Women are making gains in senior management, but remain significantly under-represented in the top jobs, with men dominating chief executive roles even in female-dominated industries.
Women held 40 per cent of senior management positions in 2025, but just 25.9 per cent of chief executive roles, according to a new report released on Tuesday.
This reflected a near-10 per cent rise from eleven years ago, when women only held 15 per cent of chief executive roles.
Women also held 36 per cent of board seats in 2025, however only 21.5 per cent of board chairs were women, the Gender Equity Insights 2026 report revealed.
Men made up about 22 per cent of workers in health care and social assistance, but held half of chief executive and head-of-business positions, it found.
While progress had been made, women's "path to the top is uneven", according to a Curtin University analysis of Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) data.
"Women are being promoted at higher rates than men at several points in the pipeline, yet that advantage disappears by the time (they) reach the most senior positions," report co-author Professor Alan Duncan said.
"Promotion rates tell us who is taking the next step. We also need to understand who keeps progressing through successive leadership tiers - and who stays."
Full-time female managers were promoted more often than their male counterparts in 2024-25, but female managers resigned at a higher rate, and resignation during paid parental leave was also higher among women.
A lack of flexible work options at the top may be contributing to these issues.
Only 13.2 per cent of employers had designed management roles for part-time work, and just one quarter of organisations measured or evaluated their flexibility.
WGEA chief executive Christine Castley said companies needed to invest in better workforce data to keep track of where talent is being lost, and understand how jobs could be redesigned to ensure everyone has a chance to progress.
"Making better use of the talent already available to us is good for workplace gender equality, good workforce strategy and good business," she said.
The report calls for employers to design more flexible management roles that do not limit progression, and to measure recruitment, promotion, pay and retention outcomes by gender to identify where women were falling out of the pipeline.
Shared caring responsibilities should be supported, with men encouraged to take parental leave, and return-to-work pathways strengthened.
The research revealed how a company benefits from women in leadership. Those with more females on their board or led by women ranked among the strongest performers in their industries.
Among the ASX-listed companies studied, those with the highest women’s board representation were top business performers in 28 per cent of company years, compared with 18 per cent in the lowest quartile.
It comes a week after a University of Sydney report highlighted the need for more "good flex" workplace strategies to achieve gender equality.
WOme
