Gender parity at the top is stalling. 5 leaders on how business can break the pattern

Progress on gender-balanced leadership over the past decade has been real but modest. Between 2015 and 2025, women's representation in senior leadership rose by 2.8 percentage points, to 24.6% of C-suite roles and 29.3% of board seats.

However, since 2022, even that modest momentum has stalled: the share of women among new C-suite hires has plateaued, board appointments have declined and women remain underrepresented in the roles that most reliably serve as springboards to the top.

The issue is not a shortage of qualified women. A new World Economic Forum Insight Report, drawing on LinkedIn Economic Graph Research Institute data on senior leadership and Egon Zehnder data on board representation, points to a deeper problem: the systems that identify, develop and allocate leadership opportunity have not kept pace with today’s workforce or business needs.

At a moment when organizations face acute pressure to navigate technological disruption, economic volatility and demographic change, the ability to draw on the full depth of available talent is a strategic and competitive advantage.

The leaders and experts featured in this collection, drawn from business and academia, converge on a common thread: progress depends less on developing individual women and more on redesigning the leadership machinery – succession systems, sponsorship, promotion criteria, feeder role access and the accountability structures that govern them.

For businesses, the opportunity is clear: those that redesign how leadership potential is recognized, sponsored and advanced will be better positioned to build the resilient, innovative and future-ready leadership teams the next decade demands.

Gender parity in leadership is fundamentally an ecosystem challenge. The encouraging reality is that ecosystems can change. Governments, businesses, and technology all have a role to play in accelerating progress.

According to the latest Global Gender Gap Report , the global educational attainment gap is more than 95% closed. Yet the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap could still take another 135 years to close. The challenge is no longer one of talent; it is one of access, opportunity, and the systems that shape both.

Those systems extend well beyond the workplace. Women continue to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid family responsibilities, while access to capital, networks, sponsorship, and leadership opportunities remains uneven.

When governments, businesses, and institutions align around a common objective, progress can accelerate significantly. The Gulf provides an important example.

Countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have linked female economic participation to broader ambitions around human capital development, economic diversification, and national competitiveness. The result has been meaningful progress in a relatively short period of time.

Technology may be the next major catalyst. AI has the potential to democratize access to knowledge, expertise, entrepreneurship, and opportunity at an unprecedented scale.

At the same time, it presents real risks. Research suggests that women may be disproportionately exposed to AI-driven disruption in certain sectors. How organizations manage this transition will help shape workforce participation and leadership pipelines for decades to come.

Companies also have a critical role to play. Across our businesses, we see talented women delivering results every day across functions, geographies, and operating companies. Our responsibility is to build systems that recognize the realities many women navigate while creating pathways for growth, exposure and leadership development.

The organizations and economies that make the greatest progress will be those that build ecosystems where talent can thrive, regardless of gender. In an increasingly competitive world, advancing women’s participation and leadership is not simply a social imperative; it is an economic one.

The recent stalling in progress towards gender-balanced leadership should be a wake-up call. LinkedIn’s data tells us that while representation has continued to inch forward over the past decade (we have seen a mere 2.8 percentage points in that period), even that slow momentum has stalled since 2022.

The systems that determine who reaches the most senior roles have not fundamentally changed. When economic conditions become more challenging or organizational priorities shift, progress quickly proves fragile.

​Breaking this pattern requires a systemic shift in how we identify, develop and advance leadership talent. Too often, access to senior roles is still shaped by traditional career trajectories and narrow definitions of leadership experience. These systems are not fully capturing the breadth of talent available in today's workforce.​

This is particularly important at a moment of profound economic transformation. As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes jobs, skills and business models, organizations and economies cannot afford to leave talent on the sidelines.

That means adopting more skills-based approaches, using data to identify barriers and opportunities, broadening pathways into leadership and creating fairer processes for advancement.

The organizations that succeed in the next decade will be those that harness the full potential of their workforce. Advancing women into leadership, as countless studies have shown, is good for the competitiveness, productivity and innovativeness of our economies, at precisely a time when we need all three. Now is the time to act.

According to the World Economic Forum's latest report, women represent 41.7% of the global workforce but hold just 29.6% of top management roles. The issue is not a lack of capable women leaders. It is ensuring they remain on the path to leadership.

Years of research have identified the barriers women face. The importance of sponsorship, visibility, and access to career-defining opportunities is well understood. The question is whether that knowledge is being translated into action.

More pathways to opportunity must be created and leaders must be accountable for opening them.

For too long, much of the conversation has focused on what women should do differently to advance. While that guidance can be valuable, lasting progress depends on leaders creating the conditions for success.

That means opening doors to stretch assignments, broadening access to cross-functional experiences and actively sponsoring high-potential women at critical points in their careers. It also means advocating for talented women when they are not in the room and intentionally raising their names during leadership, promotion and succession planning discussions.

The tools to close the gap already exist. The challenge now is execution. When leaders intentionally create opportunities for everyone, organizations build stronger leadership pipelines, become more resilient and contribute to a more inclusive economy.

Companies must move from trying harder to being smarter. The emphasis needs to shift from a single-minded focus on enhancing gender diversity to a greater focus on best-in-class inclusive practices.

For example, while quotas and targets help move the needle, they may also create resistance across other identity groups and at times, undermine the perceived legitimacy of appointments.

A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works. Local and regional context varies widely, and real progress depends on solutions grounded in local realities, shaped bottom-up, and tailored to cultural and institutional conditions. Simply put, companies must meet each country where it is, rather than where corporate headquarters wishes it to be.

There is no shortage of good intent. However, unconscious bias continues to shape how leadership potential is identified and advanced, and most organizations underinvest in addressing it.

Embedding fairness into selection processes through bias-mitigation, structured assessments, deliberate calibration and a broader definition of leadership readiness helps surface talent more consistently across the full pool.

At the same time, small shifts in practice have outsized impact. Having female leaders on interview panels and executive search teams and mandating that at least one female leader be considered for the interview slate for every leadership role, are all statistically proven to drive better outcomes.

This is where the next step change in gender diversity will come from: bias-mitigation best practices, customization to country contexts and upgrade to selection practices through smart, statistically proven micro-interventions.

Many leaders privately support gender balance. Yet when a consequential appointment arises, each waits for someone else to take the perceived risk of backing the less conventional candidate. No single decision sinks the boat but everyone keeps drilling a very small hole.

The problem is that too many career-defining decisions remain informal, invisible and therefore unaccountable.

Succession processes often behave like algorithms trained on historical data. But repeatedly selecting familiar profiles is not a neutral strategy. It is a systemic risk. The shift required is to move gender balance from the margins of HR reporting to the heart of enterprise risk governance.

Start with the feeder roles, which are the hidden currency of leadership: profit and loss roles, transformation assignments, merger and acquisition integrations, turnarounds, board exposure and powerful sponsors. These are the golden tickets to senior leadership.

Organizations should manage access to them as rigorously as they manage capital. Track who receives the opportunities that accelerate careers. Review succession slates before vacancies arise.

Ask senior leaders not merely whom they mentor but whose reputation they actively put on the line. Make sponsorship part of an executive’s job description and tie it to performance evaluation, advancement and reward.

Organizations measure what they value. It is time to audit the flow of career capital with the same discipline applied to financial capital. Because what gets measured gets done and what gets rewarded gets repeated.