Women in Executive Leadership: 10 Strategies for Navigating Transition

Board representation for women has reached record levels in every market measured. The executive line has not moved with it. In the FTSE 350, women hold 49.5% of non-executive directorships and 15.4% of executive directorships. In the JSE Top 40, 38% of board seats and 27.4% of executive roles. In the S&P 500, 35% of directorships, and in the Fortune 500, 11% of chief executive chairs.

Three markets, three independent datasets, three methods, one shape. A woman moving at executive level is not moving through a market that has broadly opened. She is crossing the one line that has not.

Most published guidance on this subject treats an executive transition as chiefly an internal matter: clarity, confidence, identity, emotional preparation. Those things are real. They are also not the binding constraint, and a chief executive is better served by knowing what the market does than by being told how to feel about it. This piece sets out where women actually are by market, what changed in 2025, what the research does and does not establish about transition itself, and ten strategies that follow from the evidence rather than from sentiment. Every figure carries its publisher and its date. Where a claim in this category is contested, thin or stale, we say so and say why.

Last reviewed 8 August 2026.

Where women actually are in executive leadership, by market

The single most useful thing to see on this question is the three levels side by side. Boardroom, executive, chief executive. The gap between the first two is the finding.

Note that the executive cell for the United States is drawn from the S&P 100 rather than the S&P 500, because no current S&P 500 C-suite figure was located. At two years old it is the only number in the table we would treat as indicative rather than current, and it is the only cell whose universe differs from the cells beside it.

South Africa also publishes statutory data covering all designated employers, and it is not in the table because it measures two management tiers rather than a governance body against an executive one. It runs in the same direction and is set out in the South African section below.

The United Kingdom

The FTSE Women Leaders Review publishes the cleanest statement of the problem available anywhere, and it publishes it about itself. In Achieving Gender Balance 2026, using data as at 31 October 2025 and published on 24 February 2026, the review records women at 42.7% of FTSE 350 board seats, 44.4% in the FTSE 100 and 41.8% in the FTSE 250, with 69% of FTSE 350 companies at or above the 40% board target.

Then it separates the board into its two halves. Women hold 49.5% of non-executive directorships and 15.4% of executive directorships. The review’s own framing is that the focus “is now on the executive director roles at just 15.4% women, showing slow progress, compared to the parity achieved more quickly for non-executive director roles at 49.5% women.”

One rung below the board, the review records women at 35.9% of FTSE 350 leadership, comprising 29.3% of executive committees and 37.0% of their direct reports. Women hold 8.2% of FTSE 350 chief executive roles and 17% of chairs.

A note on a figure circulating in secondary coverage. The claim that 88% of the FTSE 350 have met the 40% board target is a restatement of a softer measure, “at or near”. The review’s own measure is 69% at or above 40%, and that is the number used here.

South Africa

Two independent readings, one listed and one statutory, and they agree with each other.

Just Share, analysing public company disclosures with data as at September 2025 and published on 12 November 2025, records women at 38% of JSE Top 40 board seats, up from 36% in 2024 and 35% in 2023, and at 27.4% of executive roles, against 23% in 2024. Three of the Top 40 have women chief executives. Six have women board chairs. By sector, executive representation runs from 33% in basic materials to 28% in financial services to 17% in consumer staples. The same publisher’s 2024 edition recorded a detail worth carrying: the board improvement that year “is not due to more women occupying board positions, but rather to a decrease in the number of male board members.”

The statutory picture comes from the Department of Employment and Labour’s 26th Commission for Employment Equity Annual Report, released in early July 2026 and covering the 2025 reporting cycle. Across 15,090 reports from designated employers covering 6,896,041 employees, women hold 29.3% of Top Management and 38.6% of Senior Management. In the private sector alone those figures are 27.6% and 37.0%. In government they are 35.9% and 42.8%. Women are 45.7% of the economically active population. The Commission’s own framing is that male representation at Top Management is “more than two times the female representation”.

Those two figures are not a board measure and should not be read as one. Under the Employment Equity Act, Senior Management is the occupational level below Top Management, so this dataset is measuring the narrowing that happens between two management tiers rather than the gap between a governance body and an executive one. It is a separate proposition from the table above and it points the same way: 38.6% at the wider tier, 29.3% at the narrower one.

