Women’s leadership programmes work – but their progress is ‘fragile’

Talent accelerators are touted as a way to boost women to leadership positions. They help – but require larger change for their effects to stick.

But large gaps remain for economic participation and political representation. “There seems to be a gap between the educational outcomes and how women are faring in the labour market subsequently, ” she says. Women have largely achieved the same education levels that men have, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting their access to jobs. 

These kinds of elements produce overrepresentation at low company ranks, and underrepresentation at the top. “On average, we have about 46% women in entry-level positions, but that drops to 25% at the C-suite level,” says Baller. 

The composition of the corporate workforce showed signs of turnaround for nearly a decade, but that success was short-lived. “The hiring rates of women into leadership was increasing steadily for eight years until 2022,” says Baller. “However, in 2022 we actually see a downturn in this hiring into leadership positions.” The reason for that downturn remains unclear, she says. It’s something her team is still studying.

Yet the leadership gap stubbornly persists. In 2023, LinkedIn researchers estimated women held less than one-third of leadership positions worldwide. Talent accelerators may be able to promote some women into leadership roles, but the root causes of the gender leadership gap remain beyond their reach.

Initiatives for developing female leaders go by many names – sometimes called ‘talent accelerators’ or ‘leadership development programmes’ – but the goal is the same: to promote women into leadership positions and keep them there.

Most participants are high-performers on the cusp of individual contributor and manager, a stage when women’s careers are stalled or derailed by a penalty known as the “broken rung” on the career ladder. Though men and women are roughly equally represented in entry-level roles, for every 100 men promoted to manager positions, only 87 women are promoted, according to the 2023 Women in the Workplace Report by McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org. It’s a gap that widens at the highest levels of business.

Development programmes focus on building soft skills, like public speaking, confident communication, negotiation and asking for a promotion. Plenty of organisations teach new technical skills to their workers, says Rachel Thomas, cofounder and CEO of LeanIn.org. Curricula for accelerators are intended to develop the skills women need to supplement those technical skills and become effective leaders. Talent accelerators also often facilitate networking, especially with senior leaders, intended to correct unequal access to mentoring and sponsorship that help workers climb the ladder. 

Like all accelerators, LeanIn’s own training curriculum considers gender paradigms in the workplace. “It was developed not only for what you need to do to be an effective negotiator or a transformational leader, but also, ‘what are some of the unique considerations if you’re doing that as a woman or a woman with a traditionally marginalised identity? If you’re a new mother, what are some strategies? What do you need to know about the pushback you might get?'”.

Thomas is aware of how this sounds: as if women are to blame for their failure to advance. “We need the workplace to change fundamentally, to be more supportive of women, and particularly women with traditionally marginalised identities. Hard stop,” she says. “In the meantime, as irritating as it is, I would like women to have the insights and the practical tips they need to navigate a workplace that’s still biased against them.” 

Gizelle George-Joseph, chief operating officer of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, went through her company’s accelerator, the Women’s Career Strategies Initiative, 14 years ago. She honed her communications skills and received direct reviews of her presentation style. What she remembers most is meeting executives. “The COO and president were presenting early one morning, and I remember asking a question and thinking, ‘wow, I am this close to the executive office, and I get to ask questions to the COO and president’.”

Many companies in heavily male-dominated industries, like energy and finance, are putting time and energy into their programmes. The success of these initiatives is often gauged by promotion rates. At global energy company Baker Hughes, the firm introduced its women’s talent accelerator, Cultivate, in 2017. Baker Hughes says 40% of participants in their oil and energy sectors from the 2021 and 2022 cohorts have been up at least one level.

Insurance marketplace Lloyd’s of London launched its programme, Advance, in 2020 following a scathing 2019 Bloomberg article that exposed a culture of sexual harassment in the company. Advance participants get access to senior leaders in the company, training on networking and insight about their own leadership styles. Lloyd’s head of culture Mark Lomas told the BBC all participants from the 2021 cohort have landed a “role improvement”, such as taking on a project above their normal scope of responsibility or receiving a promotion, within two years of completion.

Training alone doesn’t promote and keep women in leadership, however. “Those programmes are most effective and impactful if they’re embedded in larger systemic changes in the organisation,” says WEF’s Baller.

According to the WEF and McKinsey & Company, equity programmes are most successful when there is a clear definition of success and rigorous tracking; leadership is involved and accountable; the firm understands the root cause of gaps; and curriculum is designed for success within the specific company running the programme.

Yet for women in leadership, progress is precarious. Since the pandemic, “women’s economic participation has regressed rather than recovered“, according to a June 2023 WEF report. “We learned during the [Covid-19] crisis that any progress that has been achieved can be quite easily reversible if the external conditions change,” says Baller. “We had achieved quite a bit of progress, but it turned out that it was quite fragile.”

Talent accelerators may produce female leaders and role models, but they have little apparent effect on long-time cultural penalties and the bad habits formed in the workplace. “The more they can be embedded in larger structural change,” says Baller, “the more resilient the positive impact is going to be.”