47 Best Thought Leaders on Women in Leadership

Last updated: June 2026

The 47 people in this directory are the thought leaders doing the most important work on women in leadership globally right now. They include the foundational researchers whose frameworks define how we understand the gender leadership gap, the organisational psychologists documenting the specific mechanics of bias, the practitioners and coaches building the tools women use to navigate it, and the authors and advocates who are translating research into practice at scale.

Women hold 29 percent of C-suite roles in corporate America in 2025, unchanged from 2024 and representing the 11th consecutive year of underrepresentation at every level of the corporate pipeline, according to the Women in the Workplace 2025 report by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, which surveyed approximately 10,000 employees across 124 organisations employing roughly three million people (CONFIRMED RESULT). Globally, Grant Thornton's Women in Business 2026 report, drawing on interviews with senior leaders in midsize businesses across 35 countries, found that women hold 32.9 percent of senior management roles, a drop of 1.1 percentage points from 34 percent in 2025 (CONFIRMED RESULT). Progress is not just slow; in many markets it has reversed.

Against that backdrop, the voices in this directory are doing something genuinely difficult: building the evidence base for what actually works, naming the structural mechanisms that perpetuate inequality, and providing the practical tools that women and organisations can use right now. Their work matters not because it is aspirational, but because it is rigorously empirical, field-tested, and increasingly urgent as political headwinds push back against the progress of the past decade.

Rather than recycling the same handful of celebrity names that appear on every women in leadership list, this directory surfaces the researchers, authors, and practitioners who deserve to be far better known by every HR leader, CEO, executive team, and woman in leadership who wants to understand the field at its best.

When organisations need to build the team health, communication, and accountability structures that turn commitment to gender equity into actual leadership practice, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), works with leadership teams globally to facilitate the conversations that matter. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Women in Leadership Matters More Than Ever

Two decades of research have settled several questions that were once contested. Gender-diverse leadership teams outperform their peers financially. The McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that companies prioritising gender diversity see bigger gains in women's representation and, through it, measurable performance advantages. The Grant Thornton 2026 data shows that mid-market firms maintaining or expanding gender equality initiatives are more likely to report revenue and employee growth (CONFIRMED RESULT). The business case is not a projection; it is an empirical finding that has been replicated across contexts.

The pipeline problem is also well understood. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women overall make the same transition in the United States, and only 77 women of colour, according to the 2025 Women in the Workplace data (CONFIRMED RESULT). This is what researchers call the broken rung, and Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and Maria del Mar Martinez documented it in depth in The Broken Rung (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2025), showing how the effects of this early disadvantage compound throughout women's careers. The WEF's 2025 Global Gender Gap Report found that at the current rate of change, it will take approximately 123 more years to achieve gender parity in the workplace globally (CONFIRMED RESULT).

These are the numbers the people in this directory are working to change. They are not doing so through aspiration alone. They are doing it through research, measurement, structural intervention, and the kind of sustained attention to mechanism rather than symptom that distinguishes genuine progress from performative commitment.

For teams that want to turn that commitment into day-to-day leadership practice, the Working Genius facilitation that Jonno White delivers to executive teams directly addresses the communication, accountability, and decision-making dynamics that either support or undermine gender equity in leadership teams. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on HR and people and culture leadership globally, see the directory at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-people-and-culture-2026.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of documented contribution to the women in leadership field in 2024, 2025, or 2026; a published body of work that is verified; and an accessible professional profile that makes following them practically useful. The list spans academic researchers, organisational practitioners, coaches, advocates, and authors. It is not a ranking. It is a directory.

The permanent exclusion list for this topic applies. All entries are distinct individuals with verified professional profiles. The LinkedIn Score minimum of 1 applies to academic researchers; Score 2 or above for practitioners and coaches.

Foundational Researchers: Building the Evidence Base

The people in this category built the scientific framework that every subsequent researcher in this field stands on. Their meta-analyses, experimental studies, and career-length research programmes define what is and is not known about gender and leadership.

1. Alice Eagly

Alice Eagly is University Professor and Professor of Psychology Emerita at Northwestern University, where she has spent decades producing the most rigorous body of social-psychological research on gender and leadership available anywhere. Her foundational work includes the 1990 meta-analysis on gender and leadership style in Psychological Bulletin, which showed that women were more likely to use transformational and contingent reward styles, and the labyrinth metaphor she developed with Linda Carli in their 2007 book Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, published by Harvard Business Review Press, which replaced the glass ceiling metaphor with one that better captured the multiple obstacles and detours women navigate throughout their careers rather than a single barrier near the top.

