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11th of march 2026
Women in Marketing Leadership Report
by The Growth Syndicate
What we found:
- Women have reached the top of marketing. What they find there is more complicated than the numbers suggest. 53% of Fortune 500 CMOs are women. That is real progress. But having the title does not automatically mean having the budget, the authority, or the same latitude to fail and recover.
- Women are not less confident than men. That is the most common explanation for why fewer women put themselves forward for leadership roles. Researchers tested it. It did not hold up. What did: women worry more about being judged, and they worry more about what happens if they get it wrong.
- When a job description is vague, qualified women are far less likely to apply. In a field experiment, 6% of qualified women applied for a senior role when the requirements were unclear. When the same role listed specific criteria and directly invited qualified candidates to apply, that number jumped to 29%.
- Women in marketing leadership are watched more closely than their male peers. Their decisions are questioned more often, and their failures carry more reputational weight. This is not a feeling. It is documented in the research. And it changes how they lead, because the rational response to being scrutinized more harshly is to take fewer risks.
- Giving a woman the CMO title without real decision-making power does not improve the business. Research suggests that female CMOs improve firm value, but only when they have genuine influence over budgets, strategy, and how the company operates.
- Who else is on the shortlist matters more than most organizations realize. When a woman is the only female candidate being considered for a leadership role, her chance of being hired is statistically zero. She gets seen as representing her gender rather than being evaluated as an individual. Add a second woman to the same shortlist and the odds shift dramatically.
- Advice alone does not get women promoted. Advocacy does. Women are more likely than men to have people offering them guidance and feedback. But men are significantly more likely to have someone putting their name forward in rooms they are not in. That distinction, between someone who advises you and someone who stakes their reputation on you, is what the research shows actually drives advancement.
- The three most popular approaches to improving gender diversity in organizations do not work. Mandatory training, standardized testing, and formal complaint systems all decreased the share of women in management over five years.
- The biggest drop in the pipeline is not at the top. It is at the very first promotion. For every 100 men promoted from individual contributor to manager, only 81 women make the same step. For Black women, 54. For Latinas, 65. This has barely changed in ten years.
- Organizational barriers that women face revolve around the way organizations are designed. The vast majority of solutions to them are not expensive or dramatic. They involve being specific about what roles require, evaluating people against criteria rather than assumptions, and making sure that authority matches the title on the door.
The main question
53% of Fortune 500 CMOs are women. Marketing has achieved something most corporate functions have not: genuine gender parity at the top.
Naturally, we want to celebrate this number. It represents decades of progress in a profession that was not always taken seriously as a strategic function, let alone as a path to the C-suite.
But we believe that this figure is also incomplete. It reflects who holds the title, yet it does not tell you how they got there, what they had to adapt to along the way, or whether the organizations they lead are designed to let them do their best work.
This report set out to understand what is happening beneath that headline. We studied a wide body of peer-reviewed research on gender, leadership, and organizational design. We analyzed industry data from Spencer Stuart, McKinsey, Gartner, and others. And we spoke to four women whose experience in senior marketing roles gave the research a human dimension it would not have had otherwise:
Ashley Herbert Popa has led marketing teams across B2B companies in Europe and knows what it costs to include yourself in rooms no one invited you into.
Trina Moitra has built and led marketing functions across multiple companies and thinks about intuition, risk, and data in ways that challenge how most organizations define good decision-making.
Adrie Smith Ahmad has worked across companies of different sizes and sees clearly how organizational structure shapes what gets rewarded and who gets heard.
Liana Hakobyan has co-founded and led marketing in startup environments and brings a sharp perspective on what empathetic, human-centered leadership looks like in practice.
Their perspectives do not always agree. That is part of what makes them valuable.
Joliene van Grieken, co-founder of The Growth Syndicate, frames the question the report is built around:
"For most of my career, I led as someone else. Not entirely. I was still strategic, still decisive, still accountable. But the version of me that showed up in leadership meetings was calibrated for rooms that weren't designed with me in mind. When I co-founded The Growth Syndicate, something changed radically. For the first time, I was leading as myself. It made me curious: if women have arrived at the leadership table, why do so many still feel they had to become someone else to get there?"
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That question runs through every section of this report. The research suggests that the answer is not about women. It is about how organizations are designed: how they hire, how they evaluate, how they distribute authority, and what they recognize as leadership. The findings are specific, evidence-based, and in most cases actionable.
Getting in
How do women reach marketing leadership, and what do they have to prove along the way?
TL;DR: Women don't lack confidence, they lack clear signals. When organizations leave criteria vague, qualified women opt out before the hiring process even begins. The solutions organizations should seek isn't coaching women to be bolder, rather it's designing environments that tell people where they stand.
In 2018, a reporter asked Donna Strickland why she wasn't listed as a full professor on the University of Waterloo's website. She had just won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
"I never applied," she said.
It is easy to read that as personal oversight. It is probably something else. Strickland hadn't received a clear signal that the role was something she should pursue. No one had told her she met the threshold.
In the absence of that information, she made a reasonable calculation and didn't apply. The Nobel Committee's decision to award her the prize that year was, among other things, confirmation that her self-assessment had been wrong.
That kind of miscalibration, where a qualified person underestimates their own abilities or overestimates what a role requires, does not start inside someone's head. It starts in the information environment around them. And it happens in marketing organizations at every level, before anyone notices, before any hiring decision is made.
Women don't have a "confidence problem"
TL;DR: A 2023 study found that when job criteria were made explicit, qualified women's application rates jumped from 6% to 29%. Men's rates didn't change. The problem isn't self-belief, it's information design.
The most commonly cited explanation for why women are underrepresented in senior roles is the so-called confidence gap. Women hold themselves back, the argument goes, waiting for certainty that men don't require. If women applied more often, the pipeline would fill.
A 2023 study published in Management Science tested that premise across three separate experiments: a field experiment on Upwork with over a thousand freelancers, a laboratory study using real job postings from Indeed, and a simulated promotion exercise with 1,502 workers. In each setting, qualified women applied at lower rates than equally qualified men. So far, the confidence narrative seems to hold.
But then the researchers changed one variable. They made the qualification criteria explicit and added language that directly invited candidates who met the threshold to apply. Qualified women's application rates nearly quintupled, jumping from 6% to 29%.
Qualified men's rates barely moved. They had been applying at between 19% and 23% across all conditions, and the additional information made no meaningful difference to their behavior.
The confidence explanation would predict that the intervention changed how women felt about themselves. But it didn't.
What it changed was how much information the environment gave them to work with. When the signal was clear, women applied. When it was vague, they withdrew. Men applied at roughly the same rate either way.
All of a sudden the problem doesn’t really revolve around self-belief, but has to do with information design.
Two gaps, not one
TL;DR: Women tend to underestimate both their own qualifications and overestimate what the role requires. Vague criteria don't create these tendencies, they give them room to compound, long before any hiring committee convenes.
