Women have become more visible in biotechnology’s senior ranks, but some of the unwritten rules of leadership have proved harder to dislodge, according to Dorian Readnour.
The same decisiveness that signals authority in a man can still be interpreted differently in a woman, Readnour said in an interview about her career, leadership and the rare-disease patients who have shaped her work.
For companies, that creates a test that goes beyond counting how many women hold executive titles: whether women are developed, sponsored and heard on the same terms as men — and whether organizations can make room for more than one model of leadership.
Readnour, Vice President, International Business, Sarepta Therapeutics did not begin her career in a boardroom. Before entering the pharmaceutical industry, she worked with psychiatric patients and their families at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.
That experience gave her a close view of the limits of available treatment. It also led her to a difficult career calculation: direct care could change one life at a time, while biotechnology offered a chance to influence whether new medicines reached patients on a much larger scale.
The transition placed Readnour inside an industry where women had relatively few senior role models and formal leadership programs were less common than they are today.
The gap is visible in current industry data. Women held 18.7% of chief executive roles in UK biotechnology companies in 2026, up just 0.4 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the BioIndustry Association. The figures cover the UK rather than the global sector, but they illustrate how slowly representation at the top can move.
Early advice sometimes focused on how to adapt to an established culture. Readnour recalled reading about cars so she could participate in conversations around her — a small example of the extra cultural work required to enter rooms built around male interests.
A senior woman later offered a different lesson. “She was someone that was just herself,” Readnour said. The executive’s success, and her encouragement that Readnour be herself, showed that advancement did not have to require imitation.
Other moments were more explicit. When Readnour considered applying for an international position, she said a boss asked whether she had received her husband’s permission. Her male colleagues were not asked the same question.
The assertiveness test
The question of authenticity becomes harder when identical behaviour can carry different consequences.
Readnour framed the issue as a question of which behaviours organizations reward. “What kind of female leaders are appreciated and promoted versus what kind of male leaders are appreciated and promoted?” she said. “Assertiveness is not always seen as a positive quality for a woman.”
That double standard can influence more than performance reviews. It can shape who receives stretch assignments, who is invited into strategic discussions and who becomes visible when senior roles open.
It can also reinforce a quieter career risk. Women who deliver results behind the scenes and share credit broadly may assume the work will speak for itself. In many organizations, however, impact must also be visible and clearly owned.
Readnour’s advice to aspiring women leaders is therefore not simply to work harder. It is to understand how decisions about advancement are made, communicate the value of their work and build relationships with people willing to advocate for them when they are not in the room.
Mentors advise. Sponsors act
Readnour credits both women and men with helping her career. At one biotechnology company, she recalled, a women’s employee resource group had a male executive sponsor because there were no women at that leadership level — an example of allyship that also exposed the gap. She draws an important distinction between mentorship and sponsorship.
A mentor can offer perspective. A sponsor uses influence: recommending someone for a consequential assignment, creating visibility or making sure a qualified candidate is considered when opportunities are being allocated.
That distinction matters because career-defining decisions are often made in conversations the candidate does not attend.
Companies that want more women in senior roles should therefore examine not only hiring and promotion outcomes, but how talent is developed before those decisions occur. Who gets international exposure? Who is trusted with a difficult market? Who presents to senior leadership? Who receives the assignment that proves readiness for the next role?
Readnour said the underlying question is whether women are developed differently from men. She described effective female colleagues who remained behind the scenes and emphasized group results rather than their own accomplishments — habits that can make strong performance less visible when promotion decisions are made.
For Readnour, representation is meaningful only when it is accompanied by real influence over strategy, investment and execution.
Leadership with a patient in the room
Her view of leadership is also inseparable from the patients she met early in her career and from the families affected by rare diseases.
Biotechnology executives operate within scientific, regulatory and commercial constraints. In rare disease, those decisions can affect small communities facing progressive conditions, limited treatment options and long delays in diagnosis or access.
Readnour said leaders have a responsibility to keep those realities visible as organizations grow and decision-making becomes more complex.
That does not remove the need for commercial discipline. It changes the questions that accompany it: which outcomes matter to patients, what barriers exist after regulatory approval, and how a global strategy must adapt to local health systems.
Patient organizations have also become more involved in development, contributing to natural-history research, trial design and discussions about what constitutes a meaningful benefit. That makes listening a practical input into strategy, not merely a statement of corporate values.
The connection between business performance and social impact is central to the legacy Readnour says she wants to leave: proof that building an effective business and doing right by patients and families do not have to be opposing goals.
Her career also points to a broader measure of leadership. Reaching a senior position matters. What a leader changes for the people who follow — the assignments they receive, the rooms they enter and the freedom they have to lead authentically — may matter just as much.
The bridge from discovery to care
The same leadership test extends beyond the boardroom. A scientific result becomes meaningful only when physicians can interpret it, health systems can deliver it and patients can gain access.
When Brazilian cardiologist Tiago Bignoto joined the discussion, Readnour described how a straightforward request exposes fragmentation. For a family or physician, “I just want access for my patient” is one question, she said. Inside a biotechnology company it may become three or four: Is the request for a clinical trial, expanded access or commercial access? When those paths sit in different departments, patients and doctors can be left navigating the gaps.
Clinical leaders and key opinion leaders can help bridge them. Their value is not simply presenting data or endorsing an innovation. They identify unmet needs, test whether evidence is clinically meaningful and explain how a therapy or diagnostic tool would work in practice. Executives must then connect that insight to trials, regulation, reimbursement and delivery at scale.
Bignoto pointed to genetics and artificial intelligence as tools that could help clinicians recognize inherited cardiovascular conditions earlier. Readnour brought the conversation back to access: a breakthrough cannot change an outcome if the patient is not diagnosed, the evidence does not capture what families value, or the health system cannot provide the treatment.
The final mile is therefore another leadership test. Progress depends on leaders who create room for scientists, physicians and patients to challenge one another before decisions are made. For Readnour, that returns to the question that has shaped her career: not merely who reaches the room, but whose experience influences what happens there.