The Glass Ceiling Didn’t Break. It Just Moved Up a Floor

Last month, the FTSE Women Leaders Review published what it called a landmark moment: 43% of FTSE 350 board seats now held by women, up from just 9.5% when the journey began in 2011. Government ministers declared the UK a world leader. And from a distance, it looks like a success story worth celebrating.

I am not here to diminish that progress. It is real, it is hard-won, and the people who drove it deserve credit.

But I am here to tell you that the headline is not the story. Because if you follow the data to where power actually sits, operational power, decision-making power, the power that shapes the direction of organisations, a very different picture emerges. And we owe it to the next generation of talent to look at that picture honestly.

The numbers behind the number

Before we accept the narrative of progress, consider what sits behind the headline figure: 

43% — Women on FTSE 350 boards. The figure that prompted the celebration. (FTSE Women Leaders Review, Feb 2026)

8% — Women who are CEOs in the FTSE 350. Not 43%. Eight per cent. (FTSE Women Leaders Review, Feb 2026)

15.4% — Women in executive director roles, compared to 49.5% in non-executive roles. (FTSE Women Leaders Review, Feb 2026)

-11% — Fall in women holding executive directorships on FTSE 250 boards between 2022 and 2024, while overall board numbers rose. (Cranfield/EY Female FTSE Board Report, 2024)

29% — Women in C-suite roles globally — unchanged from the previous year, across 124 organisations employing three million people. (McKinsey/LeanIn Women in the Workplace, 2025)

93 — Women promoted to manager for every 100 men — a gap that widens to 74 for women of colour. The ‘broken rung’ remains stubbornly in place. (McKinsey/LeanIn, 2025) 

These are not rounding errors. They are a pattern. And patterns in data are rarely accidental.

The Executive Gender Paradox

Professor Sue Vinnicombe at Cranfield University, who has tracked boardroom gender data for 25 years, has named what is happening with admirable precision: the “executive gender paradox.” Representation is rising. Executive power is not following.

The Cranfield data shows that between 2022 and 2024, the number of female CEOs in the FTSE 250 fell by 17%. Female CFOs fell by 12%. This happened while the headline board percentage continued to climb. We were, in effect, filling the advisory seats while the operational chairs remained largely unchanged.

“The headlines look great — but the persistent reality remains, that the glass ceiling for women in executive-level positions is still stubbornly in place.”  — Professor Sue Vinnicombe, Cranfield University

The FTSE Women Leaders Review’s own data reveals the mechanism. Women now hold 82% of HR Director roles and 57% of Company Secretary roles across the FTSE 350. But Finance Director sits at 21% and Chief Information Officer at 21%. These are the roles that feed the CEO pipeline, the roles that give you P&L responsibility, operational authority, and the track record that determines who gets the top job. We have built a highly visible female leadership presence in the rooms adjacent to power. The rooms where power actually resides look very different.

McKinsey’s 2025 Women in the Workplace report, the largest study of its kind drawing on data from 124 organisations employing three million people, identifies the same structural fault line at an earlier stage: the ‘broken rung.’ For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women make that same step. The gap compounds at every subsequent level. By the time you reach the C-suite, the pipeline has been so narrowed that parity becomes mathematically near-impossible without deliberate structural intervention.

This is not a talent problem. The talent is there. It is a system problem.

Why this matters beyond fairness

This is not a conversation about fairness alone, though fairness is a sufficient reason. The business case for genuinely diverse leadership is now one of the most robust findings in management research.

McKinsey’s Diversity Matters research found that companies with women comprising more than 30% of their executive teams were significantly more likely to financially outperform those with less female representation. Organisations in the top quartile for gender diversity are 27% more likely to outperform their national industry average on profitability. The World Economic Forum, drawing on McKinsey data, puts it even more starkly: companies with the highest share of women on executive committees report a 47% higher return on equity than those with no women at that level.

These are not soft benefits. They are financial outcomes. And they accrue specifically from women in executive roles, not from women in NED roles, however important those are. The return on equity figure matters because it measures the quality of decisions made at the top of organisations. Cognitive diversity at that level produces better decisions. Better decisions produce better returns. The logic is not complicated.