The reason vague criteria hurt women more than men has to do with how people decide whether to apply for something. The decision requires two assessments at the same time: how qualified am I, and what does the role actually require?
The research shows that women estimate both of those more conservatively than equally performing men.
In the laboratory study, participants viewed real job postings from Indeed and rated how qualified they felt. Men rated themselves 4.65 out of 10 on average. Women with equivalent profiles rated themselves 4.22.
Women also reported believing they possessed roughly 5 percentage points fewer of the stated qualifications than men with identical backgrounds. In the simulated promotion exercise, women estimated a 39% probability of being promoted if they applied. Men estimated 48%. The underlying performance was the same.
This is where we need to stress that ambiguous criteria do not create these tendencies, they give them room to operate.
When criteria are specific, both gaps narrow. When criteria are vague, they compound. And that compounding happens before any hiring committee convenes, before any interview takes place, before anyone with the authority to make a decision has even seen the candidate pool.
Marketing leadership roles at senior levels tend to be described in terms that are genuinely difficult to calibrate against.
A few common examples are "commercial acumen," "executive presence," and "strategic thinking." These appear frequently in job descriptions for VP and CMO positions, but, in fact, communicate pretty much nothing.
Naturally, these phrases can carry real meaning given the right context, but they do not give candidates much to measure themselves against. The gap between what someone thinks she offers and what she imagines the role requires can widen considerably when neither side of that equation is defined.
What it looks like from the inside
TL;DR: Women in senior marketing positions often mention having to force their way into rooms they should already be in. The persistence this requires is real, but organizations that demand it as a condition of entry are filtering for something other than talent.
Ashley Herbert Popa has spent years working in B2B marketing leadership in the Netherlands. The challenge she describes is not uncertainty about her own abilities. It is being structurally excluded from the conversations she needed to participate in to do her job. Here's how she described her experience in one of her former organizations:
"I have had to learn how to elbow my way into rooms I should already be in. Not aggressively, but I am not going to give up. I need to direct a team to fulfill the goals and priorities of the company. If I don't know what those goals and priorities are, I cannot do my job. When I was not included, I included myself. It is not an okay answer to say 'so-and-so didn't invite me.' I invite myself then."
Ashley's experience illustrates a different dimension of the same problem. The Coffman research shows what happens when the signal is missing before the hire: qualified women don't apply.
Ashley shows what happens when the signal is missing after the hire: women in leadership positions still have to fight for the access and information that should come with the role.
In both cases, the environment is withholding something the person needs, and the burden of closing that gap falls on the individual. But not every qualified person will know to do this, or be positioned to do it, or be willing to absorb the cost of doing it repeatedly throughout a career.
Organizations that require this kind of persistence as a condition of entry are selecting for something other than talent.
What this means for the people writing the job descriptions
TL;DR: Vague job descriptions aren't neutral, they predictably shrink the female candidate pool. Making criteria explicit and inviting qualified people to apply costs nothing and meaningfully closes the gap.
Joliene van Grieken has been on both sides of this equation. As a marketing leader in B2B, she spent years reading job descriptions and making the same kind of calculation the Coffman research describes, measuring herself against criteria that were often too abstract to measure against.
Now, as a co-founder of The Growth Syndicate, she is the one designing those criteria. That shift in vantage point has made the finding personal. She knows what gets lost when the signal is unclear, because she has been the qualified person who hesitated.
"The criteria aren't just about assessing people. They're about signaling who should consider themselves in the running. If you write a job description in language that requires someone to imagine themselves as a particular kind of leader before they've been told that's what you're looking for, you've already made a decision. You just haven't admitted it yet."
The research gives that observation a precise shape. When organizations specify what qualifies someone for a role and explicitly invite qualified candidates to apply, women's application rates increase significantly. Men's do not change.
This minor intervention costs nothing.
It requires no training program, no structural reorganization, and no quota. It requires only that the people writing job descriptions understand that vague criteria are not neutral. They produce predictable outcomes, and those outcomes are measurable.
The pipeline does not start with the hire. It starts with who receives a clear enough signal to decide the role is theirs to pursue.
Coffman, K.B., Collis, M., & Kulkarni, L. (2023). Whether to Apply. Management Science. Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 20-062.
Bowles, H.R., Babcock, L., & McGinn, K.L. (2005). Constraints and triggers: Situational mechanics of gender in negotiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 951–965.
Being seen
What happens to women once they are in leadership, and how does the environment shape what they are willing to risk?
TL;DR: Getting in is only half the story. Women CMOs take fewer visible risks, not because they lack confidence (the data shows no meaningful gap), but because they face greater fear of failure and scrutiny. Unlike confidence, scrutiny is an environmental factor that organizations can change.
There is a difference between getting the title and being able to do the job the way you would actually do it.
As we mentioned above, women now hold 53% of CMO positions at Fortune 500 companies. That number is up 12 points since 2020. It represents real progress and you love to see it.
But appointment and agency are not the same thing.
In 2023, three researchers (Varma, Bommaraju, and Singh) published a study in the Journal of Marketing Research that looked at a decade of US public company data, more than 7,400 company-years, to figure out why female CMOs tend to make more conservative decisions than male CMOs. The answer they found upends one of the most commonly repeated ideas in leadership development.
Fear of failure and scrutiny
TL;DR: The "confidence gap" doesn't hold up. The real drivers are fear of failure and fear of scrutiny, both of which are shaped by the work environment, not by personality.
As the previous section showed, the confidence gap doesn't explain who applies. The same holds for what happens once women are in the role.
Female CMOs launch fewer new products and invest more conservatively in marketing. This is well documented. The popular explanation is confidence.
Women, the thinking goes, are more cautious because they trust their own judgment less. When Varma, Bommaraju, and Singh tested that premise against a decade of US public company data (more than 7,400 company-years) and a study of 730 people making decisions from the perspective of a CMO, it fell apart.
On confidence, the gap between men and women was essentially zero. Women scored 4.17 out of 5, men scored 4.25. That difference is noise. It explains nothing about why women take fewer risks.
Fear of failure was different. Women scored 3.09, men 2.87. That gap held up across the data and it did help explain the risk difference. Fear of scrutiny, the sense that your work is being watched and judged more closely than other people's, showed a similar gap. Women scored 3.47, men 3.29. Also real, also a driver of more cautious decision-making.
The researchers' conclusion: the finding "departs from prior studies on executive gender, which rely on confidence as the theoretical mechanism. Instead, we find that fear of failure and fear of scrutiny in the workplace mediate the relationship between gender and risk-taking behavior."
Confidence is largely a stable personal trait. Scrutiny is a feature of the workplace. You cannot change one through organizational policy. You can change the other.
Context affects everything
TL;DR: The gender gap in risk-taking isn't fixed. It shrinks when female CMOs report to female CEOs or when firms are performing well, and widens under market uncertainty, because context shapes how their decisions get judged.