One caveat belongs with that report. Reports received fell 48.4% year on year and the employees covered fell 10.4%, which the Commission attributes to the reporting transition under the amended Act. The percentages are ratios within the reporting population. They are the most authoritative South African figures available, and they are not a census of the whole labour market.

The United States

Spencer Stuart’s 2025 US Spencer Stuart Board Index, published in October 2025 and covering 488 S&P 500 companies from proxy statements filed between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, records women at 35% of all S&P 500 directors, against 34% in 2024, 28% in 2020 and 20% in 2015. No S&P 500 board has zero women. Four have only one.

Fortune’s 2026 list, published on 3 June 2026, records 55 women chief executives in the Fortune 500, or 11%. That is the highest share in the list’s 72-year history and the fourth consecutive year above 10%.

For the level between the two, the most recent figure located is Russell Reynolds Associates’ analysis of the S&P 100 with data as at July 2024, which put women at 29% of top-team roles, 9% of chief executives, 20% of chief financial officers, 8% of chief operating officers, 24% of profit-and-loss leadership roles and 72% of chief human resources officer roles. That is two years old and is presented here as such.

Globally, and in the wider African market

MSCI’s Women on Boards and Beyond 2025 report, using data as at October 2025 and published on 4 March 2026, records women at 28.3% of board seats across MSCI ACWI constituents, up one percentage point, with 48.7% of companies at or above 30% female board representation. MSCI’s own finding is that representation among board chairs, chief executives and chief financial officers showed signs of stagnation, and that developed-market gains decelerated to 0.7 percentage points annually.

Outside South Africa, the African evidence base on women at executive level is thin, sector-limited and frequently unsourced. The one recent dataset located is the African Financial Industry Barometer 2025, a survey of more than 70 African financial institutions, which found 43% with more than a quarter of their directors female, up from 39%, 57% below that threshold, 13% with no female directors at all, and 75% of African capital-market institutions with none. That is one sector and a self-selected sample.

The same source carries the more robust point. Morocco legislated in 2021 for a minimum of 30% women on listed-company boards by 1 January 2024 and 40% by 1 January 2027, and stands at 29% across 92 listed companies against 12% in 2011. It is the only binding board quota located on the continent. Nigeria’s Central Bank guidelines of 2012 encourage 30% female board membership and 40% in top management on a non-binding basis.

Country-level board percentages for Kenya, Ghana and Africa as a whole circulate widely in commentary on this subject. The ones we could trace lead back to a single 2023 article that names no source for any of them, and they are not repeated here.

What changed in 2025

Stock and flow are different measurements, and in 2025 they moved in opposite directions. Board representation reached record levels. The rate of new appointments fell.

Five independent counts recorded the same turn in the same year.

• Spencer Stuart: women were 38% of new independent directors appointed to S&P 500 boards in 2025, down from 42% in 2024 and 47% in 2020. The total number of new independent directors also fell, from 406 to 374.
• Challenger, Gray & Christmas: women were 25.5% of new US chief executive appointments through October 2025, against 26.4% in the same period of 2024 and a full-year peak of 28.7% in 2023.
• The Conference Board: net new Russell 3000 board seats gained by women fell to 47 in 2025, from 258 in 2024 and 342 in 2023.
• Equilar and 50/50 Women on Boards: women took 22.5% of 448 new Russell 3000 board seats in the third quarter of 2025, the lowest rate in more than ten years.
• Egon Zehnder, on a longer view and a global universe, recorded new female director appointments at 14.2% in 2024 against 17.2% in 2020.

We are reporting the direction and the dates, not explaining them. Every available explanation for the 2025 turn is an inference.

What the direction does change is a planning assumption. An executive who last tested the market in 2022 or 2023 formed a view of appointment conditions that the most recent counts no longer support. That is a reason to plan on a longer horizon and to hold a current position rather than a lapsed one, which is the practical content of several of the strategies below.

The South African case: two numbers that disagree, and why

South African executives have spent 2026 reading that their country is at or near parity in senior management. Grant Thornton’s Women in Business 2026, published on 12 March 2026, puts South Africa at 47.3% of senior management roles held by women, against a global figure of 32.9%. The statutory data for the same period puts women at 38.6% of Senior Management and 29.3% of Top Management. Just Share puts JSE Top 40 executive roles at 27.4%.

Both sets of figures are honestly produced. They describe different populations.

