If you are a tech leader, you might encourage your daughter to follow your path, imagining a journey, like yours, with challenges that can be overcome with hard work. But if you are a man — especially a white man — you are likely unaware of the massive obstacles she will face that you didn’t. For women, the path to leadership is littered with obstructions that hard work can’t overcome.
Those obstacles start at the first rung of the ladder. Women remain less likely than men to be hired into entry-level roles, which leaves them underrepresented from the very beginning, according to the 2024 Women in the Workplace study. And women are far less likely to get promoted — a situation that hasn’t changed much over the past several years. For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2018, only 79 women were promoted. In 2024, that number was just 81. This is why men outnumber women at every level. It is why only 29% of C-suite members are women.
If your daughter is very young, she might see workplace parity in her lifetime — unless she is black. “It will take 22 years to reach parity for white women — and more than twice as long for women of color,” according to the Women in the Workplace study. That means, without any setbacks, we won’t see a workplace that reflects the US population until 2073.
The good news? You can help. If you are aware of the obstacles, you can help make efforts to move them. Women need allies. Be one of those.
Here are eight of the biggest obstacles women face and what they and tech leaders can do about them.
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