The risk gap is not a fixed feature of female leadership. It moves depending on the conditions around it, and it moves in predictable ways. The study above looked at three factors.
First, reporting structure. When a female CMO reports to a female CEO, she launches more new products. And that makes total sense. When you are the only woman in a leadership team, every decision you make gets a little extra attention. Not necessarily hostile attention, but attention that accumulates. A female CEO changes that. You are no longer the exception in the room. The pressure to be flawless on every call eases, and with it, the instinct to play safe.
Second, company performance. When a company is doing well relative to its peers, female CMOs take more risks. This makes sense. A strong track record creates a cushion. One bet that does not pay off is easier to absorb when the overall numbers are solid, and it is easier for other people to judge fairly.
Third, market uncertainty. This one cuts the other way. When conditions are turbulent and hard to read, female CMOs become more conservative. The reason has to do with how people evaluate decisions when they do not have clear information. When a market is stable, you can look at a CMO's call and judge it against a relatively clear set of signals.
When the market is chaotic, those signals disappear. And when people lack clear criteria for evaluating a decision, they default to instinct, which often includes assumptions about how men and women perform.
Shelley Correll's research at Stanford has documented this pattern directly: the less clear the evaluation criteria, the more space there is for gender-based expectations to creep in. A woman making a bold call in a volatile market gets judged differently than a man making the same call, not because the call is different but because the lens through which it gets evaluated is.
Why visibility comes at a cost
TL;DR: Being a minority in leadership increases how closely your decisions are watched, raises the reputational cost of failure, and produces more conservative behavior, not as a flaw, but as a rational response to an uneven playing field.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and researchers have been documenting the underlying pattern for decades.
When you are one of very few people like you in a leadership group, your decisions attract disproportionate attention. That attention raises the stakes when something goes wrong. And the higher cost of failure produces more cautious behavior as a perfectly rational response. Kram and Hampton described this cycle in 1998. Brescoll, Dawson, and Uhlmann found in 2010 that mistakes by women in senior roles carry larger reputational penalties than equivalent mistakes by men. Ridgeway and Correll showed that when performance is ambiguous, gender stereotypes fill the evaluation gap.
So the logic here isn't that women lack the so-called "nerve." Rather, it suggests that women accurately read an environment where the consequences of a visible failure are higher for them, and act accordingly.
Adrie Smith Ahmad has observed a related pattern in how visibility distributes once women are in leadership.
"In my experience, men tend to say yes to a speaking invitation almost regardless of the specifics. Women need more context first. They want to know the what, the where, the how, and then they still need to consider it."
That is a reasonable response to uncertainty. But its cumulative effect is that women's names circulate less, which affects the informal visibility that shapes sponsorship and advancement over time. The hesitation is not about confidence, instead it reflects the same fear-of-scrutiny mechanism the Varma research identified. When you know your performance will be watched more closely, you want clearer terms before you step into the spotlight.
"Nine out of ten times, the only women at the table are in marketing or HR."
That is precisely the kind of structural isolation the research links to heightened scrutiny. Whether it happens because of deliberate exclusion or because of a pipeline that has been leaking for years, its effect on how female leaders approach risk is the same.
Representation is a performance question
TL;DR: Companies with female CMOs tend to show higher firm value, but this benefit likely depends on whether the organization creates conditions that don't suppress their decision-making capacity. Appointing without fixing the environment may not deliver the results the business case promises.
The study also found that companies with female CMOs tend to show higher firm value. The data is strong enough that the researchers recommend boards appoint more women to the role not just for fairness but for shareholder returns.
The pipeline does not only narrow at the point of entry, as the previous section showed. It narrows again once women are in role, through the same mechanism: ambiguity that gives bias room to operate.
But here is the catch. That finding does not exist in isolation. Pair it with everything the moderator analysis showed, and a more complicated picture emerges.
A female CMO reporting to a male CEO, in a company that is underperforming, during a period of market turbulence, is operating under exactly the conditions the research shows will compress her strategic range. The firm value benefit is likely conditional on whether the organization actually creates the space for it. Appointing a woman to the role and then placing her in an environment that suppresses bold decision-making is not a diversity strategy. It is a setup.
What organizations can do about it
TL;DR: Three structural levers matter: who evaluates the CMO, when she's appointed (ideally not during a crisis), and how decisions are reviewed (clear, pre-committed criteria reduce bias). None require changing people, just how the room works.
The research points to three things, each within reach of anyone who has influence over how a leadership team operates.
Who evaluates the CMO. CEO gender has a measurable effect on female CMO risk-taking. That does not mean you need a female CEO to unlock the benefit. It means the composition and quality of the evaluation structure matters. Who assesses the CMO, through what lens, and with what assumptions in play: these things shape behavior in ways that show up in business results.
When she is appointed. Risk capacity is highest when a company is performing well. Meanwhile, research on what is sometimes called the glass cliff shows that women are disproportionately appointed to senior roles in struggling organizations. The Varma findings suggest that those appointments place female CMOs in precisely the conditions that suppress the bold decision-making the role most needs.
How decisions get reviewed. The scrutiny mechanism runs on ambiguity. When performance criteria are clear and agreed on ahead of time, there is less room for bias to operate. Standardizing how marketing decisions are evaluated is good practice in general. For female CMOs, it directly addresses the thing that most constrains their strategic range.
None of these changes require a transformation program or a new set of values on the wall. They require paying attention to how the room actually works. The research suggests that is where the leverage is.
Varma, R., Bommaraju, R., & Singh, S.S. (2023). Female Chief Marketing Officers: When and Why Do Their Marketing Decisions Differ from Their Male Counterparts'? Journal of Marketing Research. DOI: 10.1177/00222437231156902
Supporting references: Kram & Hampton (1998); Brescoll, Dawson & Uhlmann (2010); Ridgeway & Correll (2004)
Making decisions
How the evaluation environment shapes what leaders are willing to risk
TL;DR: The title alone does not unlock the performance benefit. Female CMOs improve firm outcomes only when they hold real decision-making power. Without it, the appointment is symbolic and the business case falls flat.
In the previous section we looked at how scrutiny shapes the way women in marketing leadership are seen and evaluated. This section is about what that scrutiny does to the decisions themselves.
The question is not whether female CMOs can make bold strategic calls. The evidence says they can, and in many cases they do so with better results than their male counterparts. The question is whether organizations are set up to let them.
Assigning titles is not enough
TL;DR: A 25-year study of S&P 1500 companies found that female CMOs improve firm value, but only when they hold genuine influence within the leadership team. Gender alone does not predict performance. Gender plus authority does.
In 2023, Oh and Song published a study in the Journal of Business Research that looked at 25 years of data from S&P 1500 companies. They wanted to identify whether companies with female CMOs perform better.
The answer was yes, but with a very important condition.