Grant Thornton’s number comes from its International Business Report, a survey of roughly 10,000 mid-market businesses across 28 to 35 economies, listed and unlisted, answered by chief executives, managing directors, chairs and senior executives about their own firms. It is a mid-market self-report. The Commission for Employment Equity number is statutory reporting by designated employers covering 6.9 million employees. Just Share’s number is built from the published disclosures of the 40 largest companies on the Johannesburg exchange.

Three populations, three instruments, three answers. Grant Thornton does not publish its definition of “senior management” or its per-country sample size on any page we could reach, which is a material gap in the more optimistic of the two figures. Its global number also fell 1.1 percentage points in 2026, from 34.0% in 2025, which is consistent with everything else recorded above.

An executive comparing any of these figures against her own executive committee is comparing against a different population again. The useful question is not which number is right. It is which population the number describes, and whether it is hers.

Why South Africa is a different market condition

The Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022 commenced on 1 January 2025, with regulations published on 15 April 2025. It sets five-year sectoral numerical targets across 18 economic sectors, applying to four upper occupational levels including Top Management and Senior Management, for designated employers with 50 or more employees together with organs of state. Gender is one of the designated dimensions.

The targets are sector-specific, so no single number applies to every reader and none is quoted here. The consequence is structural rather than numerical. Executive-level gender composition in South Africa is now a reported, certificated figure attached to state contracting eligibility. It is not a values statement, and it is not a communications matter. A South African designated employer sitting at 27.6% female Top Management is carrying a measurable gap at precisely the level this article is about.

The governance layer runs the other way, and the difference is worth knowing. The JSE Listings Requirements oblige a board or its nomination committee to maintain a publicly available policy on the promotion of broader diversity at board level, specifically covering gender, race, culture, age, field of knowledge, skills and experience. The policy may set targets, and those targets are voluntary. Companies report annually on how the policy was applied and explain where diversity indicators were not implemented. That is comply-or-explain, not quota. So a South African executive is operating under a statutory regime that measures her level and a listings regime that does not.

The market-by-market divergence in what a senior appointment means to the employer is treated at greater length in our guide to how to become a C-level executive.

Where the measurable difference in senior women’s careers actually is

Most writing on this subject concerns entry: how women get in, get promoted, get appointed. The best available evidence points somewhere else. The measurable difference is on the exit side, and it is sharpest one rung below chief executive.

A 2025 working paper by Charles J. Hadlock of the University of Pittsburgh, Paul Obermann of Idaho State University and Joshua R. Pierce of the University of Alabama, examining S&P 1500 executives across 2001 to 2021, found that female senior executives excluding chief executives are 15 to 20% more likely to leave their roles in any given year than male counterparts. The gap is roughly twice as large at the poorest-performing firms as at median performers. Severance is at least as common for departing women as for men, and the gap is wider for executives under 60, both of which are consistent with forced rather than voluntary departure. After leaving, the likelihood of what the authors classify as a bad outcome, meaning not resurfacing in an executive role or resurfacing with a pay cut of 20% or more, is about 19% higher for women.

The same study found gender differences in chief executive turnover small and statistically insignificant.

That last finding sits against a widely cited practitioner position, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than resolving. Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search firm with a commercial interest in this question, analysed 1,317 chief executive departures across twelve global indices between 2018 and 2024 and published on 21 May 2025. It found average chief executive tenure of 5.2 years for women against 7.9 years for men, and 32% of women chief executives departing within three years having been dismissed against 24% of men. Their departure-reason split differs sharply too: 13% of women left through retirement against 31% of men, and 6% moved to another internal role against 14%.

One academic study of the S&P 1500 finds no significant chief executive gap. One search firm’s analysis of twelve global indices finds a large one. The samples, the periods and the universes are different, and neither is obviously wrong. The honest reading is that the finding is robust below chief executive and contested at chief executive.

What follows from this practically is not caution about ambition. It is that the risk in a senior transition concentrates in a place most preparation ignores, and it responds to due diligence and to contract terms rather than to confidence. Strategies eight and nine below are built on it.

Two claims in this field that do not hold as stated

Both are repeated constantly, including by organisations with no interest in misleading anyone. Both deserve exactness rather than a position.

The glass cliff is contested, not established and not disproved

The glass cliff originated in a 2005 study by Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam in the British Journal of Management, an archival analysis of FTSE 100 companies which found that firms appointing women to boards were more likely to have experienced consistently poor performance in the preceding five months.

Three things have happened to it since.

