Most Women's Leadership Programs Are Designed for Women. The Ones That Actually Work Are Designed for the Organization.

I have spent a significant part of my career inside women's ERGs. I led the Women's ERG at HAVI and again at Krispy Kreme. Before that, I served as the Mentoring Chair for the Women's ERG at Sears Holdings. I have mentored more women than I can count, and I have also been on the receiving end of genuine sponsorship and mentorship that changed the trajectory of my career.

So when I talk about what works and what doesn't in women's leadership development, I'm not speaking from the outside. I'm speaking from years of sitting in those rooms, running those programs, and watching what actually moved the needle versus what looked great in an annual report.

Here's what I've learned: the best-intentioned programs often fail because they treat women's advancement as a women's problem. Programs that encourage women to work on their confidence, speak up, etc, are somewhat helpful for the participants’ personal development, but alone they don’t move the needle.

The topic of women’s advancement is an organizational challenge. And until organizations own it at that level, they'll keep seeing the numbers lag.

The Numbers Are Telling Us Something

According to McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, women now hold 29% of C-suite positions, up from 17% in 2015. That sounds like progress. But here's what the same data also shows: women make up roughly 48% of entry-level employees and only 29% of top executive roles. For every 100 men promoted to their first manager role, only 81 women receive the same promotion. This "broken rung" at the manager level is where women's pipeline quietly collapses, not at the top.

Grant Thornton's Women in Business 2024 report found that at the current rate of progress, we will not reach gender parity in senior leadership until 2053. That is a systemic problem.

The Hidden Cost of Unconscious Bias

One of the most stubborn barriers to women's advancement is something most organizations are reluctant to address head-on: unconscious bias. In male-dominated leadership environments especially, bias doesn't usually look like outright discrimination. It looks like the woman who gets interrupted or ignored in meetings. The high performer who gets labeled "not quite ready" while her equally qualified male peer gets promoted on potential. The leader who is described as "aggressive" for the same behaviors that earn her colleague the word "decisive." The woman who does not get included in after work social activities (been there!) and the disproportionately high representation of tall men in top leadership positions (~58% of Fortune 500 CEOs are over 6ft, compared to 14.5% of men being that height or taller).

Unconscious bias training is not a nice-to-have. It is foundational infrastructure, particularly for the managers and executives who control access to opportunity. When the people making promotion decisions have never examined their own assumptions about leadership and gender, all the women's development programs in the world cannot compensate for what happens in those rooms.

Sponsorship Is Not the Same as Mentoring

I have been both a mentor and a beneficiary of sponsorship, and I can tell you with complete clarity that they are not interchangeable. Mentoring is about guidance. Sponsorship is about advocacy and the use of power on someone else's behalf.

Catalyst research confirms that women who have an influential sponsor who champions their progression are significantly more likely to be promoted than women who have mentors alone. McKinsey's 2025 data reinforces this, noting that entry-level women receive far less sponsorship than any other group, and that when women receive the same career support men do, the so-called "ambition gap" disappears entirely.

A mentor talks to you. A sponsor talks about you, in the rooms you haven't been invited into yet. Organizations that are serious about pipeline development need to build formal sponsorship programs, not just mentoring circles.

What Organizations That Actually Get This Right Are Doing

The organizations that move the needle on women's leadership share a few consistent practices:

• Unconscious bias training embedded in the promotion and performance review process, not as a standalone HR event but as an ongoing practice built into the decisions that actually matter.

• Succession planning that is intentionally inclusive, where high-potential women are named, tracked, and developed on the same timeline and with the same intentionality as their male peers.

• Leadership development programs that are genuinely inclusive in design, not parallel tracks but fully integrated programs where diverse perspectives are treated as assets, not checkboxes.

• Blind resume practices and structured interviews that reduce the role of affinity bias in who even gets considered for leadership roles in the first place.

• Formal sponsorship programs that pair high-potential women with senior leaders who have the influence to create access, not just offer advice.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2023 found that companies with strong DEI programs have an average of 35% women leaders, compared to only 25% in companies with low-quality or nonexistent programs. That 10-point difference does not happen by accident. It happens because of deliberate structural choices.

The Business Case Is Clear

This is not just the right thing to do. It is a genuinely smart business strategy. According to the UN Global Compact, companies with gender-balanced leadership are 20% more likely to report improved business outcomes. The research on gender parity consistently points to better decision-making, higher retention rates, stronger innovation, and improved financial performance.

Retention alone should make the case. Organizations that invest in women's advancement keep their talent. Those that don't watch their high performers walk out the door, often to competitors who will sponsor, promote, and pay them what they're worth.

And yet, McKinsey's 2025 report also notes that a growing number of companies are scaling back the very programs that produced these results: remote and hybrid work options, formal sponsorship, and targeted development. The organizations that hold the line on these investments will have a meaningful talent advantage in the years ahead.

The Bottom Line

Women's leadership development cannot live inside the ERG alone. It has to live inside your succession planning, your performance calibration conversations, your promotion criteria, your sponsorship culture, and your senior leadership's willingness to examine their own blind spots.

I've seen what's possible when organizations make that shift. I've also seen what happens when they don't. The gap between the two is not talent. The talent is there. It has always been there.

If your organization is ready to invest in women's leadership in a way that actually moves the needle, I'd love to talk about what that looks like.