Female CMOs were associated with higher firm value only when they held real power within the top management team. The researchers built a composite measure of how much influence each CMO had relative to other executives, things like compensation rank, tenure, and structural position. When female CMOs scored high on that measure, firm performance improved. When they held the title but not the influence, there was no measurable difference.
The interaction between gender and power was statistically significant at the 1% level. Power alone showed no significant effect. This is an important detail because it means the benefit is not simply about having strong leaders in general. Something specific happens when a female CMO has both the role and the authority to shape what the company actually does.
Peter Drucker famously argued that marketing and innovation are the only two functions that create customers. Oh and Song draw on that framing to position CMOs not as support functions but as central to how firms compete. If that is true, then giving a CMO the title without the authority is not just unfair. It is a strategic miscalculation.
Only 10% of the firm-years in their dataset had a female CMO. That number has risen since, but it tells you something about the conditions under which these findings were generated. For most of the period studied, female CMOs were exceptions, not the norm. And as we explored in the previous section, being the exception in the room tends to compress the range of decisions you feel safe making.
When data becomes a shield
TL;DR: Over-reliance on data before making a decision can be a symptom of operating under scrutiny. When every call you make will be questioned more closely, you naturally want more evidence behind it. That caution has a cost.
One of the patterns that emerged in our interviews was a tension between data and instinct that maps directly onto the scrutiny findings.
Trina Moitra, a marketing leader who has led teams across multiple B2B companies, put it bluntly: "If you are taking 100% of decisions based on data, you would be taking them five months too late."
"If you are making 100% of decisions based on data, you would be taking them five months too late. I'm not saying that data doesn't matter. It is that in a fast-moving market, the ability to act on incomplete information is a competitive advantage. Waiting for the full picture is often the same as waiting too long. Intuition is not some mystical quality. As women, we take in more data and then kind of crunching it behind the scenes so the subconscious already knows what the conscious is not aware of."
This is an interesting reframe. It positions what is often dismissed as a soft skill (reading a situation, sensing where the market is heading, trusting a hunch) as a form of cognitive processing that happens to be faster than formal analysis.
Liana Hakobyan has arrived at a similar conclusion through a different path. Her understanding of what leadership looks like has shifted over time. Early in her career, she associated it with the Steve Jobs archetype: visionary, unreachable, commanding.
"Early in my career, I thought leaders were supposed to be unreachable. You know, visionary, stiff, almost like icons. Now I see it differently. The leaders I have liked working with most are the ones who are actually empathetic and understand human psychology and behavior."
What Trina calls intuition, Liana calls empathy. The language is different but the substance is the same: a form of leadership intelligence that processes information through relationships, context, and human understanding rather than through spreadsheets alone. Neither of them frames this as a substitute for analytical thinking. Both frame it as something that works alongside it, and that organizations consistently undervalue.
But here is where the scrutiny problem comes back in. If you are a female CMO operating in an environment where your decisions get questioned more closely, where failures carry higher reputational cost, and where the evaluation criteria are vague enough to let bias in, the rational response is to over-index on data. Not because you lack judgment, but because you need proof to survive the room. The instinct to gather more evidence before acting is not timidity. It is armor.
The cost is that it slows you down. And in a function like marketing, where timing often matters as much as strategy, that slowdown can mean missed opportunities the organization never sees.
The false choice between leader or nurturer
TL;DR: Female leaders are often expected to choose between a directive style (seen as effective but punished as "unfeminine") and a collaborative style (seen as natural but dismissed as "soft"). The best leaders integrate both. But the environment determines whether they are allowed to.
Joliene van Grieken describes a tension she has navigated throughout her career: two modes of leadership that she had to learn to hold at the same time.
The first came naturally to her. Empathy, relationship building, creating psychological safety for her teams. The second she had to develop. Setting clear deadlines, enforcing accountability, making the hard call when the situation demanded it. "In order for somebody to feel accountable," she says, "you need to be very clear on what that accountability is. I cannot give you feedback if you do not know where I'm holding you accountable for."
"As a woman, I think that empathy, relationship-building, creating psychological safety for my team came naturally to me. But when it came to setting clear deadlines, enforcing accountability, making the hard call when the situation demanded it—that is something that I had to learn. In order for somebody to feel accountable, you need to be very clear on what that accountability is. I cannot give you feedback if you do not know what I am holding you accountable for."
She does not frame this as abandoning one mode for the other. She frames it as integrating both, and she is clear-eyed about the fact that the "commander" dimension was something she had to add, not something she replaced the "nurturer" with.
What makes this relevant to the broader argument is that organizations tend to recognize only one of these modes as leadership. The directive, decisive, accountability-driven style reads as authority. The relational, empathetic, team-oriented style reads as something else, something softer, something that gets described in performance reviews as "good with people" rather than "strategic."
The research we discussed in the previous section helps explain why. When evaluators lack clear criteria for assessing performance, they default to assumptions about what leadership looks like. And those assumptions tend to be assigned as masculine, (think decisiveness, assertiveness, and willingness to take visible, public risk.
These are not bad qualities. But treating them as the only markers of leadership effectiveness means that a large part of what actually makes teams function, the relational infrastructure, the psychological safety, the ability to read a room and adapt, goes unrecognized and unrewarded.
"My responsibility is that the bus keeps driving and that there is enough gas in it. Does that sometimes mean I need to make hard decisions that are not good for some individuals? Yes. But my responsibility lies with the company. That is not nurturing. It is not commanding. It is leadership that holds both without pretending one is more legitimate than the other."
Liana Hakobyan's experience offers a different way into the same question. Early in her leadership career, she tried the firm, emotionless approach she associated with authority. It did not work. People did not connect with her.
"I tried to be more firm, more closed off. People did not connect with me. But when I allowed myself to be softer, more open, even vulnerable in certain situations, that is what actually connected with people. That is what worked in a leadership position."
What Liana discovered is that leading as herself, with warmth and openness rather than performed toughness, produced better results. Not as a concession, but as a strategy. The vulnerability she describes is not a weakness she got away with. It is what made her effective.
Her experience and Joliene's are not in tension. They describe the same thing from two directions. Joliene learned to integrate the directive mode into a style that was naturally collaborative. Liana learned that abandoning her natural style in favour of a directive performance made her a worse leader. Both arrived at the same place: the version of leadership that works best is the one the person actually believes in. The question is whether the organization makes room for it.
What changes when the room changes
TL;DR: When female CMOs report to female CEOs, they take bolder decisions. The environment, not the individual, is the variable that moves.
There is a moment in Trina Moitra's interview that connects directly to the Varma research from the previous section. She describes what happened when her company brought on a female COO.
"When we brought on a woman as our COO, I immediately saw it, both in myself and in the team. There was this desire to fail more frequently. Because if you are not failing frequently, you are not doing better things. The willingness to take risks shifted. It was not just me. The whole team felt it."
That is the Varma finding in lived experience. The study showed that female CMOs take more strategic risks when they report to a female CEO. Trina is describing the same dynamic one level down. The composition of the leadership team changed. The evaluation environment shifted. And the willingness to take risks shifted with it.
