, we would change the pipeline faster than any programme ever could.
