Twenty-five years ago, only nine women ran S&P 500 companies. Today there are 48, which is an undeniable gain, even if it still represents just 9.6 percent of the index. The new Women’s Power Gap (WPG) 2025 report, supported by a recent Forbes analysis, reveals a sharper insight: women who reach the CEO position clear a higher bar than their male peers, producing résumés that boards claim to prize, full of breadth, depth, and cash-flow fluency, yet seldom require of men.
WPG’s pathway analysis shows that female chiefs are 32 percent more likely to log an additional tour as president before receiving the CEO title. By contrast, their male peers more often move directly from running a business unit or from the COO seat. In effect, boards appear to require women to provide an extra proof point that they can run the show before trusting them with it.
That incremental step is not just symbolic. It adds years of operational exposure, wider profit-and-loss responsibility, and, for many, a stint managing external shareholders—experiences that hard-wire commercial judgment. Women are also more than 1.5 times as likely to have served as CFO immediately before becoming CEO (10 percent versus 6 percent for men), underscoring the premium boards place on demonstrable financial fluency when the candidate is female.
The report quantifies what many executives have intuited: even when women hold the classic “launch roles” that traditionally feed the top job, like president, COO, or divisional P&L lead, they convert at sharply lower rates. For every ten women in those roles, only three become CEO, a 67 percent fall-off WPG dubs the Final Drop. By comparison, men in the same positions advance more predictably.
Why the attrition? Part of the answer lies in functional segmentation. Women dominate staff posts such as CHRO (76 percent) and CMO (56 percent), but hold just 24 percent of P&L launch positions and only 15 percent of COO roles. Those staff tracks are valuable yet rarely viewed by search committees as CEO crucibles.
Boards sometimes whisper that “the pipeline isn’t ready.” The numbers challenge that narrative. Women already occupy nearly a quarter of the jobs that typically precede the CEO position, and the share is rising. The bottleneck is therefore less about experience and more about risk perception: WPG finds that boards behave more cautiously when the shortlist includes a woman, insisting on extra steps to “de-risk” the appointment.
Those perceptions are shaped early. “Invisible walls” steer talented women toward HR and marketing and away from line roles, long before the CEO search begins. The pattern is self-reinforcing: limited early P&L exposure constrains later readiness, which in turn reinforces the myth of an under-prepared pipeline.
For nominating committees, the message is clear: requiring female finalists to demonstrate an extra chapter of operational proof does not preserve meritocracy; it increases the risk premium on half the talent market. Investors who value disciplined capital allocation should view that premium as a measurable inefficiency.
For executives already in the promotion queue, three moves stand out:
Finally, sitting CEOs who recognise the optionality embedded in broader resumes can architect career paths accordingly rotating high-potential leaders across finance, supply chain, and digital product zones instead of confining them to functional silos. Boards that institutionalise such mobility convert latent capability into succession-ready optionality and, ultimately, shareholder value.
Investors have long debated whether diversity creates outperformance. The more immediate insight here is about optionality. Companies that demote bias from their talent algorithms unlock a pool of leaders who have already mastered breadth, resilience, and stakeholder management—the very skills boards now prize in an era of poly-crisis. Requiring an extra lap before permitting women onto the track simply delays those advantages.
The next time a nom-gov committee hesitates, consider WPG’s bottom line: women CEOs are not exceptions to the rule; they have been over-conforming to it. Recognizing that fact is less an act of equity than one of strategic clarity, and, increasingly, competitive necessity.
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