Her Social Role Theory provides the foundational framework for understanding why women and men are perceived and judged differently as leaders. When women behave in ways expected of leaders, they violate expectations about how women should behave; when they behave according to gender expectations, they are seen as insufficiently leadership-like. This double bind, documented and measured rigorously by Eagly and her collaborators across dozens of studies, remains one of the most important structural findings in the field. She was awarded the APA's Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in 2009 and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work provides the psychological bedrock for almost everything that comes after it in the women in leadership research literature.

2. Herminia Ibarra

Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and one of the most globally influential voices on leadership, identity, and career transition. Her research on women in leadership is built around the insight that identity is a central obstacle: women internalise leadership development as self-improvement rather than as the kind of outward-looking, network-building, and opportunity-seizing behaviour that actually produces career advancement. Her 2015 book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, published by Harvard Business Review Press, challenged the conventional development logic by arguing that behaviour changes identity, not the reverse.

Her 2010 Harvard Business Review article "Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers," co-authored with Robin Ely and Deborah Kolb, remains one of the most cited analyses of why even well-intentioned women's leadership programmes often fail. She is ranked among the Thinkers50 Top 50 world management thinkers and is a member of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network. Her forthcoming 2026 book The Bonus Years: Reinventing Our Longer Work Lives extends her identity and career transition framework to the challenge of navigating the second half of working life. Her LinkedIn activity and Harvard Business Review writing in 2025 and 2026 are consistently substantive and immediately applicable.

3. Robin Ely

Robin Ely is the Diana Tilson Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Culture and Community at Harvard Business School, where she has spent her career investigating how gender dynamics in organisations actually work. Her most significant contribution to the women in leadership literature is her foundational research with Herminia Ibarra and Deborah Kolb on how women's leadership development programmes frequently fail by focusing on fixing women rather than on changing the systems and cultures that produce inequality in the first place. Their 2011 Academy of Management Learning and Education paper, "Taking Gender Into Account: Theory and Design for Women's Leadership Development Programs," won the journal's Decade Award in 2021, confirming its enduring influence.

Her research shows how organisational identity processes shape women's leadership trajectories, and how women who try to adapt to masculine norms often do so at significant psychological and professional cost. Her work on defensive routines in organisations, on how race and gender intersect in workplace dynamics, and on the conditions that allow women to develop as leaders rather than simply to survive in hostile environments, makes her one of the most important structural thinkers in this field. Her published work in 2025 and 2026 with Sanaz Mobasseri and colleagues on racial inequality and defensive organisational structures extends her analytical framework to the intersection of race and gender.

4. Deborah Kolb

Deborah Kolb is Emeritus Professor at the Simmons School of Management and a Founding Director of the Center for Gender in Organizations. Her research sits at the intersection of negotiation, leadership, and gender, and her specific contribution is to show how the informal, relational, and behind-the-scenes work that women disproportionately perform in organisations is systematically invisible and uncompensated. Her book Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining, co-authored with Judith Williams, and her Harvard Business Review work on small wins for women and on negotiating from a position of strength, have been widely adopted in leadership development programmes globally.

Her foundational research on gender and negotiation showed that women who ask for raises and promotions face a backlash effect that men do not, a finding that reframed the advice given to women navigating career advancement. Rather than telling women to simply negotiate more assertively, her research showed the problem was structural: the rules of negotiation were built for a social context in which assertive behaviour is penalised differently depending on gender. Her work on the "second shift" in organisational life, capturing the invisible labour women perform to manage relationships and smooth organisational processes, has shaped how researchers think about why women's contributions are systematically undervalued.

5. Shelley Correll

Shelley Correll is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women's Leadership and Professor of Sociology and Organizational Behavior at Stanford University, where she directs the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab. She is the incoming President of the American Sociological Association for 2026, confirming her position as one of the most institutionally central figures in the field. Her research on the motherhood penalty is among the most cited findings in the women in leadership literature: her experimental studies showed that mothers are judged as less competent and less committed than fathers, and are consequently offered lower starting salaries for the same work, even when their resumes are otherwise identical.