A 2020 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Morgenroth, Kirby, Ryan and Sudkämper found glass cliff effects that were small and varied by domain and study design, larger in countries with higher gender inequality, and extending to racial and ethnic minority groups. The authors’ own characterisation is of small, context-dependent effects rather than a robust general phenomenon.

Two large archival tests, the larger of them since, have failed to find it. Bechtoldt, Bannier and Rock, examining 233 large listed firms in Germany and the UK across 2005 to 2015 using matching, panel analysis and instrumental variables, concluded that “before the appointment of female executives, the performance trend in German or British companies is no more negative than in companies that select male managers.” A 2024 study in The Leadership Quarterly, “Female CEO selection: Does the glass cliff exist?”, examining 10,348 chief executives including 526 women at US public companies across 1998 to 2022, found women no more likely than men to be appointed at struggling companies, and found that as a company’s financial stability improved, the likelihood of a woman being appointed increased.

That is the state of the evidence and it does not license a headline in either direction. The glass cliff has not been disproved: the meta-analysis found something, and the authors of the largest European non-replication put a question mark in their own title. Nor is it established: the two largest archival tests ever run on it did not find it. The defensible word is contested.

Why this matters to a woman weighing an actual offer: an executive who assumes the glass cliff is a law will read every distressed company as a trap, and one who assumes it is a myth will skip the diligence. The evidence supports neither shortcut. It supports assessing the specific company, which is what the turnover finding above already argues for on independent grounds.

Sponsorship is a useful distinction, not a demonstrated cause

The advice that women need sponsors rather than mentors is close to universal in this category. The evidence under it is thinner than its confidence suggests.

The foundational study is Coqual’s The Sponsor Dividend, published in 2019 on fieldwork conducted in January 2018 with 3,213 US white-collar professionals. Its reported outcome variable is satisfaction with rate of advancement, not advancement: 57% of women without a sponsor reported satisfaction against 68% with one. It measures a correlation, in one country, from fieldwork now eight years old, and it reports no pay figures.

The most recent academic work on the question does not close the gap. A 2025 paper in Gender, Work & Organization by Gröschl, Gabaldon, Hahn and Kelan examined sponsorship through semi-structured qualitative interviews with women leaders in France and Spain, focused on early and mid-career advancement. It is small-sample, qualitative, two European markets, and not about senior women. It supports no numerical claim. It does contain one finding that cuts against the category’s assumptions and is worth carrying: the sponsors these women leaders described were predominantly male, against a literature that emphasises same-gender relationships.

So there is no rigorous, recent, senior-woman-specific quantitative evidence that sponsorship causes advancement. There may be a real effect. Nobody has measured it at this level.

What survives is the definition, and the definition is the useful part. A mentor advises you. A sponsor spends their own capital on you in a room you are not in. Those are different relationships, they are built differently, and confusing them wastes years. That is worth knowing whether or not anyone has quantified the return.

Ten strategies for women in executive leadership navigating transition

Each of the following is written for an executive who has read the sections above. They are ordered as a sequence, and the sequence matters more than any single item in it.

1. Define which market you are entering before you enter it

Executive appointment and board appointment are different markets with different assessors, different documents and different timelines, and a transition that treats them as one thing tends to fail at both. A nomination committee is filling a named gap in a skills matrix. An executive search consultant is matching against a specification written for a business of a particular size. A functional move inside a group is assessed by people who already have a view of you.

The questions to settle first are which of those you are entering, on what horizon, and whether you are moving toward a defined thing or away from an undefined one. Transitions defined only by what is being left behind become reactive, and at this level a reactive search is visible from the outside.

2. Decide what you want the next appointment to be evidence of

A role that fitted five years ago may no longer fit a current leadership philosophy, a current risk appetite or a current life. That is ordinary and it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that at executive level each appointment becomes the evidence base for the one after it, and a seat taken for the wrong reason narrows the next set of options rather than widening it.

So the question is not only what you want, but what the appointment will make you a credible candidate for in five years. Sector, scale, ownership structure, whether the role carries a profit-and-loss, whether it carries board exposure. Those are not preferences. They are the inputs to the next matrix you are read against.

3. Audit your leadership capital against the route, not against your title

The functional shape of senior representation is the sharpest supporting detail in the evidence, and it repeats independently in two markets. In the FTSE 350, women hold 82% of human resources director roles and 21% of finance director roles, with chief information officer roles also at 21%. In the S&P 100, as at July 2024, women held 72% of chief human resources officer roles and 24% of profit-and-loss leadership roles.

