Charmain Bogue | The Case Against Stretch Assignments for Women

Stretch assignments are often framed as opportunity; what they actually are can be something else entirely.

Stretch assignments are supposed to develop leaders. For women, they frequently do something different: they place women in high-visibility, high-risk roles without the resources, support, or authority those roles require, and then the woman's struggle to succeed in impossible conditions is used as evidence that she wasn't ready for more responsibility. The stretch becomes a ceiling rather than a step.

Bogue has spent enough time with women navigating this dynamic that she now approaches the concept of stretch assignments with specific questions rather than automatic enthusiasm. The question isn't whether a woman should take on something ambitious. It's whether the assignment is genuinely designed for development or whether it's exposing her to failure in a context where the design, not the person, was the problem.

What "Stretch" Actually Means

A real stretch assignment is one where the gap between current capability and assignment requirements is challenging but bridgeable with support. The word "support" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Real support means a mentor or manager who is actively invested in the person's success, resources commensurate with the scope of the work, and a safety net for the inevitable mistakes that happen when someone is doing something new.

What passes for a stretch assignment in many organizations is a high-stakes, under-resourced role that nobody else wanted, handed to a woman who is told she should feel grateful for the opportunity. The assignment stretches her without supporting her, and when things go wrong, she absorbs the accountability rather than the organization that set her up to fail.

The Double Standard in Assignment Design

Research on stretch assignments has found consistent patterns: men tend to be given stretch assignments based on their potential; women tend to be given them based on their track record. That means women have to prove more before they're stretched, and then face a higher bar in the stretch itself. The combination produces slower development even in organizations that believe they're investing equally.

Bogue points to another pattern: when men struggle in stretch assignments, the difficulty is often attributed to factors outside their control, which preserves their reputation and keeps them on the advancement track. When women struggle, the difficulty is more likely to be attributed to personal capability. That asymmetry shapes who gets another opportunity.

How to Evaluate a Stretch Opportunity

Bogue coaches women to evaluate any stretch opportunity against a set of questions before saying yes. Is the scope of the role matched by the resources available? Who else has held this role and what happened to them? Is the person offering the role invested enough in your success to be actively helpful when things get hard, or are they handing you the problem and stepping back?

The answers to those questions tell you something important about whether this is a genuine development opportunity or a high-visibility failure position with your name on it. Saying no to the second category isn't playing it safe; it's reading the situation accurately.

What Organizations Should Change

Organizations that want stretch assignments to work for women rather than against them need to redesign the support structures that surround those assignments. That means active sponsorship, not just mentorship. It means explicit acknowledgment that mistakes are expected and how they'll be handled. It means evaluating the outcomes of stretch assignments by gender and asking whether the pattern is what they want it to be.

Bogue's message to organizations is that the stretch assignment isn't the problem. The design is the problem. Getting the design right is entirely within leadership's control, and the organizations that get the design right tend to build a stronger internal pipeline than the ones that don't.

The women Charmain Bogue works with are not afraid of hard work or high stakes. They've earned the opportunities they're asking for. What they're asking for is the same architecture of support that surrounds stretch assignments when they're handed to men. That's not a special accommodation. It's competent leadership development design.