Her subsequent work through the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab has translated that research into practical interventions, including bias interrupters for hiring, performance evaluation, and promotion processes. Her "Redesigning Work" summits brought together academic researchers and organisational leaders to test evidence-based interventions in real companies. Her 2025 research on the intersection of gender and AI bias, including work on how AI systems trained on historical data reproduce and sometimes amplify gender discrimination in hiring and evaluation, extends her research programme to some of the most urgent questions facing organisations in 2026. Her LinkedIn activity and public writing in 2025 and 2026 are substantive, timely, and directly actionable for HR and DEI practitioners.

6. Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the 2023 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences, awarded specifically for her work advancing our understanding of women's labour market outcomes. Her decades of research on the economics of gender documented how the gender pay gap in the United States is not primarily explained by discrimination in the conventional sense but by what she calls the "greedy job" phenomenon: the fact that careers rewarding long, inflexible, and unpredictable hours disproportionately penalise women, not because of bias against women per se, but because of the unequal domestic division of labour that means women bear a greater cost for taking up those hours.

Her 2021 book Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity, published by Princeton University Press, synthesised her decades of research into one of the clearest accounts of how the women in leadership gap is maintained not by overt discrimination alone but by the structural incompatibility between how leading organisations reward commitment and how domestic responsibility is distributed. Her Nobel Prize substantially amplified the reach of this framework, and her 2025 and 2026 commentary on what the implications of AI and flexible work arrangements mean for gender equity represents some of the most important current thinking on whether the structural barriers she identified might finally be shifting.

The Advocacy and Research Pillars

The organisations and institutional leaders in this category translate research into programme, policy, and measurable change at scale. They are the infrastructure through which academic knowledge becomes something companies can actually act on.

7. Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas is CEO of LeanIn.org and OptionB.org, the nonprofits she co-founded with Sheryl Sandberg to advance gender equity and empower women to achieve their ambitions. Under her leadership, LeanIn.org has become the most widely used platform for gender equity research and tools in the corporate world: the Lean In Circles community includes tens of thousands of small peer support groups in 188 countries, and the annual Women in the Workplace report she produces with McKinsey is the largest study of the state of women in corporate America, used by hundreds of organisations annually to benchmark their progress.

The Women in the Workplace 2025 data found that for the first time, women are notably less interested in being promoted than men, a gap that closes when women receive the same career support that men do. Thomas's framing of this finding, that the problem is not women's ambition but their rational response to a workplace that does not support them equally, is consistent with the structural turn in women in leadership research and directly challenges the persistent tendency to frame the gender gap as a women's confidence problem. In 2026, LeanIn.org under Thomas's leadership pivoted to address the AI gender gap, responding to data showing that 33 percent of men use AI daily compared to 27 percent of women, and that women are 23 percent less likely to receive manager support to use it. Her podcast Tilted, launched in 2025, extends her public profile beyond the annual report cycle.

8. Jennifer McCollum

Jennifer McCollum is President and CEO of Catalyst, the global nonprofit supported by many of the world's most powerful CEOs and leading companies to build workplaces that work for women, a role she has held since April 2024 as Catalyst's sixth CEO. Previously she was the first female CEO of Linkage, a top-20 global leadership development firm dedicated to advancing women, and she led its acquisition by SHRM. Her book In Her Own Voice: A Woman's Rise to CEO became an Amazon bestseller in 2023. In March 2026, she published Men at Work: The Roadmap to Gender Partnership, a call for men to move beyond passive support toward shared leadership in gender equity, making her one of the few voices in this space building a serious, evidence-based engagement with male allyship rather than treating it as a secondary concern.

Under McCollum's leadership, Catalyst in 2026 launched the Convergent Leader, a new leadership playbook developed in partnership with Coqual designed to help leaders restore trust, close the AI skills gap without burnout, and sustain inclusion amid market pressure and the current political retreat from DEI initiatives in many organisations. Her active LinkedIn presence and her Harvard Business Review writing make her one of the most visible CEO-level advocates for gender equity in the corporate world right now, combining institutional credibility with genuine intellectual contribution.

9. Joanna Barsh

Joanna Barsh is Director Emerita of McKinsey and Company after more than 30 years, and the creator and leader of the Centered Leadership Project, a decade-long McKinsey research initiative into what drives and sustains successful women leaders. Her books How Remarkable Women Lead, co-authored with Susie Cranston (Crown Business, 2009), and Centered Leadership: A Practical Field Guide (McKinsey and Company, 2014), introduced the five-dimension Centered Leadership model covering meaning, framing, connecting, engaging, and energising, which has been used in leadership development programmes across hundreds of organisations and at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Deutsche Bank Women on Wall Street, and Google Zeitgeist, among many others.

