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Closing the Gender Leadership Gap
More women on boards, but fewer in the C-Suite. What quotas miss.
Board quotas were supposed to trigger a cascade. Get women into the boardroom, and the rest of the organization would follow. Twenty-five years later, the data tells a more complicated story.
In this report published by AltoPartners, researchers examined gender representation across 34 countries, comparing five policy regimes — from early-adopting enforceable quotas to voluntary targets to no formal targets at all.
The analysis draws on Findem's talent data alongside research from Deloitte, McKinsey, the WEF, and the European Institute for Gender Equality. The pattern is consistent across nearly every region: countries with enforceable quotas show the lowest C-suite representation, between 16% and 20%, while early voluntary adopters lead at 29%.
What you'll learn
- Why enforceable quotas improve board representation but correlate with lower C-suite gains
- How voluntary regimes in countries like the UK and Sweden have outperformed mandatory quota countries at the executive level
- What the "broken rung" at first promotion to management means for leadership pipelines
- Which conditions — cultural readiness, investor pressure, pay transparency, flexible work — most reliably predict whether board diversity translates into executive advancement
- What companies can do right now