This is not about women needing women above them in order to function. It is about what happens when the conditions that suppress bold decision-making are eased. A more balanced leadership team reduces the token pressure. It distributes scrutiny more evenly. It makes it possible to fail without that failure being read as confirmation of something about your gender.
The practical implication is the same one that emerged from the Oh and Song research. If you appoint a female CMO into an environment that compresses her range, you will not see the performance benefit the data says is available. The benefit is palpable, but it is conditional on whether the organization does its part.
The gap between authority and ownership
TL;DR: Many female marketing leaders describe having the responsibility but not the authority. Budget controlled elsewhere, strategic exclusion dressed as operational efficiency, being in the room but not in the decision. The Oh & Song research suggests this gap directly limits the business value diverse leadership can deliver.
Joliene describes an evolution in her own career that illustrates a subtler version of the authority problem. Early on, she was "defensive and protective of marketing," treating it as her turf rather than seeing herself as responsible for the broader commercial motion. Feedback on marketing felt like a personal attack.
"I was very defensive and protective of marketing, instead of taking the real responsibility: I am responsible for this commercial motion. I turn one of the levers, but I still need to make sure that everybody else pulls theirs too."
That evolution, from defending a function to owning a commercial outcome, is a version of the power dynamic the Oh and Song data describes. A CMO who is boxed into marketing-as-cost-center, whose budget is controlled by finance, whose strategy is second-guessed by sales, and whose seat at the leadership table is conditional rather than permanent, is a CMO without real power regardless of what the org chart says.
The research suggests that this gap matters for the bottom line. Gender-diverse leadership with genuine authority improves firm value. Gender-diverse leadership without it does not. The difference is not the appointment. It is what comes after.
What this means for organizations
TL;DR: Two things matter: whether the CMO has real authority (not just the title), and whether the evaluation environment allows her to use it. Both are design choices, not personality problems.
The pattern that runs through all of this, from the Oh and Song data to the Varma moderator findings to what the women we interviewed describe, is that the variable that matters most is not who the leader is. It is how the organization is designed around her.
A female CMO with authority, in a company that evaluates decisions fairly and does not punish risk asymmetrically, performs at least as well as her male counterparts and in many cases better. A female CMO without those conditions performs cautiously, because caution is the rational response to an environment that will judge her failures more harshly than it judges anyone else's.
The first scenario is a strategic asset.
The second is a missed opportunity the organization created for itself.
The question for leadership teams is not whether to appoint women to senior marketing roles. The evidence on that is clear.
The question is whether you are willing to design the conditions that let the appointment actually work. That means auditing who controls the CMO's budget and strategic scope. It means examining whether the evaluation criteria for marketing decisions are clear enough to limit bias.
It means asking honestly whether a female CMO in your organization has the same latitude to fail and recover as a male CMO would.
If the answer to any of those is no, the appointment is not the problem. The room is.
Oh, H. & Song, R. (2023). Do female CMOs enhance firm performance? Power matters. Journal of Business Research, 158, 113690.
Varma, R., Bommaraju, R., & Singh, S.S. (2023). Female Chief Marketing Officers: When and Why Do Their Marketing Decisions Differ from Their Male Counterparts'? Journal of Marketing Research. DOI: 10.1177/00222437231156902.
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Ridgeway, C.L. & Correll, S.J. (2004). Unpacking the gender system: A theoretical perspective on gender beliefs and social relations. Gender & Society, 18(4), 510–531.
Correll, S.J. (2017). SWS 2016 Feminist Lecture: Reducing gender biases in modern workplaces. Gender & Society, 31(6), 725–750.
McKinsey & Company (2023). Women in the Workplace 2023. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org.
Drucker, P.F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Row.
What would change things
From diagnosis to design: the structural interventions the evidence says actually work
TL;DR: The barriers this report has documented are not personality problems. They are design problems. And design problems have design solutions. The most effective interventions are surprisingly mundane: making criteria specific, distributing power deliberately, designing shortlists with intention, and replacing mentorship with sponsorship. None of them require an organization to change its values. They require it to change its processes.
Everything in this report so far has been diagnostic. We have looked at how ambiguity in job criteria deters qualified women from applying. We have looked at how scrutiny falls unevenly on women in leadership, and how that uneven scrutiny compresses the range of decisions they feel safe making. We have looked at how real authority, not just the title, determines whether a female CMO's appointment translates into performance.
The pattern that connects all of it is not complicated. Ambiguity is where bias lives. When the criteria for getting hired, getting evaluated, and getting promoted are vague, people fill in the gaps with assumptions. And those assumptions tend to run in one direction.
The good news is that ambiguity is fixable. Not with cultural seminars or awareness campaigns, but with information design. The most effective interventions the research identifies are surprisingly mundane. They are about making things specific, making things visible, and making things fair. None of them require an organization to change its values. They require it to change its processes.
The pipeline breaks earlier than most companies think
TL;DR: The most consequential gender gap on the path to CMO is not the glass ceiling. It is the first promotion from individual contributor to manager. McKinsey calls it the "broken rung," and it has barely moved in a decade.
There is a persistent belief that the gender problem in leadership is about the final step, the appointment to the C-suite. The data tells a different story. McKinsey and LeanIn's Women in the Workplace reports, now spanning a decade of data, show that the biggest drop happens much earlier: the first promotion from individual contributor to manager.
In 2024, for every 100 men promoted to that first managerial role, only 81 women were promoted. For Black women, the number was 54. For Latinas, 65. These numbers have barely moved since 2018, when the figure was 79.
There’s also a compounding effect that we need to mention. Women make up 48% of entry-level employees but only 29% of the C-suite. Every rung of the ladder reflects the bottleneck at the bottom.
If fewer women become managers, fewer women become directors, fewer become VPs, and fewer become CMOs. The 53% figure at the top of the marketing function is remarkable precisely because it has managed to outrun a pipeline that leaks at every stage.
In marketing specifically, the broken rung has a particular shape. The overall marketing workforce is 61% female, and 57% of marketing managers are women. But the path to CMO requires P&L responsibility, cross-functional leadership, and revenue accountability.
Women in marketing are disproportionately channeled into brand, communications, and creative tracks. These are essential roles, but they typically lack the P&L ownership that boards and CEOs expect of CMO candidates.
McKinsey's research on what they call "experience capital," the accumulated knowledge from high-stakes assignments, documents that men are 25% more likely to receive stretch assignments and 20 to 30% more likely to be labeled "high potential."
That labeling matters. It determines who gets the revenue-facing projects, the cross-functional rotations, the board presentations. By the time a CMO search begins, the pool of women with the right experience profile has already been narrowed by years of unequal assignment decisions that nobody tracked.
The fix has three parts.
First, track promotion data by gender at every level. Fewer than half of companies currently do this, according to McKinsey. You cannot fix what you do not measure.