Her 2025 and 2026 work focuses on TALENT RISING, ongoing research into what enables talented women and people of colour to advance, which builds on her Centered Leadership foundation and extends it to the current challenges facing women leaders in an environment of DEI rollbacks, economic uncertainty, and AI disruption. Her active LinkedIn commentary in 2025 and 2026, including pieces from Davos 2026, addresses how trust, risk, and leadership are evolving in ways that create both new challenges and new openings for women. For leadership teams needing development tools grounded in rigorous research rather than inspiration alone, her Centered Leadership model remains one of the most practically developed frameworks available.

10. Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the founder and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual), a New York-based think tank that has produced more than a decade of groundbreaking research on sponsorship, leadership, and the advancement of diverse talent. Her foundational contribution to the women in leadership field is her distinction between mentorship and sponsorship: mentors give feedback and advice, but sponsors advocate for their protégés' advancement with their own capital. Her research showed that women are over-mentored but under-sponsored, which is a primary reason why the mentorship advice commonly given to women does not translate into the promotions and assignments they need to advance. Her Harvard Business Review article "The Sponsor Effect" and her book Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) shifted how organisations think about developing women leaders.

Her research on the specific experiences of senior executive women, on what she calls the "leadership ambition gap," and on the intersecting barriers facing women of colour in senior roles has influenced leadership development architecture across Fortune 500 companies. Her work on the "executive presence gap," documenting how women are disproportionately penalised for presence factors that were defined by and for men, has been incorporated into performance development systems and coaching programmes globally. Her Coqual research in 2025 addresses how AI, flexible work, and the rollback of formal DEI commitments are reshaping the sponsorship dynamics that women need to advance.

11. Frank Dobbin

Frank Dobbin is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. His research on the sociology of organisations and the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion interventions is among the most rigorous and most important available. His 2022 book Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't, co-authored with Alexandra Kalev, synthesised more than 30 years of data from 800 companies, along with in-depth interviews with managers, and reached a conclusion that was controversial in the DEI world: almost nothing that companies most commonly do works. Mandatory diversity training, diversity committees, and diversity targets accompanied by sanctions have little or no effect on the demographic composition of management. What does work, Dobbin and Kalev found, is structural change: mentoring programmes, management training, transparency in hiring and promotion, and creating cross-functional teams that mix groups that rarely work together.

His 2016 Harvard Business Review article "Why Diversity Programs Fail," co-authored with Alexandra Kalev, is the single most read piece of evidence-based writing on what does and does not produce diversity progress in organisations. It has shaped how the most sophisticated HR and DEI leaders think about intervention design, and has provided the empirical foundation for the shift from awareness-raising toward structural intervention that characterises the best current practice in the field. His active research programme continues to produce findings that challenge comfortable assumptions about what diversity commitment actually requires.

12. Alexandra Kalev

Alexandra Kalev is Associate Professor of Sociology at Tel Aviv University and Frank Dobbin's primary research collaborator on the systematic study of what actually moves the needle on diversity in organisations. Their joint work, including the 2022 book Getting to Diversity and the foundational 2006 American Sociological Review paper on diversity practices and their effects, represents the most rigorous evidence base available for HR and DEI leaders designing programmes intended to increase women's representation in leadership roles.

Her own research examines network structures in organisations and how formal and informal networks shape the career trajectories of women and minorities differentially. Her finding that the structure of work networks, rather than individual characteristics alone, determines much of the inequality in career outcomes provides one of the clearest structural explanations for why individual-level interventions so often fail to produce systemic change. Her work is essential reading for any organisation that has invested heavily in women's leadership development without seeing corresponding movement in the demographic composition of its leadership team.

Documenting Bias and Building Structural Change

The researchers and authors in this category are the people doing the detailed work of naming specific bias mechanisms, measuring their effects, and designing interventions that address the structure rather than the individual.

13. Joan Williams

Joan Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC College of the Law San Francisco, and the author of Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), which provides organisations with a systematic tool for interrupting the four patterns of gender bias she has documented across decades of research: prove-it-again bias, tightrope bias, maternal wall bias, and tug of war bias. Her career-long research programme has documented how these four bias patterns operate across industries, professions, and career levels, providing the most practically useful taxonomy of gender bias available for HR and DEI practitioners.

