Women gain ground in leadership, but management gaps persist

By Daniel Okafor

The share of enterprises with a woman chief executive officer (CEO) rose to 28.2% in 2025 from 23.4% in 2013, yet women still held only 30.5% of managerial positions globally, according to a newly released International Labour Organization (ILO) report.

The ILO nevertheless calls the remaining imbalance “critical.” For HR leaders, the findings reach succession planning, promotion, board selection and workforce reporting; the ILO says the challenge is no longer identifying effective approaches, but ensuring implementation.

How much has leadership representation changed?

The board figures moved further. Enterprises with at least 30% women on their boards increased from 38.3% to 45.5% between 2013 and 2025, a rise of 7.2 percentage points. Over the same period, the proportion of firms with a woman board chair more than doubled and reached 30.9%.

The report also found more women senior managers across all functions. They were concentrated in human resources (HR, the people function), where women represented 62.5% of senior managers, and finance and administration, at 55.4%.

Where do women’s career pipelines still break?

Representation remained low in two functions linked to advancement. Women held 19.8% of senior-manager roles tied to profit and loss (P&L, which tracks revenue, costs and results) and 26.3% in research and development (R&D). The ILO calls these functions most closely associated with pathways to executive leadership.

The report said women had made significant gains in education and skills acquisition over the past three decades and now outpaced men globally in higher education. Yet it warned that labour-market outcomes had not matched that progress.

The report identified enduring structural constraints: occupational segregation, or jobs clustered by gender; unequal care responsibilities; and persistent social norms shaping labour-market participation and career progression.

Women accounted for 30.5% of managerial positions globally. Fewer than half of women, 48.6%, were economically active, meaning they were in work or seeking it, and they earned US$0.78 for every US$1 earned by men.

The private-sector pipeline carried the sharper warning. Senior and top management contained more women, but junior and middle-management posts contained fewer. The result resembles a revolving door: women reach the upper tiers in greater numbers while the ranks below them thin out.

What business gains do employers report?

The report found that more than two in three employers, 68.5%, reported positive outcomes from gender equality and diversity initiatives. Among firms that reported increased profits, 87.4% linked those gains to initiatives promoting women in management.

Leadership diversity also tracked with stronger reported performance. Enterprises with a woman CEO were 6.4% more likely to report better business outcomes than firms with a male CEO. Enterprises with a woman board chair were 17.5% more likely to report better business outcomes than those with a male board chair.

What must employers do next?

The ILO placed three actions on employers:

• Strengthen women’s leadership pipelines.
• Use gender metrics and voluntary targets.
• Improve access to roles where women are underrepresented.

ILO Director-General Gilbert F. Houngbo said: “Gender equality is a fundamental right, and the evidence is clear that it is also a powerful driver of sustainable enterprises and economic growth. The priority now is to turn policies and commitments into concrete, measurable progress.”

Maria Paz Anzorreguy, director of the ILO Bureau for Employers’ Activities, said: “At a time when enterprises are competing for skills and talent, leaving women’s potential untapped makes little business sense. The evidence increasingly tells us what works. The priority now is to put it into practice and scale it.”

For HR, that means checking whether women’s leadership pipelines strengthen, whether gender metrics are used, whether voluntary targets exist and whether access improves where women are underrepresented. These are management questions, not a reporting exercise. The arithmetic remains stubborn.

For employers, the next test is whether stronger pipelines make the gains recorded by 2025 durable, rather than leaving the management pipeline thinner at its base.