Second, replace subjective "potential" assessments with performance-based criteria. Bohnet, van Geen, and Bazerman published a study in Management Science in 2016 showing that when evaluators compare multiple candidates side by side, they rely on individual performance data. When they evaluate candidates separately, which is the norm for most promotion decisions, stereotypes dominate.
Third, deliberately assign P&L and revenue-facing stretch assignments to women in marketing earlier in their careers. This is the experience capital that makes or breaks CMO candidacy, and it is currently distributed unevenly.
"The loud go-getter is not always going to be your best CMO. Maybe look at what qualities you are actually rewarding at the leadership level."
Adrie is describing the downstream effect of a pipeline that selects for visibility and assertiveness rather than diagnostic thinking, relationship building, and the quieter forms of strategic judgment. If your promotion criteria reward one style of leadership, your pipeline will produce one type of leader. And you will lose people who lead differently but no less effectively.
Adrie implemented a practical version of this at her own company. She introduced a system where everyone had to bring five ideas to team meetings, even bad ones. The goal was not the ideas themselves. It was to normalize contribution from people who would not otherwise speak up, to create a structure where the less visible voices had room to participate without having to fight for it.
That kind of small, deliberate design choice is what moves the needle. Not a mandate to be more inclusive. A mechanism that makes inclusion the default.
Two women on the shortlist changes everything
TL;DR: When only one woman appears on a CMO finalist shortlist, her probability of being hired is statistically zero. With two or more women in the pool, the odds of hiring a woman increase dramatically. This is the single highest-leverage intervention in executive hiring.
Johnson, Hekman, and Chan studied 598 actual hiring decisions at a U.S. university and found something that should stop any CEO or board member in their tracks. When only one woman appeared on a finalist shortlist, her probability of being hired was statistically zero. Not low. Zero. When two or more women appeared on the shortlist, the odds of hiring a woman increased by a factor of 79.
The researchers call this the "two in the pool effect," and the logic behind it is straightforward. When a woman is the only one on a shortlist, she stands out as the representative of her group rather than as an individual candidate. Decision-makers, consciously or not, treat her as the diversity option. When two or more women are present, the comparison shifts from "the woman versus the men" to "these candidates versus those candidates." Gender becomes less salient, and qualifications become more so.
This finding explains why Rooney Rule policies, which require at least one diverse candidate in the finalist pool, have produced only modest results. The threshold is not one. It is two. For CMO searches typically involving three to five finalists, requiring at least two women on the shortlist is a small structural change with outsized impact.
The executive search process introduces additional leverage. World Economic Forum research from 2023 found that female search consultants outperformed male consultants by 25% in presenting at least one female candidate to the interview stage. Intel's requirement of at least two underrepresented members on all interview panels increased diverse hires from 31% to 45% within two years. And Harvard Business Review research from Lucas, Giurge, Berry, and Chugh in 2021 showed that longer shortlists further reduce bias, because they dilute the mental shortcut that causes decision-makers to default to the familiar.
Spencer Stuart's data makes these changes practical, not aspirational. 68% of current CMOs are first-time CMOs, and 58% were promoted from within. Companies are already investing in development rather than recycling the same executives. The question is whether the development and selection processes are designed to surface the best candidates or simply the most obvious ones.
Give her the power, not just the title
TL;DR: More than half of CMO roles are structurally misaligned: broad expectations, narrow authority. When female CMOs lack genuine decision-making power, there is no performance benefit. The fix is role design, not better hiring.
As the Making Decisions section showed, female CMOs improve firm value only when they hold real power within the leadership team. Without it, the appointment produces no measurable benefit. A 2025 study by Whitler, Rego, and Morgan in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science helps explain why so many appointments fail to deliver that benefit. They found that 54% of CMO roles are structurally misaligned. CEOs expect the CMO to drive revenue growth, but the actual authority granted is limited to marketing communications. They describe this as a "water-walking job." Nearly a third of the companies in their dataset cycled through three or more CMOs within ten years. That is not a talent problem. It is a role design problem.
The authority gap shows up in multiple dimensions. While 58 to 59% of CMOs report directly to the CEO, that percentage drops significantly at larger enterprises, where CMOs increasingly report to CROs, COOs, or other intermediaries. Marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of company revenue, down from 11% before the pandemic. 64% of CMOs say they lack sufficient budget to execute their strategy. And CMOs are losing control of marketing technology budgets to IT leaders, which undermines the resource base that defines structural power.
Board-level access is another gap. Whitler, Krause, and Lehmann found that only 2.6% of board members have marketing experience. Subsequent research showed that boards do not appear to value CMOs at the strategy-setting level of the firm, even while considering marketing issues as critical priorities. For female CMOs, this creates a double exclusion: limited power within the leadership team and limited visibility to the board that evaluates executive performance.
Joliene van Grieken's evolution, which she described in the previous section, from defending marketing as territory to owning the broader commercial motion, only worked because the organization met her halfway.
A CMO who sees herself as owning commercial outcomes but whose budget is controlled by finance and whose strategy is overruled by sales is a CMO with responsibility but no authority. That mismatch is not a development issue. It is an organizational design failure.
The structural fixes are specific. Mandate CEO-direct reporting for the CMO role. Define explicit budget authority and P&L responsibility in the role description. Align performance metrics to revenue and customer outcomes the CMO can actually influence. Establish cross-functional governance with formal CMO decision rights over customer experience and revenue operations. And add marketing-experienced board members, because a board that does not understand the function cannot evaluate the person leading it.
Watch for the glass cliff
TL;DR: Companies in crisis are roughly 50% more likely to appoint a female executive. These appointments signal change to investors, but they set women up in structurally weakened positions with depleted resources and heightened scrutiny.
Reinwald, Zaia, and Kunze analyzed over 26,000 executive appointments in U.S. firms from 2000 to 2016 and found that companies in crisis were approximately 50% more likely to appoint a female executive than stable companies. The researchers showed that firms use significantly more transformation-related language in press releases when appointing women, but not when appointing men. The appointment itself is being used as a signal to investors that change is coming.
The glass cliff effect is strongest when no other women serve on the leadership team, when the appointee is promoted from within, and when investor attention is high. All of these conditions amplify the signaling value of the appointment.
No study has isolated glass cliff dynamics specifically for CMO appointments. But the mechanisms apply directly. A CMO appointed during crisis inherits exactly the conditions earlier sections showed suppress female CMO performance: reduced resources, less authority, and heightened scrutiny. The appointment looks like progress. The structure ensures it cannot deliver.
Organizations can mitigate this by implementing transparent, planned search processes for CMO appointments rather than crisis-driven selections. They can mandate minimum resource commitments when hiring CMOs during turbulence. And they can track whether female CMOs are disproportionately appointed to distressed situations. If the pattern exists, it is not coincidence. It is a structural tendency that needs to be named and corrected.
