When I was a sole parent looking for my next role, I was turned down around 40 times. I hadn’t lost my ambition, my skills, or my drive to lead. What I’d lost was the ability to fit into jobs that had been designed for someone with no one waiting at home. Nobody was building senior roles for a woman like me. So in 2008, I built my own and started LeadershipHQ.
I thought about that this week when I read new research reported by Women’s Agenda. Nearly two decades on, the story hasn’t changed as much as it should have.
Women are getting promoted. Then they disappear.
The Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC) has analysed the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s employer data, and the headline is one every CEO and board should sit with. At several points in the pipeline, women are actually being promoted at higher rates than men. Yet by the time you reach the most senior roles, that advantage has vanished, and men still dominate the top jobs. It’s most striking in industries where women make up the majority of the workforce.
The research is the 2026 Gender Equity Insights report, Unlocking Australia’s Workforce Potential, the latest in the annual series BCEC produces with WGEA. Drawing on more than a decade of WGEA data, it gives a name to something I see in boardrooms all the time: the “male pedestal effect.” Men remain overrepresented in CEO roles even in several industries where women make up most of the workforce. Think about health care and social assistance, where men are only around 22 percent of employees. If any sector should have women filling the top table, it’s that one.
Read that again. Women are not failing to step up. They are stepping up, again and again, and then the system quietly runs out of room for them.
And here’s the finding I want every leader to underline. According to the report, women’s advancement is held back less by a lack of promotion opportunities and more by women leaving the workforce and having their careers interrupted. The ladder is there. We just keep pulling it away the moment women’s lives change.
We’ve spent years talking about the “leaky pipeline” as if it were some natural force. It isn’t. The pipeline is designed. And right now, it’s designed to narrow at exactly the moment experienced women are ready to lead.
Flexible on paper, rigid where it counts
Here’s the number that stopped me. Around 90 percent of Australian workplaces offer flexible work. Only about 13 percent have designed management roles that can be done part-time.
So flexibility is everywhere, right up until the job comes with power.
BCEC’s Dr Silvia Salazar made the point beautifully: offering part-time work and designing senior jobs that genuinely work part-time are two completely different things. Most organisations have done the first and congratulated themselves. Very few have done the second.
What happens next is predictable. A capable woman becomes a parent or a carer. She takes the flexible arrangement on offer. She keeps doing excellent work. And she stays in a role she outgrew years ago because the next step up only exists as a 50-hour, always-on, in-the-office job. The organisation loses her leadership. Often, eventually, it loses her entirely.
Not all flexibility is created equal.
Professor Rae Cooper, whose team led a separate study released the same week, draws a line I wish every leader understood: the difference between “good flex” and “bad flex.”
Good flex gives people genuine choice and control over their hours. Bad flex is when schedules shift to suit the employer, and the worker has little say. One builds trust, well-being, and retention. The other is just instability with a nicer name.
That research also found the gap between the flexibility women want and what they actually get is widest for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, particularly in their 40s and 50s, when careers and pay should be peaking. Single parents, women with chronic illness or disability, migrant and refugee women, and women in regional areas face extra barriers too.
As a sole parent, I know what it is to carry the load alone and be told the job can’t move. Every one of those barriers is a leader somewhere deciding that the way it has always been done is the only way it can be done.
This isn’t a women’s issue. It’s a leadership issue.
Two more findings matter here.
First, organisations with women CEOs and senior leaders are more likely to have proper flexible work strategies, and ASX companies with more women in leadership tend to perform better on market value and investor returns. This is a performance story, not a charity one.
Second, only 11 percent of organisations have a target to increase men’s use of parental leave. While caring is seen as women’s work, flexibility will be seen as a women’s accommodation, and anyone who uses it will pay a career price. When men take leave and work flexibly too, it stops being a “mummy track” and starts being how work works.
This matters even more in the male-dominated industries I care so much about: construction, engineering, mining, rail, legal, and finance. These are the sectors that tell me they can’t find women leaders. Often they’ve already hired them. They just haven’t built a job those women can keep doing.
What leaders can do on Monday?
WGEA’s three recommendations for employers are refreshingly simple: make progress measurable and accountable, open pathways into well-paid senior roles, and share care so careers can be sustained. That’s the what. Here’s how.
You don’t need a new policy document. You need to redesign the work. Here’s where I’d start.
Audit your senior roles, not your policy. Take every role from manager upward and ask honestly: could this be done in four days? In a job share? With different hours? If the answer is “no,” ask why and whether that reason is real or just a habit.
Design flexibility in before the vacancy. Advertise senior roles as flexible by default. If you wait for a candidate to ask, many of the best ones never will.
Measure who stays, not just who gets promoted. Promotion data tells you who took the next step. Track who keeps moving through each tier and who leaves and when.
Make it normal for men. Set a target for men’s parental leave and have senior men visibly use flexible arrangements. Culture follows what leaders do, not what they say.
Give people choice and control. Flexibility that changes at the employer’s whim isn’t flexibility. Co-design arrangements with your people and protect them.
Talk to the women who left. Exit data is gold. Ask the senior women who walked out what would have made them stay. Then listen without getting defensive.
The real question
The women are there. The talent is there. The ambition is absolutely there. What’s missing is leaders willing to redesign the work so that the people they’ve already invested in can keep rising.
So here’s my question for you: if the most capable woman in your organisation needed her next role to be part-time, does that role exist? If it doesn’t, she’ll make the decision for you.
Let’s build the jobs she can say yes to
Let’s work on this together.
If you’re serious about keeping and growing your women leaders, here’s how I can help.
Women’s leadership programs. LeadershipHQ’s award-winning women’s leadership program gives women the confidence, capability, and networks to step into senior roles and stay there. We run it for organisations across Australia, including in male-dominated industries like construction, engineering, and rail.
Executive coaching. One-on-one coaching for women stepping up, coming back from a career break, or navigating the move into senior leadership, and for the leaders redesigning the roles around them.
Keynotes and workshops. I speak to leadership teams, boards, and conferences about courage, human leadership, and building workplaces where women rise. Bring me in to start the conversation your organisation needs to have.
Get in touch with LeadershipHQ or book me to speak, and let’s build the jobs and the leaders your organisation needs.
Sonia McDonald is the founder and CEO of LeadershipHQ, a keynote speaker, executive coach, and author of Leadership Attitude, Just Rock It! and First Comes Courage.
Source: Madeline Hislop, “Women are promoted at higher rates than men. Then the senior jobs stop bending”, Women’s Agenda, 13 October 2026. Read the article
Source: Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Gender Equity Insights 2026: Unlocking Australia’s Workforce Potential, 13 October 2026. Read the report
Ready to Go Deeper?
If any of these lessons sparked something in you—if you’re ready to do the real work of becoming the leader (and the person) you’re capable of being—here’s how we can keep going together:
🎙️ Listen to the Leadership With Sonia Podcast—real conversations, real leadership, zero fluff. soniamcdonald.com/podcast
📚 Read my books—Leadership Attitude, Just Rock It!, and First Comes Courage. Available now. soniamcdonald.com
🎤 Book Sonia to speak—for your next conference, team day, or leadership event. manager@soniamcdonald.com.au | 1300 719 665
🤝 Work with us—leadership programs, executive coaching, and workshops designed to change how you lead. leadershiphq.com.au
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