Set that beside a separate finding about the chief executive route, which our guide to how to become a C-level executive sets out with its sources: the route runs disproportionately through functions that carry a profit-and-loss. The functions in which women are most concentrated are not those functions. That is a route observation, and we make no claim here about how it came about.

The practical consequence is that a capital audit organised by job title will understate most senior women and mislead some. Organise it instead by what the next matrix asks for: capital allocation decisions taken, revenue or margin owned, regulatory exposure carried, transactions completed, restructurings led, board reporting done, governance processes sat through. Where a genuine gap exists against the route, it is better found now than at the second interview. Where the exposure exists but is buried inside a functional title, that is a positioning problem rather than a career problem, and it is the subject of our guide to how to write an executive CV.

4. Test your market relevance against current conditions, not remembered ones

Appointment flow slowed on five independent counts in 2025 while board representation hit records. An executive whose last serious market test was in 2022 or 2023 is carrying assumptions the current counts do not support: about how quickly a process moves, how many candidates are in it, and how many processes are running at all.

Relevance at this level is not a matter of collecting certificates. It is a matter of whether you can speak credibly about the two or three things currently changing the economics of your sector, and whether the evidence of that is anywhere a search consultant can find it. Where formal development is warranted, choose it against a named gap in the route rather than against a general sense of needing to be current.

5. Build confidence out of preparation, because preparation is the part you control

Accomplished people experience doubt in transition and it is not a defect. It is also not the thing to work on first, because confidence at executive level is downstream of preparation and rarely upstream of it.

There is one piece of measured evidence adjacent to this and it is worth stating with its limits attached. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s Women in the Workplace 2025 study, published in December 2025 and drawing on 120 to 124 participating companies representing roughly three million employees, found that stated ambition for promotion differs by gender and narrows sharply with seniority: at entry level, 80% of men against 69% of women; at senior level, 92% of men against 84% of women. That study covers the United States and Canada only, and its participating companies are self-selected organisations that opted into a gender-diversity benchmarking exercise. It is not a random sample of employers and it is not evidence about the UK, South Africa or Africa.

What is worth taking from it is the direction: the gap at senior level is the smaller one. The executives reading this are, on that measure, already in the narrower part of the distribution. Preparation, in the concrete sense, means market research on specific companies, an assembled and testable evidence base, current documents, rehearsed answers to the two questions in your record you would rather not be asked, and a settled view of what you will not accept.

6. Hold a current public position, not a lapsed one

A transition is not conducted privately. By the time a search consultant is briefed, your public record already exists and is already being read, and it is read as a formal part of assessment rather than as background colour.

Two things matter more than volume. Consistency, so that the CV, the LinkedIn profile and anything you have published describe the same career in the same terms. And currency, so that what is visible reflects the seat you hold now rather than the one you held three roles ago. Building this while a transition is under way is possible and it is visibly late. The mechanism is covered in full in our guide to personal branding for executives, which also sets out what is legally constrained about what an executive may say in public.

7. Build the relationships that carry capital, and be clear about which ones do

At executive level a network is not a contact list. It is the set of people who will argue for you in a room you are not in, plus the larger set who will tell you the truth about a company before you join it.

On the mentor and sponsor distinction, hold both the definition and its limits. A sponsor spends capital, a mentor spends time, and the difference is real. What the evidence does not establish is that sponsorship causes advancement for senior women, because nobody has measured it at this level. The one recent qualitative finding available records that women leaders’ sponsors were predominantly male, against a literature that assumes otherwise. Treat that as a reason to widen the field rather than narrow it.

The second function of a network is diligence, and it is the one most people underuse. Before a board conversation becomes an offer, the people who have worked with that chair, that chief executive and that audit committee are the only source of information about how the company behaves under pressure. Given what the turnover evidence says about performance-sensitivity, that intelligence is not soft. It is the highest-value input available.

8. Assess the company’s condition as a risk question, not a values question

This is where the evidence changes the standard advice most.

The 2025 working paper on S&P 1500 turnover found that the gap in senior women’s exit rates roughly doubles at the poorest-performing firms compared with median performers. That is a statement about where the risk concentrates, and it is actionable in a way that most transition guidance is not.

