Representation and Leadership

The Opportunity

Organizations that measure and act on representation at every level, not just at the top, build stronger pipelines, make better decisions, and outperform their peers financially. Representation is not a values exercise. It is a performance strategy.

The Business Case

Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are more likely to outperform their peers on profitability.¹⁰ In companies led by women CEOs, women hold 38.3 percent of board seats compared to the global average of 28.9 percent, and 36.8 percent of senior executive roles compared to the global average of 21 percent.⁹ Representation at the top changes the composition of everything below it.

The inverse is also true.

At the current rate of change, it will take nearly 50 years to reach gender parity in corporate America.³

Globally the projection is 134 years.⁴ Organizations that treat representation as something that will improve on its own are working from a historically disproven assumption.

What the Research Shows

Women represent 48 percent of entry level employees in corporate America and 29 percent of C-suite roles.¹ For the eleventh consecutive year they are underrepresented at every level in between.² The gap does not begin at the top. It begins at the first promotion. For every 100 men promoted to their first management role, only 81 women make the same move.⁶ Every subsequent level reflects that original gap compounded.

In 2023, C-suite representation for women declined for the first time in two decades.⁵ Progress is not guaranteed. Without active attention and intentional intervention it reverses.

Women of color face sharper attrition at every level. Only 74 women of color are promoted to manager for every 100 men.⁷ Sixty-one percent of Black women in 2024 said their race had played a role in missing out on an opportunity, up from 45 percent in 2018.⁸ Representation data that does not disaggregate by race misses the most significant gaps.

Most of the research on representation comes from large publicly traded companies, because that is where data collection is most consistent and most studied. The patterns it reveals, the broken rung, the compounding attrition, the reversal of progress when attention lapses, are not unique to corporations with thousands of employees. They show up at every scale. A ten-person company where every senior role has always been held by a man, and where no one has ever asked why, is operating with the same structural dynamic as a Fortune 500 with a diversity dashboard. The difference is that in a small organization the fix is visible and immediate. The person making hiring and promotion decisions can see the whole picture at once. That is an advantage worth using.

On Confidence, Visibility, and Who Gets Promoted

The external candidate who walks in performing confidence often gets the trajectory that the internal employee who has been quietly delivering for years does not. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern with research behind it. When reading the same job description, similarly qualified men believe they meet the requirements to a greater extent than women do.¹¹ Harvard Business School research found that confidence is consistently treated as a proxy for competence even when the two are not correlated.¹² Harvard Business Review researchers tracked behavior at a multinational firm across communication, movement, and time allocation and found that women and men had indistinguishable behaviors and identical performance scores, yet men significantly outnumbered women at senior levels.¹³ The gap was not in performance. It was in perception.

When organizations evaluate candidates based on structured criteria applied consistently, rather than on impressions formed in informal interactions, the outcomes change. The woman who has been doing the job at a high level for three years becomes more visible. The external candidate who presents well but has not yet demonstrated anything becomes less automatically advantaged.

Job descriptions also play a role. Requirements lists that include everything a hiring manager might ideally want, rather than what the role actually requires, shrink the qualified applicant pool before a single conversation happens. Reviewing job descriptions for unnecessary requirements is a low-cost, high-impact practice.

A Note on Company Size

A small organization does not need a representation dashboard to act on this pillar. It needs one honest question asked at least once a year: at every level of this organization, from the newest hire to the person making final decisions, do women have equitable presence and equitable voice? If the answer is no, the follow-up is simple. What is one thing we can change this quarter? Representation gaps at small companies are often more visible and more immediately addressable than at large ones. The absence of bureaucratic process is an advantage here, not an obstacle. A founder or a small leadership team can make a structural change in a week that would take a large organization a year to approve. Use that speed.

For nonprofits specifically, representation at the leadership level often reflects the communities the organization serves, or it does not. Either way that gap is visible and meaningful to funders, to staff, and to the people the organization exists to help. Tracking it and acting on it is not overhead. It is mission alignment.

What Good Looks Like

Good represents accessible baseline practices. Better reflects more intentional investment. Best describes what the most forward-thinking companies are doing right now.

Questions Worth Asking

• At what level do women most commonly stop advancing in our organization, and do we know why?
• Are our job descriptions including requirements that eliminate qualified candidates before they apply?
• When we hire externally for senior roles, are we comparing candidates against the same criteria we use to evaluate internal employees?
• Do we track representation by race and gender separately, or only as a combined category?
• Who in our organization is accountable for representation outcomes, and how is that accountability measured?