With C-suite parity stalled and AI embedding old biases, a 40-year veteran examines why high-performing women are still measured against a standard of silence.
It’s a fine line, and we teeter across it every day. After 40 years in academia, business meetings, and boardrooms, I know how it works. Speak up the right amount — not too much — in the right way, to be heard. Use your words sparingly, powerfully, respectfully, knowing some will be dismissed or, if useful, claimed by someone else. Women’s experiences in the workplace are different from men’s. Full stop.
Even discussing topics about women in the workforce provokes a familiar hesitation to speak up: an internal calculation about how many waves one should make, followed by further internal debate about whether such hesitation represents wisdom or cowardice, and finally, a quiet wondering about whether men experience such doubts at all. Like many women, I have internalized the struggle.
To be clear, the dynamic constraining women is not just my perspective — it is grounded in an overwhelming body of evidence. Yes, there has been progress. Women hold 29% of C-suite positions today, up from 17% in 2015. But the distribution and longevity of that progress are more complicated than a triumphant headline.
The patterns I describe here do not reflect intentional harm inflicted by all men. They reflect systems built without enough women in them. If we want to change that, we must be willing to name what those systems look like. That is the point: to name the water, without blaming the fish.
The most effective way to keep women quiet is to make speaking up cost more than staying silent. Nobody designed it that way. But that is what the data shows we built.
I have experienced my share of condescension and unsolicited advice. But mostly, I have been fortunate. I have benefited from men who noticed my work, said my name in rooms I was not in, and spent their credibility on my behalf. The question we should ask is why that experience remains the exception — and how we make it the norm.
Are We Creating Workplaces Where Women Lead Final Decisions?
More than before. And not nearly enough.
Women hold 72% of Chief Human Resources Officer roles and roughly 47% of Chief Marketing Officer roles — the rooms adjacent to power. They hold 8% of COO roles, the position that most directly feeds the CEO seat, and roughly 10% of Fortune 500 CEO positions.
Women have achieved near-parity in the rooms adjacent to power. The rooms where final decisions are made remain overwhelmingly male.
At the board level, women reached a record 33% of S&P 500 board seats in 2024 — but that trend has since reversed. New appointments of women directors fell from 43% in 2022 to 33–36% in 2025. In my own experience across three boards, I was the only female director each time, the outlier. While fellow board members generally welcomed me, some made me not-so-subtly aware that my presence had shifted their usual dynamic.
Fewer female directors will likely be appointed now that the regulatory scaffolding that drove minority inclusion — such as Nasdaq’s board diversity rule — has been largely dismantled.
Are We Backing Women’s Ideas With the Same Conviction We Use to Praise Their Resilience?
Not really.
Women are interrupted far more than men. In mixed-gender settings, men interrupt women three times more frequently than they interrupt other men. In one study of male-female conversational pairs, 95% of interruptions were men talking over women.
Research shows that men do 70% of the speaking in mixed-gender meetings — yet that ratio is rarely experienced as an imbalance. Listeners consistently overestimate how much women speak. When women account for just 30% of the talking time, they are perceived as dominating the conversation.
Men are measured against total ownership of the conversation — anything less than 100% is giving room. Women are measured against total silence — anything more than zero is taking space.
Yale researcher Victoria Brescoll found that for men, speaking time and perceived power are positively correlated. For women, that correlation disappears: women who speak frequently are rated as less competent and less suited to leadership by both men and women equally.
On the question of idea credit, women are 37% more likely than men to have a colleague receive recognition for their work. In venture capital — the most concrete expression of backing an idea — women-only founding teams received just 2% of VC funding in 2023, a figure that has barely moved in thirty years.
Are We Defining Progress Through the Lens of Power, Pay, and Permanence?
The unadjusted pay gap — about 85 cents on the dollar in 2025 — has moved only four cents over twenty-two years. But the pay gap is less the core problem than a symptom of one. The deeper issue is which roles women hold and what those roles come with: less upside, less equity, less bonus eligibility.
There will also be less institutional pressure going forward on companies to include women. Use of “DEI” in S&P 500 annual report filings dropped 32% between 2024 and 2025. DEI metrics tied to executive compensation fell from 68% of S&P 500 companies to 35% in a single year.
On performance evaluation: studies using identical job applicants randomly assigned female or male names found that the “male” applicants were consistently rated as more competent and offered higher starting salaries. In another study, two-thirds of performance reviews written for women contained subjective language about negative personality traits — words like “bossy” — while only 1% of male reviews included such characterizations.
As we have seen in high-profile moments like the Olympics, even women who perform at the absolute highest level — gold medal winners — can find their achievements belittled or overshadowed by thoughtless comments from leaders implying their accomplishments are somehow less worthy of celebration than men’s.
What About the Tech Industry?
Worse on representation, worse on culture, and uniquely consequential — because tech is no longer just an industry. It is becoming the foundation of all work.
Women hold 27–29% of the overall tech workforce and 11% of tech executive positions, compared to 48% and 29%, respectively, across the broader economy. Half of all women who take a job in tech leave the field by age 35 — more than twice the attrition rate in other industries.
The question is not only what tech does to women inside its walls. It is what tech built without women does to everyone outside it.
Women make up only 22% of the AI workforce and 18% of AI researchers worldwide. A Berkeley Haas analysis of 133 AI systems found that nearly 44% exhibited gender bias. A 2024 UNESCO study found that major language models associate women with domestic roles four times as often as men — biases now embedded in hiring tools, healthcare diagnostics, and credit algorithms.
What One Person Can Do
The men who change things for women in their organizations mostly do not give speeches. They say, “She wasn’t finished.” They say, “That was her idea.” They make one phone call. Research shows these moments are not small. In aggregate, they are how the pattern breaks.
Sponsorship matters in a way that mentorship alone does not. Almost three-quarters of women who had a sponsor credited that support as instrumental in their advancement. Yet only 45% of women report ever having had one.
Meeting structures with explicit participation norms change the dynamics measurably. Leaders who publicly name idea originators shift the attribution pattern in real time. These are not heroic acts. They take four seconds and cost nothing — except the willingness to notice how the water influences some fish differently than others.
Data speaks. It is inviting us to change.
Sources & Further Reading
All cited statistics appear with inline hyperlinks in the original published version. Additional background: Joan Williams, What Works for Women at Work (NYU Press, 2014); NBER Working Paper on VC-backed founder gender gaps (Tookes, Hebert, Yimfor, 2025); Equilar 2025 Executive Compensation Report; UN Women promotion pipeline data 2023.