Her "Bias Interrupters" tool is a set of evidence-based changes to management systems, including hiring rubrics, evaluation criteria, assignment processes, and meeting norms, that address the structural mechanisms through which bias operates rather than asking individuals to overcome their biases through training alone. It has been adopted by organisations across healthcare, law, technology, and professional services. Her 2025 and 2026 research on gender and AI in the workplace examines how automated systems are reproducing and in some cases amplifying the four bias patterns she has documented in human decision-making.

14. Tsedale Melaku

Tsedale Melaku is Assistant Professor of Management at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, CUNY, and author of You Don't Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). Her interdisciplinary research unites three strands of significant sociological and management inquiry: diversity in the workplace, women in leadership positions, and the impact of systemic racism on advancement opportunities. Her concept of the "inclusion tax," the hidden cost imposed on Black women in white-dominant organisations through the invisible labour of navigating racial and gender aggressions, is one of the most precise and practically useful concepts produced in this space in recent years.

Her November 2025 lecture at St. John's University, where she presented on the experiences of Black women in white-dominant institutional spaces, and her ongoing research programme on how white racial framing and systemic gendered racism shape the experiences of women of colour in law, business, and academia, make her one of the most important voices at the intersection of race and gender in leadership. Her work in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, the New York Times, and other outlets has extended her research beyond the academy into the practitioner community. Her forthcoming co-edited Handbook on Workplace Diversity and Stratification provides a comprehensive academic resource that builds on her empirical work.

15. Stefanie Johnson

Stefanie Johnson is a Professor and Director of the Center for Leadership at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business, and the author of the Wall Street Journal National Bestseller Inclusify: The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams (Harper Collins, 2020). Her research focuses on the intersection of leadership and diversity, with a particular emphasis on how unconscious bias affects the evaluation of leaders and what practical strategies leaders can use to mitigate it. She has presented her work at the White House, at the 2016 summit on diversity in corporate America, and is a member of the MG 100 Coaches.

Her Inclusify framework addresses the tension that leaders often create when they try to promote inclusion: the tendency to emphasise either uniqueness or belonging at the expense of the other. Women in leadership contexts face this tension acutely: they are often asked to fit a leadership model that erases their specific identity, or alternatively to perform their difference in ways that reduce them to a representative of their group rather than a complete person and professional. Her practical tools for leaders, including her LinkedIn Learning course on increasing diversity and inclusion in organisations and her active contributions to Bloomberg, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review in 2025 and 2026, make her one of the most accessible research-to-practice voices in the field.

16. Michelle King

Michelle King is a globally recognised organisational psychologist, author, and speaker, formerly the Director of Inclusion at Netflix and Head of UN Women's Global Innovation Coalition for Change, now managing director of the Executive Coaching and Consulting Institute. She is the author of The Fix: Overcome the Invisible Barriers That Are Holding Women Back at Work (Atria Books, 2020) and How Work Works: The Subtle Science of Getting Ahead Without Losing Yourself (2023). Her central argument, that organisations need to fix workplace culture rather than women, provides a structural alternative to the confidence-deficit framing that has dominated women's leadership advice for decades.

Her LinkedIn Top Voice recognition for workplace equity in 2022 and her regular contributions to Forbes, the Economist, Harvard Business Review, and CNN in 2025 and 2026 address how AI and digital transformation are reshaping the gender dynamics of workplace culture. She has delivered more than 500 talks at major conferences including SXSW and the Nobel Peace Prize Conference, and has designed leadership development programmes for Amazon, FIFA, Netflix, and Dior. Her work at the specific intersection of culture, leadership, and inequality, grounded in both academic research and substantial practitioner experience, makes her one of the most complete voices in this space.

17. Deepa Purushothaman

Deepa Purushothaman is the co-founder of nFormation, a membership-based community for professional women of colour, and a Women and Public Policy Program Leader in Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the author of The First, The Few, The Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America (HarperCollins, 2022), which drew on interviews with hundreds of women of colour across industries and cultural backgrounds to document the specific experiences of isolation, burnout, and identity suppression that characterise the experience of being among the first, few, or only in executive roles.

Her foundational career was at Deloitte, where she spent more than 20 years and became one of the first Indian-American women and one of the youngest people to make partner in the firm's history. She also served as the US Managing Partner of WIN, Deloitte's pioneering women's initiative, giving her both the academic credentials and the practitioner authority that make her voice particularly credible in corporate contexts. Her TED talk and SXSW keynotes in 2025 and 2026 address how women of colour can build collective power, challenge the structural conditions that require them to contort their identities, and transform organisations from within. Her work provides essential intersectional depth to a conversation that too often treats "women in leadership" as a homogeneous category.

