And to some extent, that may be true, says Heather Spilsbury, CEO of 50/50 Women on Boards, a nonprofit focused on gender balance on corporate boards.
“There was a lot of angst with how companies were going to move forward this year, especially if they had government funding. That included what their board makeup looked like and how they recruited for board members and how they recruited for leadership as well,” says Spilsbury.
But at the board level, Spilsbury also places blame on companies slow-walking succession planning amid economic uncertainty. This year, companies have contended with on-again off-again tariffs, an immigration and worker visa crackdown, nagging inflation, and fickle consumers, all of which contribute to a sense of unease. In such environments, “companies tend to sit still in terms of advancing or looking at their leadership model,” says Spilsbury. “If you’re not looking for new talent outside of your own threshold or your own board, it becomes very limited in terms of who’s being appointed to a board and where you’re searching for expertise. That’s where you see the progress stall; when companies aren’t really paying attention to that or it’s not their priority.”
The Conference Board reports that board turnover and election of new directors slowed in 2025. Women recorded a net gain of 47 board seats in the Russell 3000 in 2025, compared to 258 in 2024 and 342 in 2023, and 59% of women’s board seat gains in 2025 came from expanding board size rather than replacing an existing male director.
CEO turnover overall is also slowing this year (down 3.5% through October compared to last year), and women are getting a smaller share of the new jobs that are available. Through October, 25.5% of new CEOs at U.S. firms were women this year, down from 26.4% for the same period last year and 3.2 percentage points off the peak of 28.7% for all of 2023, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks CEO turnover at U.S. companies in business at least two years with at least 10 employees. “It is the lowest rate for women rising to the CEO role since 2020, when 23% of new CEOs were women,” Challenger’s latest report says.
In the smaller universe of the Fortune 500, 52 women are currently CEOs, with that sum set to jump to 54 in the first quarter of 2026, one off from the high of 55 set in June 2025.
But as the current generation of female executives ages out of their jobs, Stevenson says many companies have dismantled those formal, centralized leadership development programs due to their cost and delayed pay-off and because talent job-hops more than it used to. “Our patience isn’t what it once was around development,” she says.
“Now almost no organization has a meaningful management development track, and so it’s very much survival of the fittest,” Stevenson says. “It’s a problem in general, and it’s especially a problem for women.”
“Just in general, CEO readiness is at an all-time low,” Stevenson said.
Meanwhile, female CEOs are leaving their jobs at a faster clip this year. The rate of outgoing women CEOs is 23% through October, compared to 21% during the same period last year, according to Challenger.
But the outlook for a long-term surge in women’s representation among CEOs—at the corporate level, at least—is not great. The McKinsey study found that women, while just as dedicated to their jobs as men, are less likely to aspire to a promotion. At the entry level, 80% of men want to be promoted compared to 69% of women. At the senior level, the split is 92%-84%.
Stevenson has a message for employers: rededicate yourself to developing promising women and members of other underrepresented groups into competent leaders. It’s a matter of using every resource available to improve a business. “We have a huge dearth of great leadership, and we have these categories of people …that could be the incremental difference,” she says. “What asset of any kind, if you had it available, would you not use? If you had oil that was available, you would use it. If you have money available, you use it. Women are an available resource that are being underutilized.” But in corporate and political environments that are nosier than ever, it’s uncertain whether companies will listen.