Sponsorship, not mentorship
TL;DR: Women are over-mentored and under-sponsored. Mentors give advice. Sponsors put their credibility on the line and say "she's ready." The distinction is the difference between guidance and power.
The research on sponsorship versus mentorship is among the most well-documented in this domain, and it is directly relevant to marketing leadership pipelines.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research at the Center for Talent Innovation established the core problem. Women are more likely than men to have mentors. But men are significantly more likely to have sponsors.
A Catalyst study found that while more women than men were assigned mentors, 15% more men won promotions. For women, there was no statistical relationship between having a mentor and receiving a promotion.
But when women's mentors were high-ranking individuals who actively advocated for them, women were equally likely as men to advance. The variable that matters is not advice. It is someone with organizational capital saying your name in rooms you are not in.
Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD summarized it precisely: women are over-mentored and under-sponsored.
"Widen your bench. Don't expect your manager to fill all your buckets. Women, especially in environments where they are one of few senior women, tend to rely on a narrow set of relationships for support, feedback, and advocacy. That makes them vulnerable. If that one relationship changes, through a reorg, a departure, or a shift in priorities, the support structure collapses."
The most effective corporate sponsorship programs share a design feature that distinguishes them from mentorship. Sponsors are held accountable for their protégé's advancement. At IBM Europe, VP- and GM-level sponsors are paired with high-potential women, and sponsor failure is defined as a protégé's failure to earn a promotion. KPMG's integrated approach, which includes formal sponsorship, increased women's C-suite representation from 22.2% to 60% between 2014 and 2023. Those are not incremental gains. They are structural shifts.
Trina Moitra adds a complementary point.
"Most women I have seen focus on what they lack. 'I cannot do this, I do not have that.' Instead of looking at what you lack, look at what you are really, really good at. Look at your strengths and then compound and stack those. You do not need to spend ten thousand hours becoming an expert at something that is not your strength. Use the tools available to you to plug the gaps, and put your energy into what already sets you apart."
Her advice is to compound strengths rather than remediate weaknesses. The women who advance tend to be the ones who are known for something specific, not the ones who tried to be adequate at everything. But that strategy only works if the organization has created the conditions for specificity to be recognized and rewarded, which brings us back to the structural argument this entire section is built around.
Reach critical mass
TL;DR: One woman on a leadership team is a token. Two is a pair. Three changes the dynamic. Research consistently identifies three as the minimum number at which women shift from performing under pressure to contributing as equals.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter's foundational research from 1977 established that individuals representing less than 15% of a group function as tokens. They face performance pressure, isolation, and role entrapment. Torchia, Calabrò, and Huse studied 317 Norwegian firms in 2011 and found a precise threshold: boards need at least three women before the group dynamic shifts from tokenism to genuine influence. Going from one or two women to three or more significantly enhanced firm innovation. Konrad, Kramer, and Erkut independently confirmed the same number.
The practical implication is that organizations should pursue gender diversity across the entire C-suite simultaneously, not just in traditionally female-coded roles. The CMO and CHRO are the only C-suite roles near gender parity. But if these are the only two women-held positions on a leadership team, their holders remain numerical tokens. A female CMO operating within an executive team of three or more women will contribute more to strategic decisions, experience less isolation, and be more likely to exercise the genuine power that translates into firm value.
Design the leave, design the return
TL;DR: The motherhood penalty operates during precisely the career stage when CMO-track professionals build the experience that qualifies them for senior roles. Parental leave design, returnship programs, and proximity bias management are structural interventions, not benefits.
"I think it would be interesting to look at how family planning impacts women in leadership. I have not worked with a CMO who has children. That is worth thinking about."
The motherhood penalty is one of the most robust findings in organizational research. Correll, Benard, and Paik demonstrated through audit studies in 2007 that mothers face lower perceived competence, reduced hiring probability, and lower recommended salaries. For CMO-track professionals, this penalty operates during precisely the career stage, roughly ages 25 to 40, when P&L exposure, cross-functional rotations, and stretch assignments build the experience capital required for senior marketing roles. A two-year gap at the wrong moment does not just pause a career. It can permanently narrow the experience profile that makes someone CMO-ready.
Three policy interventions have strong evidence. First, parental leave of 6 to 12 months, paired with incentives for fathers to take leave. NBER research shows that leave under one year improves job continuity and employment rates, while longer leaves can negatively affect earnings for high-skilled women. Germany's 2007 reform, which replaced long means-tested leave with shorter, more generous earnings-related benefits plus a dedicated paternal leave allocation, showed no harm to mothers' long-term career trajectories and positive effects for high-earning women.
Second, returnship programs. Goldman Sachs pioneered the model in 2008 as a 12-week paid program with a direct-to-hire pathway. Across companies, over 80% of returnship participants receive full-time offers. Major programs now operate at JPMorgan Chase, HubSpot, P&G, IBM, and others. Marketing departments, with their large female talent pools, are natural candidates for targeted returnship programs focused on mid-career women re-entering the CMO track.
Third, flexible work requires active management of proximity bias. Research shows that remote workers are 38% less likely to receive bonuses and that 41% of C-suite executives believe remote workers are less likely to be considered for promotion. Since women disproportionately prefer and use flexible arrangements, proximity bias creates a gendered advancement penalty. Ashley Herbert Popa flagged this in her interview: office mandates that require three days in-office disproportionately exclude parents who live further from the office. The policy looks neutral. The impact is not.
Organizations must pair flexibility with outcome-based performance evaluation, structured promotion criteria applied regardless of location, and regular audits of promotion rates by work arrangement. Flexibility without accountability for how it is evaluated is not a benefit. It is a trap.
What does not work
TL;DR: The three most popular diversity interventions, mandatory training, standardized tests, and grievance systems, actually decreased diversity in management over five years. What works instead: voluntary engagement, formal sponsorship, and pay transparency.
It is worth noting what the evidence says does not work, because many organizations invest heavily in interventions that feel productive but produce no results or actively backfire.
Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev's research, spanning 30 years of data from over 800 U.S. firms, delivers an uncomfortable finding. The three most popular diversity tools, mandatory training, standardized job tests, and grievance systems, all decreased diversity in management. Mandatory diversity training produced no improvement in representation of white women, Black men, or Hispanic managers after five years. It actually decreased the share of Black women in management by 9%. Compliance-framed training was even worse.
The interventions that do work share a common feature: they engage managers as participants rather than positioning them as the problem. Formal mentoring programs increased representation by 9 to 24% over five years. Voluntary training framed as professional development shows positive effects. Diversity task forces that ask managers to help solve the problem, rather than telling them they are the problem, produce sustained change.
Pay transparency has particularly strong causal evidence. Blundell and colleagues found in 2025 that UK pay transparency legislation closed 19% of the gender pay gap. Denmark's reporting law reduced the gap by 2 percentage points while simultaneously increasing female hiring and promotion. Transparency works because it removes the ambiguity that allows disparities to persist unexamined. It is the same mechanism that makes specific job criteria more effective than vague ones. When information is visible, assumptions have less room to operate.
