Where have all the women gone?
From boardrooms to the director’s chair and court rooms, representation for women is being eroded…
It’s 2026. The fight for gender equality in the workplace - equal access to opportunities, resources, pay and quashing biases - is exhausting and quite frankly, boringly repetitive. And looking at recent reports, we’re now asking: where have all the women gone?
In an uncomfortable truth, in some of the most influential industries in the UK and globally, women are no longer inching forward and in several cases, they are actively slipping back.
The disappearing act at the top
According to the Financial Times, female barristers made up just 23 per cent of advocates appearing before the UK Supreme Court in 2025, lower than it was in 2009, the year the court was created. Seventeen years on, progress has not just stalled but quietly gone backwards.
Around 40 per cent of barristers in England are women, up from 32 per cent twenty years ago. Law schools are packed with women. But among King’s Counsel (KCs), the elite rank given to the most senior and respected advocates, women now make up less than 15 per cent, down from 26 per cent which is the highest proportion of women advocates in the Supreme Court in history.
This is not just an internal problem for the legal profession. The Supreme Court adjudicates on issues that disproportionately affect women: employment rights, reproductive autonomy, domestic abuse, immigration, healthcare, and family life. When women are absent from the advocacy, perspectives narrow, even when judges themselves are diverse.
Male dominated boardrooms
In the UK’s largest companies, women are losing ground where it matters most: executive authority. While boardroom diversity targets have improved headline numbers, the number of women in executive director roles across FTSE 250 companies has fallen over the past two years. Executive director roles dropped sharply from 2022 to 2024 (an 11% decline) with women now representing only about 12 % of executive positions despite overall board numbers rising.
While women now occupy 43% of roles on company boards and 35.3% of leadership roles across the FTSE companies, up slightly from 34.5% in 2023, female representation in senior decision making positions is lacking.
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According to the Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org published in December 2025, women in the USA remain underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline, especially in senior leadership, where they make up just 29 percent of C-suite roles, unchanged from 2024. The report stated women face less career support and fewer opportunities to advance as companies show declining commitment to women’s progress. While women are as dedicated to their careers as men, there is a gap in their desire for promotion.
And globally, women are losing representation in sectors traditionally associated with female employment. Retail, accommodation, food services, consumer services, wholesale and real estate have all seen a decline in women’s share of the workforce.
Who gets to tell the story?
As award season kicks off, it’s a depressing fact that the percentage of women directors of the top films at the North American box office fell to a seven-year low in 2025. According to the latest report, ‘Inclusion In The Director’s Chair’ published in December 2025, the number of women directors of the 100 highest-grossing films of the year dropped nearly 40% year-on-year.
Looking at both gender and race/ethnicity, six directors in 2025 were women of colour (the same as in 2024), marking the first time in the 19-year span that women of colour outnumbered white women directors (three). The report noted that 73% of the top directors were white men.
When women disappear from cultural leadership, stories narrow, perspectives flatten and power quietly recentres men.
Why women leaders disappearing matters
The most dangerous myth of the past decade was that gender equality was inevitable. Clearly that’s not the case. While progress is not linear, we can see representation slipping away.
So when we ask “Where have all the women gone?”, the answer is uncomfortable but clear. They’ve been filtered out by systems that even in 2026 reward sameness, lean into traditional malecentric business boardrooms and biases which refuse to push for gender equality.
We want to see a tide change and support women to get a seat at the table they deserve to be at.
