This is a sentiment that researcher Dr Hannah Pitterman came across again and again as in her interviews for The Leadership Challenge: Women in management report, launched on 17 March.

The wealth of anecdotal and factual data in the report has been collated from interviews with professionals from firms such as AMP, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Macquarie Bank and Freehills. The accompanying analysis provided by Dr Pitterman is nuanced, thought-provoking and at times startling in its frankness.

While the media continues to focus on the gladiatorial achievements of women in the workforce, an institutional approach rather than a person-centred approach needs to be embraced, according to Dr Pitterman. “These are women who are, we can say, ‘outstanding’ in inverted commas because they can ‘do it’,” Dr Pitterman said.

Senior counsel Catherine Parry of law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery would fall into Pitterman’s description of the “extraordinary woman”. She began her career at British firm Slaughter and May, spent eight years at the Bar and has also worked for top-tier firms Freehills and Clayton Utz.

“The report, frankly, didn’t resonate with me simply because I’ve chosen the hard road to make this work,” she admitted.

Her response is unsurprising given that she belongs to a generation of women who fought their way to the top, relying on what Parry described as “sheer guts and determination” to succeed. Dr Pitterman said that organisations cannot afford to rely on these extraordinary individuals to tip the balance.

“As long as it is women who have to take on the brunt of that responsibility, I think you get this ‘extraordinary women’ syndrome. And people like to idealise the extraordinary women, and we’ve got a few and we wheel them out, Dr Pitterman said.

“But the high level of personal adaptation that is required to fit in culturally creates an enormous toll on women, and on organisations, because they lose talent.”

Law firms are among the brigade of professional services firms recruiting on the basis on “culture fit”. But, Dr Pitterman predicted — in the face a looming talent crisis — the need to change institutional norms will become even more pressing.

“There is a [growing] understanding that the person-centred approach assumes that a woman has to make changes to fit in with the dominant culture.” she said. “When you start to understand that it is the job culture that is problematic, then you’re really looking at system change rather than individual change.”

Freehills managing partner Peter Butler has taken the report and its findings to heart, lamenting the “glacial progress” towards greater equality in the profession.

“There’s no denying this is a most complex issue, and one thing I feel fairly strongly about is that, if you strip away the issues of fairness and justice, and the rationalist issue of the wastage of the talent pool that’s available, it’s surprising that organisations aren’t doing better than they are given the number of well-intentioned and often extremely bright people who are applying their attention to the issue,” Butler said.

Butler said that one of the key performance indicators for senior managers across the firm is the promotion of females into the partnership.

“The firm feels very strongly that we’ve got to improve the number of females moving into partnership and into other leadership positions, and it’s been working towards that goal for some years,” he said.

“I have key indicators over my performance that require me to take accountability and responsibility in terms of how well the firm is doing in terms of promoting females into the partnership.”

Both Dr Pitterman and Butler predicted that the complexity of the issues surrounding women in the upper echelons of the workforce will only grow as the notoriously fickle generation Y enters the frame.