Every day, Mothers make high-stakes decisions that safeguard wellbeing, manage risk, and shape the long-term trajectory of their families.
Mothers navigate competing priorities. Mothers regulate emotion in moments of volatility. Mothers advocate fiercely. Mothers design systems that hold entire lives together. Mothers think in years — sometimes decades — while responding to the immediate demands of the present. And somehow, Mothers are not formally recognized in leadership.

The Intuitionship Research Initiative exists to change that.

This initiative funds the next wave of research advancing Mother-Leader Intuitionship — a leadership framework that identifies and measures the sophisticated competencies cultivated through maternal experience. Strategic foresight. Crisis management. Negotiation. Systems thinking. Adaptive resilience. Emotional intelligence under pressure.

For too long, leadership development has been narrowly confined to formal roles, titles, and paid workforce milestones. But the intuitive decisions made at midnight, the fierce advocacy at school meetings, the vision and resilience forged through caregiving — these are not peripheral to leadership. They are foundational.

Through rigorous, evidence-based research, this initiative will expand how leadership is understood, developed, and valued — helping organizations build cultures where Mothers are not merely accommodated, but recognized and celebrated for the full scope of their contributions.

When we expand what counts as leadership, we finally recognize the leadership Mothers have been practicing all along. And when Mothers are fully seen as leaders, hiring becomes more inclusive, mentoring strengthens, and promotion pathways reflect the true depth of lived expertise.

The future of leadership is already being shaped — in homes, in communities, in the invisible architecture Mothers build every day.

Now it’s time to name it. To measure it. To value it.

Invest in the research that redefines leadership to include and value the profound work of Mothers.