Europe’s gender parity gap hasn’t closed. Here’s what the boardroom data actually shows

For the past 20 years, the World Economic Forum has measured how slowly the world closes its gender gaps. In June, its research arm looked specifically at senior leadership. The findings mirror those of Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top Europe research, also published in June – which tracks sitting CEOs across European markets annually.

The research shows that just 8% of CEOs at Europe’s largest companies are women. While it is an increase from five years ago when the figure was 6%, that is not the kind of progress that really matters for many women.

The individual country data in the Route to the Top research reveals something even more interesting. In Italy, 2.4% of sitting CEOs are women. In Germany, that figure is 5.4%. In Denmark and Portugal, it sits above 11%. These markets share the same EU labour law, similar investor bases, and comparable economic conditions, yet end up with very different numbers of women in the top job.

While many might suggest that the gap between Italy and Denmark is down to economics, it likely has more to do with individual board choices over the past decade.

I sit in a lot of succession conversations with European boards, and the pattern repeats itself with striking regularity. Boards tell me they want more women coming through. All of them mean it and are looking at how they can improve female board representation. However, while the board wants to talk about diversity in the leadership pipeline, often the problem is that the pipeline is too thin to begin with.

Our own Route to the Top Europe research has continuously found that European boards struggle with succession planning as a discipline in general. Most companies, even those with a CEO who is genuinely well matched to the role, only review succession when a departure forces the issue, rather than treating it as ongoing work. Most leaders, even at well-run companies, will privately admit they could not confidently name the next generation in line to succeed them.

A board in that position cannot identify its next female CEO any more reliably than it can identify its next CEO of any description. The gender gap at the top is a visible symptom of a deeper issue: most European companies simply do not know who is in their leadership pipeline until the need to fill a vacancy becomes urgent.

When boards do go looking properly, women are very often already there. It is the exposure rather than the talent that is normally missing. It is assignments such as a senior operating role or a transformation mandate that can expose someone to a board before a CEO change is even considered. I have watched capable women get identified early, and win praise consistently, only to be routed away from high-visibility roles that boards actually reward when choosing a next chief executive. Being seen as promising, and being put in the path of the job, are two different things.

The World Economic Forum’s research points at the same gap. Women in senior leadership tend to arrive with broader, more varied experience than their male peers, but that experience was accumulated at lower levels of seniority – which means many reach the C-suite without the single, high-stakes role boards instinctively look for once the CEO conversation starts.

Widening the search at the point when a CEO role opens up is too late. The decisions that mattered were already made years earlier – decisions such as who runs the hardest or most high-profile business units. These are the kinds of opportunities that get board-level exposure.

The boards I see making real progress aren’t running better diversity programmes – they’re running better succession processes. They are also treating representation as one of the numbers that tells them whether the process is actually working, much like a CFO would treat any indicator that something needs attention.

What this looks like in practice is reviewing who gets stretch assignments, making sponsorship of future leaders a structured part of how senior leaders are expected to spend their time, and having boards regularly revisit what “ready for the top job” actually means.

None of this lowers the bar. In fact, it does quite the opposite, because it forces a board to be explicit about what it is selecting, rather than letting instinct and familiarity take over and calling the result meritocracy.

For organizations that do this well, succession planning is an always-on mindset. Their philosophy is simple: the best time to start looking for the next CEO is the day after you appoint the current one.

But they also view the CEO as one among equals. To that end, they intentionally build a leadership team whose skills complement and fortify the CEO’s own strengths. If CEO is an outspoken leader, are there other strong communications leaders in place? Or is it a forward-thinking CEO who needs a great CFO next to them? These are all things considered in a successful CEO succession plan.

Europe has had two decades of pledges and public commitments on this issue. The difficult part is the unglamorous work that happens years before any appointment: deciding which people are being prepared for the top job, and being honest about whether they look anything like what the business needs to be successful.

The data may be published annually, but whether the numbers move will depend entirely on decisions about pipelines, stretch roles, and whether there is a strong succession planning process in place.

It’s about preparing for change, identifying people early, and giving them the experience to be prepared to step into the CEO role at some point in the future.