Are We There Yet?

I entered the working world in the 1980s, well, actually, when I was 16, but the adult working world when I graduated college. I remember exactly how sharp women’s elbows had to be, because there were so few seats, if any, for women at the top. I also remember how many men held those seats and were, frankly, unimpressive at the job. It wasn’t about merit. It was about which gender was allowed in. I have been championing women through my investments for years, so I often ask the question about women’s equality: are we there yet?

Are women being embraced as equals, or are we just better at pretending? My guess is we are better, not equal. The numbers back that up. Women now hold 29 percent of C-suite roles, essentially flat from the year before, and remain underrepresented at every single level of the pipeline for the eleventh year running. For every 100 men who get promoted into their first manager role, only 81 women make that same jump — the “broken rung,” and it’s been stuck there for years. In many companies, the ladder becomes rungless for women at some point.

Women hold about a quarter of C-suite roles globally but under a fifth of CEO seats, and hiring of women into the C-suite has basically stalled since 2022. So it’s not that the door is closed. It’s that the door is open a foot and everyone’s fighting over who gets to squeeze through. Not that different from the early 80’s. And I think part of what’s stalling this out is something nobody wants to say out loud: plenty of men are still intimidated by women who are smarter than they are, and instead of embracing that as an asset, they put a foot down. It isn’t about chauvinism; it is about fear of smarter women.

Sometimes it’s just a slow withdrawal of being pulled into the room where decisions get made. You can build all the policy you want, but you can’t legislate away insecurity. Then there’s the piece nobody designed the system around at all: children. If you’re a woman with real ambition, your thirties and forties — the exact years you’re supposed to be putting your foot on the gas professionally — are also the years biology hands you the narrowest window to have kids. Try being present and running two competing priorities that both demand everything, at the same time, with a partner who’s also trying to run flat-out on his or her own career. Something gives. Historically, it’s been her.

If we’re going to live to a hundred, does that change the game? Perhaps we should be designing careers like there’s only one shot, one sprint, one decade that counts? Why can’t one partner lead for a stretch while the other builds a family runway, and then trade? Why isn’t staggering the sprint just… normal? We treat the traditional linear climb as the only legitimate one, and that assumption punishes women more than it punishes men, every time. It also gets more interesting — and more honest — when you take gender out of the couple entirely.

Two women, two men, one of each: the “roles” we assume in a heterosexual marriage — who leans in, who leans back, who carries the emotional load — don’t map cleanly onto every relationship. Does that happen in homosexual relationships? Are there default settings? Defaults can be changed. Will the next generation be more forgiving — more willing to let each person build a life around what they actually want, instead of a script? I want to believe yes; after all, I am an eternal optimist.

I see more men flexing, more couples negotiating rather than assuming, and more openness to nonlinear paths. But the data on speaking up is not encouraging: the share of people willing to speak out against discrimination when they see it actually declined this past year, down to 15 percent — the only behavior tracked that moved in the wrong direction. That’s not a small thing. Silence is how norms stay put. Maybe my success comes from never being silent.

I don’t think men and women are the same, and I don’t want them to be. I think we should embrace the difference. But different does not mean unequal, and it definitely doesn’t mean anyone gets to decide, on your behalf, what you’re capable of or what timeline your life has to run on. Anybody should be able to do anything they want to do — on whatever schedule actually fits their life, with a partner who’s genuinely building it alongside them, not one who expects them to bend.

We might be closer than 1985. But we are nowhere near done.