It does not mean refusing distressed situations. Turnarounds build the strongest executive records available and the evidence on the glass cliff does not support treating them as traps. It means that the diligence a distressed situation requires is different in kind: how long the current chief executive has been in post and on what terms, how the board behaved during the last downturn, whether the mandate you are being given is the mandate the board actually believes in, who else was approached, and what happened to your predecessor. A company that will not answer those questions has answered them.

The questions of cultural fit and long-term direction still apply. They sit after the risk assessment, not instead of it.

9. Negotiate the exit terms at the same time as the entry terms

This is the single largest change the evidence makes to how an executive transition should be prepared.

The record shows that senior women’s departures are more often involuntary and more often costly than men’s at the same level. Female senior executives below chief executive are 15 to 20% more likely to leave in any given year. Severance is at least as common for them as for men, and the gap is wider under 60. The likelihood of a bad post-exit outcome, meaning no return to an executive role or a return with a pay cut of 20% or more, is about 19% higher.

The response to that is contractual and financial rather than emotional. Before signing: notice periods on both sides, severance terms and what triggers them, treatment of long-term incentives on a departure that is not for cause, change-of-control provisions, restraint and non-compete terms and how long they would keep you out of your own market, indemnity and directors’ and officers’ cover, and what the company may and may not say about your departure. These are ordinary points to raise at executive level, they are raised more readily before an appointment than after one, and an executive who raises them reads as someone who has done this before.

The financial side is the same discipline. A senior transition that goes badly is survivable when the runway is long enough for the next appointment to be chosen rather than accepted, and the length of that runway is a household calculation as much as a personal one. Executives at this level are frequently carrying dependants, elder care, a partner’s own career or all three against a search that may run three quarters, and those are planning inputs to be costed rather than private matters to be absorbed. Given the 19% figure, the cost of a rushed next move is measurable.

Doubt, disruption and identity shifts are real features of transition, and support systems help. What the evidence identifies as specific to senior women is the exit, and an exit is prepared with a contract.

10. Treat transition as a normal feature of the executive market

Movement at this level is ordinary and increasingly so. Spencer Stuart records that of the 168 new chief executives appointed across the S&P 1500 in 2025, roughly 84% were first-time chief executives. The market that treated a first-timer as a risk has changed materially, and that change is not gender-specific. It applies to the reader of this page as much as to anyone else.

No source publishes internal against external appointment rates broken down by gender at C-suite level, so this article makes no claim about whether women are more or less likely to be appointed from inside. What is on the record is that the chief executive market as a whole ran at roughly 77% internal appointment in 2023, and that the first-time barrier has weakened materially since.

A transition is a position taken in a market whose shape is now documented. The table at the top of this page is that shape, and it is the correct starting point for a decision.

Common questions

Where does women’s representation actually break down in executive leadership?

At the executive line rather than the boardroom door, in every market measured. In the FTSE 350 as at October 2025, women held 49.5% of non-executive directorships and 15.4% of executive directorships. In the JSE Top 40 as at September 2025, 38% of board seats and 27.4% of executive roles. Across South African designated employers in the 2025 reporting cycle, 38.6% of Senior Management and 29.3% of Top Management. In the United States, 35% of S&P 500 directorships and 11% of Fortune 500 chief executives.

Has progress on women in executive leadership stalled?

Board representation is at record levels and the appointment rate fell in 2025 on five independent counts. Spencer Stuart recorded women at 38% of new S&P 500 independent directors, down from 42% in 2024. Challenger, Gray & Christmas recorded women at 25.5% of new US chief executive appointments through October 2025, against a 28.7% full-year peak in 2023. The Conference Board recorded net new Russell 3000 board seats gained by women falling to 47 in 2025 from 342 in 2023. Equilar and 50/50 Women on Boards recorded the lowest new-seat share in more than a decade in the third quarter of 2025. MSCI recorded stagnation among board chairs, chief executives and chief financial officers. The direction is documented. The causes are not, and are not asserted here.

Is the glass cliff real?

It is contested. The original 2005 FTSE 100 study found that firms appointing women to boards were more likely to have performed poorly beforehand. A 2020 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found small, context-dependent effects. The two largest archival tests since, covering 233 German and UK listed firms across 2005 to 2015 and 10,348 US chief executives across 1998 to 2022, did not find it. It has not been disproved and it is not established.

Does sponsorship help women reach the C-suite?

