Most of the attention in this field goes to the boardroom. Board representation, C-suite percentages, the woman who did or did not get the top job.

I understand why. Those numbers are visible, they are reported publicly, and they are the ones your key stakeholders read about.

But if you are trying to work out where to put finite time and budget for a genuine pipeline that reaches the top, the number that should concern you most is much further down.

The step where it actually opens

Ninety-three women were promoted to manager for every hundred men last year. For women of colour, seventy-four. Those figures come from the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, drawn from 124 organisations employing around three million people, and the pattern has held for eleven consecutive years.

That is the very first step off individual contributor. Before any of the maternity penalties, before the senior-leadership travel demands, before most of the things we usually reach for as explanations. The cohort is already uneven at the point where it becomes a management pipeline at all, and every subsequent stage inherits that arithmetic.

Which means an organisation can run an entirely fair process at every level above manager and still end up with the C-suite it has. The distortion was introduced early.

Why this changes the target

That statistic describes a decision made by a manager deciding on promotions. It is not a statement about the women in question, their capability, their ambition or their readiness. It is a statement about a judgement call made by someone else, about them, usually with imperfect information and under time pressure.

So an intervention aimed at the candidate is aimed one level below where the decision sits. However good the programme is, however engaged the participants are, it does not touch the decision maker.

This is worth naming out loud in your next intervention design conversation, because it reframes what you are commissioning. You are not looking for a women’s development programme only. You are also looking for something that reaches first-line managers at the moment they decide who is ready.

What reaching them looks like

The good news is that this population is easier to influence than senior leaders, because there are more of them and they are less invested in defending existing outcomes.

A few things I have seen work.

Make readiness criteria explicit before the promotion round rather than during it. Most first-line managers are not applying a biased standard deliberately, but in the absence of clear and defined, standards they default to resemblance. Someone reminds them of themselves at that stage, and that feels like evidence.

Ask for the counterfactual in calibration. When a manager says someone is not quite ready, ask what specifically would make them ready and by when. This single question converts a feeling into a development plan. Often the inability to answer why someone is not ready can alter the decision itself. 

Report promotion ratios by manager, not just by business unit. Aggregated to a division, the number disappears into the average. At manager level it becomes visible, and visibility does a great deal of work on its own without anyone needing to be confronted.

And put the promotion decision itself into your first-time manager training, because that is where the habit forms. A manager decides who is ready for the first time in year one, and whatever they do then, they tend to keep doing.

Where this leaves your women’s programme

It does not remove the case for it. Women’s leadership programmes do real things: they build visibility, networks, sponsors, they surface talent the organisation had not noticed, they change what individual women believe is available to them. They enable women to identify their success goals and chase them uninhibited.

What this changes is the systemic barriers they encounter.

A programme aimed at women cannot close a gap produced by promoting managers. Sold on that basis it will underdeliver, and the next budget conversation becomes harder for you than it needed to be. Sold alongside a managerial intervention, with the promotion ratio as the shared measure, it becomes part of something that can actually move.

The gap opens at the first rung.

That is where the design should start, and it is a much cost optimised place to work than the boardroom.