The design question
TL;DR: The reason most organizations have not made these changes is not that they are hard. It is that the current system feels natural to the people it advantages. Changing that requires honesty. But it starts with design.
There is a temptation, when presenting findings like the ones in this report, to end with advice for women. Be more confident. Speak up more. Lean in. The research does not support that framing. The confidence gap, as we argued in an earlier section, is largely a myth. The application gap is real, but it is driven by ambiguity in the environment, not deficiency in the individual. The scrutiny gap is real, but it is produced by evaluation systems, not by women's performance. The authority gap is real, but it is an organizational design choice, not a personality problem.
Joliene van Grieken puts it simply. She spent years learning to perform in environments that did not recognize her natural leadership style. She learned to add the "commander" mode to her "nurturer" mode. She built strategic relationships years in advance because she knew the room would not give her the benefit of the doubt. All of that worked. But it worked by adapting the individual to a broken system, not by fixing the system.
Not every woman in this report describes the same experience. Liana Hakobyan has worked primarily in startup environments with flat hierarchies, and she has never felt that her gender was an obstacle.
"I have never experienced a difference based on my gender, not in my life and not in my career. I am being completely honest about that."
That is worth taking seriously, not as an exception that proves the rule, but as information about what conditions look like when the barriers this report describes are absent. Liana's working environments tended to be smaller, less hierarchical, and less shaped by the entrenched power dynamics that larger organizations accumulate over time. She did not need to mask because the environment did not demand it.
The research throughout this report supports exactly that reading. When criteria are clear, women apply at the same rates as men. When leadership teams are balanced, women take bolder decisions. When evaluation systems are fair, the scrutiny gap narrows. Liana's experience is what the research predicts should happen when the design is right. The goal is to make more organizations look like the ones she has worked in.
At The Growth Syndicate, Joliene leads differently. Not because she changed, but because the environment did.
The question this report leaves organizations with is whether they are willing to do the same. Not out of charity or political obligation, but because the evidence is clear: organizations that reduce ambiguity, distribute authority fairly, evaluate performance on criteria rather than assumptions, and expand what they recognize as leadership do not just retain more women. They make better decisions. They take smarter risks. They perform.
The interventions are not expensive. They are not dramatic. Most of them involve writing things down more clearly, evaluating people more fairly, and paying attention to who has power and who just has a title. The reason most organizations have not done them is not that the changes are hard. It is that the current system feels natural to the people it advantages.
Changing that requires honesty. But it starts with design.
Research cited:
Blundell, J., Costa Dias, M., Joyce, R., & Xu, X. (2025). Pay Transparency and Gender Equality. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
Bohnet, I., van Geen, A., & Bazerman, M.H. (2016). When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint vs. Separate Evaluation. Management Science, 62(5), 1225–1234.
Coffman, K.B., Collis, M., & Kulkarni, L. (2023). Whether to Apply. Management Science. Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 20-062.
Correll, S.J., Benard, S., & Paik, I. (2007). Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? American Journal of Sociology, 112(5), 1297–1338.
Dobbin, F. & Kalev, A. (2016). Why Diversity Programs Fail. Harvard Business Review, 94(7–8), 52–60.
Dobbin, F. & Kalev, A. (2022). Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't. Harvard University Press.
Ellingrud, K., Yee, L., & Martínez, B. (2025). The Broken Rung: When Women Stall and What It Takes to Get Them to the Top. Harvard Business Review Press.
Hewlett, S.A. (2013). Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Harvard Business Review Press.
Johnson, S.K., Hekman, D.R., & Chan, E.T. (2016). If There's Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There's Statistically No Chance She'll Be Hired. Harvard Business Review.
Kanter, R.M. (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation. Basic Books.
Konrad, A.M., Kramer, V., & Erkut, S. (2008). Critical Mass: The Impact of Three or More Women on Corporate Boards. Organizational Dynamics, 37(2), 145–164.
Lucas, B.J., Giurge, L.M., Berry, Z., & Chugh, D. (2021). Research: To Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring, Make Your Shortlist Longer. Harvard Business Review.
McKinsey & Company (2024). Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th Anniversary Report. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org.
Oh, H. & Song, R. (2023). Do Female CMOs Enhance Firm Performance? Power Matters. Journal of Business Research, 158, 113690.
Reinwald, M., Zaia, J., & Kunze, F. (2023). Shine Bright Like a Diamond: When Signaling Creates Glass Cliffs for Female Executives. Journal of Management, 49(3).
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Torchia, M., Calabrò, A., & Huse, M. (2011). Women Directors on Corporate Boards: From Tokenism to Critical Mass. Journal of Business Ethics, 102(2), 299–317.
Varma, R., Bommaraju, R., & Singh, S.S. (2023). Female Chief Marketing Officers. Journal of Marketing Research. DOI: 10.1177/00222437231156902.
Whitler, K.A., Krause, R., & Lehmann, D.R. (2018). When and How Board Members with Marketing Experience Facilitate Firm Growth. Journal of Marketing, 82(5), 1–18.
Whitler, K.A., Rego, L.L., & Morgan, N.A. (2025). The CMO Role Design Problem. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Parting thoughts
This report began with a question from Joliene van Grieken: if women have arrived at the leadership table, why do so many still feel they had to become someone else to get there?
The research we studied offers a clear answer. The problem is not who women are. It is how the environments around them are built. Vague criteria that shrink the candidate pool before anyone applies. Scrutiny that falls unevenly and compresses the range of decisions women feel safe making. Titles that come without the authority to do the job. Evaluation systems that reward one template of leadership and overlook the rest.
None of these are inevitable. All of them are changeable. And most of the changes are not expensive, not dramatic, and not particularly difficult to implement. They require specificity where there is currently ambiguity, fairness where there is currently assumption, and honesty about who the current system advantages and who it does not.
What struck us most in the process of writing this report was not any single finding. It was how consistently the same mechanism appeared across every section. Ambiguity is where bias lives. In job descriptions, in evaluation criteria, in promotion processes, in how authority gets distributed. Remove the ambiguity and the gaps narrow. Leave it in place and they compound. The pattern held across every study we examined and every conversation we had.
Ashley, Trina, Adrie, and Liana each navigate this reality differently. Ashley forces her way into the rooms the system forgot to invite her to. Trina trusts her judgment faster than the data can confirm it. Adrie designs structures that make space for people who lead quietly. Liana leads with vulnerability and empathy and has found that showing up as herself, not performing someone else's version of authority, is what actually connects with people.
That is the spirit we hope this report carries. Not a case against anyone, but a case for designing organizations that do not require women to work around the system in order to work within it.
The 53% number is real. It matters. But it is a starting point, not an endpoint. What comes next depends on whether organizations are willing to look at how the room actually works, and change what they find.