No rigorous, recent, senior-woman-specific quantitative evidence establishes that it does. The most-cited study, Coqual’s 2019 report on 2018 fieldwork, measured satisfaction with rate of advancement rather than advancement itself, in the United States only. A 2025 qualitative study in Gender, Work & Organization covered early and mid-career women in France and Spain and supports no numerical claim, though it found that these women’s sponsors were predominantly male. The distinction between a mentor who advises and a sponsor who spends capital is a useful definition and it is not a measured finding.

Are senior women more likely to leave executive roles?

Below chief executive, yes, on the best available evidence. A 2025 working paper covering S&P 1500 executives from 2001 to 2021 found female senior executives excluding chief executives 15 to 20% more likely to leave in any given year, with the gap roughly doubling at the poorest-performing firms and a bad post-exit outcome about 19% more likely. At chief executive level the evidence conflicts: the same study found gender differences statistically insignificant, while Russell Reynolds Associates’ analysis of 1,317 departures across twelve global indices found average tenure of 5.2 years for women against 7.9 for men and dismissal within three years at 32% against 24%.

Why do South African figures on women in senior management disagree with each other?

Because they measure different populations. Grant Thornton’s 47.3% comes from a self-report survey of roughly 10,000 mid-market businesses across 28 to 35 economies. The Commission for Employment Equity’s 38.6% at Senior Management and 29.3% at Top Management comes from statutory reporting by designated employers covering 6.9 million employees. Just Share’s 27.4% comes from the published disclosures of the 40 largest companies on the Johannesburg exchange. All three are honestly produced. Only one of them is likely to describe the population you are in.

Where this leaves you

The evidence in this piece supports a narrower and more useful proposition than the category usually offers. The market a woman crosses at executive level is documented, its shape is consistent across four independent datasets, its direction changed in 2025, and the risk in it concentrates on the exit rather than the entry. None of that is fixed by a document, and we are not going to suggest otherwise.

What a document does is decide what a search consultant, a nomination committee or a board can argue on your behalf when you are not in the room. Given a market that narrows hardest at exactly the line you are crossing, the case has to be made explicitly, in the terms the matrix uses, and it has to survive 360-degree referencing.

Elite Executive Career Solutions has been doing this work for nine years, has positioned more than 10,000 professionals across 38 countries and five continents, and covers 1,154 distinct role titles across 26 primary profession families. Every executive engagement is human-written. Client identities are never disclosed, and no client document appears on this site.

If you are preparing for a defined executive move, the Executive CV & Cover Letter engagement is the starting point, built through the Executive Career Positioning Suite™. If the question is a board seat, the Board Pack and the Board & Leadership engagement are scoped by consultation, because a governance case is built against a specific matrix rather than to a specification. Where the transition itself is the question rather than the document, the Executive Positioning Strategy is the engagement that addresses it.

Review the Executive Solutions engagements, or write to [email protected] to arrange a confidential consultation.

About this guide

Published by the Executive Insights desk at Elite Executive Career Solutions, formerly Elite CV. The firm was established in December 2016 and has been trading since February 2017. Across nine years of practice it has positioned more than 10,000 professionals in 38 countries across five continents, covering 1,154 distinct role titles across 26 primary profession families. Every executive engagement is human-written and is delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite.

Client identities are never disclosed. Work is attributed by role, sector and country only, and no client document appears anywhere on this site. Every figure above carries its publisher and its date, and the full source list follows. Where a source is single-producer, self-selected, commercially interested or outside the market under discussion, the guide says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

Six claims that circulate widely on this subject were consulted and are not used here: a national leadership census whose most recent edition is nine years old, a set of parity projections built on data now three years old and since superseded, a stale earlier wave of a promotion ratio that is still being republished as current, a modelled dismissal result whose specification its publisher does not disclose, a set of country-level board percentages that trace to a single article naming no source for any of them, and one figure whose denominator could not be established. Each was excluded on its sourcing, not on its conclusion, and none is reproduced above.

