This qualitative study provides a comprehensive understanding of how women experience authentic leadership throughout the stages of adult development, bridging Robert Kegan’s orders of consciousness and Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES. The current context is a culture deeply conflicted by women’s authority, where men and women, along with the gendered structure of most organizations, hold unconscious biases and stereotypes, hindering women’s authentic leadership. Results indicate women experience and understand authentic leading differently throughout the stages of development as they follow a path toward wholeness, the heroine’s journey. Their experience becomes more complex with ever widening perspectives and understanding, initially intellectual then embodied, where awareness of gender and leader biases mainly emerges within the self-transforming mind. These findings aim to augment women’s leadership development programs, thus preventing further entrenchment of these stereotypes.