Yet McKinsey’s 2025 study also found that only half of companies currently say women’s career advancement is a high priority, and that some have already scaled back formal sponsorship programmes, career development tailored for women, and flexible working arrangements. The research is clear on the consequences: companies that deprioritise this do not simply stagnate. They go backwards.

“Without bold steps, we could erase all the progress we have made toward gender diversity.” — McKinsey/LeanIn Women in the Workplace, 2025

Five actions that actually move the needle

Identifying a structural problem is the easy part. What follows are five actions grounded in what the evidence shows actually works, not gestures, but mechanisms.

1. Audit the pipeline, not just the board

The 40% NED target has done its job. The next question every organisation should be asking is not ‘how many women are on our board?’ but ‘how many women are in our P&L-bearing roles?’ Track the gender split of internal promotions into Finance, Operations, Technology, and General Management over the past three years. These are the CEO feeder roles. McKinsey’s research is unambiguous: companies that track these metrics and set targets against them see meaningfully faster progress than those that don’t. What isn’t measured doesn’t change.

2. Fix the broken rung before worrying about the ceiling

The data from eleven consecutive years of McKinsey research is consistent: the biggest barrier to women reaching the top is not the final step but the first one. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women make that transition, a gap that widens to 74 for women of colour. Every woman who doesn’t make that first promotion is one fewer candidate in the senior pipeline a decade later. Organisations should audit promotion rates by gender at every level, with particular scrutiny at the entry-to-manager transition. Where there is a gap, there is a process failure; in criteria, sponsorship, or both.

3. Challenge the informal succession conversation

The most persistent barrier to women reaching CEO level is not formal bias. It is the informal network through which succession decisions are made, whose name comes up before the process officially begins. The FTSE Women Leaders Review found that 39% of all available FTSE 350 roles in 2025 went to women, meaning six in ten appointments still went to men. Nomination committees should be required to document how candidates entered consideration, not just the shortlist, but the pre-shortlist. Transparency at that stage, before the field is set, is where behaviour changes.

4. Redefine what ‘ready’ looks like

The traditional definition of a ‘board-ready’ or ‘CEO-ready’ candidate, current or former CEO or CFO of a listed company, is both self-fulfilling and self-limiting. Deloitte’s global boardroom research notes that since boards prefer to recruit members with CEO experience, the pipeline outlook remains structurally pessimistic unless organisations expand their skills frameworks. Leaders with deep operational experience in technology, sustainability, international markets, and transformation are running complex businesses. They are CEO-calibre. Organisations that recognise this will access a significantly broader and more diverse pool of talent than those still hiring from a 1985 template.

5. Name an owner and set a deadline

Commitment without accountability is aspiration. McKinsey’s research consistently identifies personal accountability from senior leaders as one of the strongest predictors of progress on gender diversity. Every organisation should have a named individual, the CEO or Chair, personally accountable for progress on executive gender balance, with measurable targets and a public reporting timeline. Not a committee. Not a working group. One person, on record. The same rigour applied to financial targets, risk appetite, and strategic KPIs. What has a named owner, gets done. What doesn’t have one, doesn’t.

The moment we are in

The FTSE Women Leaders Review closes its five-year cycle this month. The framework that drove fifteen years of progress is transitioning to its next phase, and nobody has yet defined what that phase looks like. The appointment rate for women to FTSE 350 boards dropped from 46% in 2024 to 42% in 2025, a small movement, but in the wrong direction, which the Review itself flagged as a warning.

Globally, the picture is no more reassuring. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report found that at current rates of progress, full gender parity remains 123 years away. One hundred and twenty-three years. That is not a slow journey. That is an absent one.

International Women’s Day is a moment to take stock honestly. Not to celebrate prematurely, not to despair, but to look at the data, name what it shows, and decide what we are actually going to do about it. The organisations that treat this as a structural business problem, not a PR moment, not a compliance exercise, are the ones that will have the leadership talent, the decision-making quality, and the performance outcomes that others will spend years trying to replicate.

The glass ceiling did not break. It moved up a floor. And until we are as focused on where power sits as we are on where seats are filled, we will keep celebrating the wrong number.

Until next time, celebrate the milestones, but never stop asking what lies beyond them.

Erika