Sources

Statutory, regulatory and exchange

• Department of Employment and Labour, South Africa, 26th Commission for Employment Equity Annual Report 2025/26, released July 2026, covering the 2025 reporting cycle; 15,090 reports from designated employers covering 6,896,041 employees
• Department of Employment and Labour, South Africa, Employment Equity Regulations following the Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022. Act commenced 1 January 2025; regulations published 15 April 2025; five-year sectoral targets across 18 economic sectors
• Baker McKenzie, Cross-Border Listings Guide, Johannesburg JSE Limited, corporate governance, 1 February 2026, for the substance of the JSE Listings Requirements board diversity policy. The substance is independently corroborated by Just Share, below

Indices and reviews

• FTSE Women Leaders Review, Achieving Gender Balance 2026, data as at 31 October 2025, published 24 February 2026
• Spencer Stuart, 2025 US Spencer Stuart Board Index, published October 2025; 488 S&P 500 companies, proxy statements filed 1 May 2024 to 30 April 2025
• Just Share, Women in leadership: Assessing gender equality in JSE Top 40 boards and C-suites, data as at September 2025, published 12 November 2025, and the 2024 edition, 30 October 2024
• MSCI, Women on Boards and Beyond, 2025 Report, data as at October 2025, published 4 March 2026; MSCI ACWI constituents
• Egon Zehnder, Global Board Diversity Tracker, 5 December 2024. Used only for the 2020 to 2024 appointment-rate trend, which is dated on the page
• Fortune, 2026 Fortune 500 women chief executives count, 3 June 2026

Academic

• Charles J. Hadlock, Paul Obermann and Joshua R. Pierce, Falling Down Hard: Gender Differences in Top Management Turnover, SSRN working paper as at August 2025; S&P 1500 executives 2001 to 2021. Working paper, not peer-reviewed at the time of writing, and described as such on the page
• Thekla Morgenroth, Teri A. Kirby, Michelle K. Ryan and Antonia Sudkämper, “The who, when, and why of the glass cliff phenomenon: A meta-analysis of appointments to precarious leadership positions”, Psychological Bulletin 146(9), September 2020
• Myriam Bechtoldt, Christina E. Bannier and Björn Rock, The Glass Cliff Myth? Evidence from Germany and the U.K., The Leadership Quarterly; SSRN working paper posted 19 November 2018; 233 large listed firms, Germany and the UK, 2005 to 2015
• “Female CEO selection: Does the glass cliff exist?”, The Leadership Quarterly, DOI 10.1016/j.leaqua.2024.101853, 2024; 10,348 chief executives including 526 women, US public companies, 1998 to 2022. Cited by title, journal, DOI and sample; the author list could not be retrieved and is not attributed
• Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, British Journal of Management, 2005, the originating glass cliff study, via the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership
• Stefan Gröschl, Patricia Gabaldon, Tobias Hahn and Elisabeth K. Kelan, “The Emergence and Effects of Sponsors for Women Leaders”, Gender, Work & Organization 32(5): 1786 to 1796, 2025; qualitative interviews, France and Spain, early and mid career

Research houses and surveys, attributed by name on the page

• Russell Reynolds Associates, Why Women CEOs Leave Sooner, and How Boards Can Help All CEOs Thrive, 21 May 2025; 1,317 chief executive departures across twelve global indices, 2018 to 2024. Executive search firm with a commercial interest in the subject
• Russell Reynolds Associates, Global CEO Gender Parity a Lifetime Away, 22 January 2024; twelve-market universe, for the 77% internal appointment figure for 2023
• Russell Reynolds Associates S&P 100 C-suite analysis, data as at July 2024, via Hunt Scanlon, 17 October 2024. Two years old and stated as such on the page
• Coqual, The Sponsor Dividend, published 2019 on fieldwork conducted in January 2018; 3,213 US white-collar professionals. Reported outcome variable is satisfaction with rate of advancement, not advancement. United States only
• Spencer Stuart, S&P 1500 chief executive transitions, 2025; 168 new chief executives appointed, of whom approximately 84% were first-time chief executives
• McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2025, published December 2025; 120 to 124 self-selected participating companies, approximately three million employees, United States and Canada only
• Grant Thornton, Women in Business 2026, published 12 March 2026, and the South African edition; International Business Report survey of approximately 10,000 mid-market businesses across 28 to 35 economies. Definition of “senior management” and per-country sample size not published
• African Financial Industry Barometer 2025, Africa Financial Industry Summit; more than 70 African financial institutions, self-selected, financial sector only

Quality journalism used as a route to named research houses

• Fortune, “Women CEOs and boards: progress stalling”, 23 December 2025, as the route to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, The Conference Board, and Equilar with 50/50 Women on Boards. Each figure is attributed on the page to the research house that produced it
• Forbes, “Glass cliff for female CEOs: study reveals mixed evidence”, 13 January 2025, as the route to the 2024 Leadership Quarterly study