18. Linda Babcock

Linda Babcock is the James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and one of the foremost researchers on gender and negotiation. Her 2003 book Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, co-authored with Sara Laschever, is the foundational text on how women's reluctance to negotiate is not a personality deficit but a rational response to a social context in which women who negotiate assertively face a specific backlash cost that men do not. Her subsequent book Ask For It (Bantam Books, 2009), also with Laschever, translated that research into practical guidance for women on when and how to negotiate effectively within those constraints.

Her research programme has documented not only the negotiation gap but also the mechanisms through which it is maintained: the prescriptive gender norms that make assertive women less likeable, the anticipation of that backlash that causes women to pre-emptively moderate their asks, and the organisational practices that compound those individual disadvantages into systemic pay gaps and promotion differentials. Her I-Corps programme for teaching women in STEM to negotiate and commercialise their research has extended her impact to the next generation of women in science and technology. Her work is essential reading for any women's leadership programme that wants to address the negotiation dimension with genuine structural awareness.

Negotiation, Career Navigation, and Positioning

The people in this category have done the most sustained work on the specific career navigation challenges women face: how to negotiate, how to position themselves for advancement, how to manage the political dimensions of organisations, and how to build the kind of visibility and sponsorship that produces real career progress.

19. Hannah Riley Bowles

Hannah Riley Bowles is the Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the leading researchers on gender and negotiation in workplace settings. Her research programme has produced several of the most important findings on why standard negotiation advice fails women and what actually works instead. Her most widely cited paper, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, showed experimentally that women who negotiate assertively are seen as less warm and likeable, and less hireable, than men who negotiate with the same behaviour, but that women who frame their negotiation in relational terms, expressing care about the relationship and providing a legitimate reason for their ask, can reduce that backlash while achieving similar outcomes.

Her research provides one of the most evidence-based foundations for the specific framing and communication strategies that women can use in negotiation contexts, without requiring them either to accept the backlash or to abandon their own interests. Her work at the Harvard Kennedy School, including her participation in executive education programmes for senior women in public service and her ongoing research on gender in political and organisational negotiations, extends her framework across sectors and career stages. Her LinkedIn activity and Harvard Kennedy School publications in 2025 and 2026 address how remote and hybrid work arrangements are changing the negotiation dynamics that women navigate.

20. Lois Frankel

Lois Frankel is the founder of Corporate Coaching International and the author of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (Business Plus, 2004), which has sold more than a million copies and has been revised and updated three times, most recently in 2014. The book identifies 133 specific behaviours that women learn in girlhood that undermine their professional effectiveness as adults: over-apologising, not promoting their own work, asking for permission rather than asking for forgiveness, and positioning requests as questions rather than statements. It provides the most comprehensive practical inventory of self-defeating career behaviours available in a single volume.

Her subsequent books Nice Girls Don't Get Rich (2005) and See Jane Lead (2007) extended her framework to financial management and formal leadership roles. Her corporate coaching practice has worked with Fortune 500 companies and major nonprofits globally, and she has been a regular keynote speaker at women's leadership conferences for more than two decades. The longevity and sustained commercial success of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office confirms that the gap she identified between the behavioural education women receive in childhood and the behavioural requirements of corporate leadership is both persistent and real. Her 2025 and 2026 coaching work addresses how the behaviours she documented interact with AI and remote work dynamics.

21. Susan Colantuono

Susan Colantuono is the founder and CEO of Leading Women, a consulting firm that has developed a distinctive framework for understanding why women stall in their careers even after building strong interpersonal and social skills. Her "Missing 33%" framework identified that organisations select for advancement based on three things: interpersonal skills, which women often excel at and are explicitly trained for; self-management skills, which women also typically demonstrate strongly; and business, financial, and strategic acumen, which organisations say they value most but rarely develop in women's leadership programmes. This gap, documented through research on 2,000 women's careers, is what she calls The Missing 33%.

Her TED Talk "The Career Advice You Probably Didn't Get," which has been viewed millions of times, distils this framework into one of the clearest and most counterintuitive analyses of why women's leadership programmes often fail to produce promotion outcomes. For any organisation that has invested heavily in developing women's interpersonal and communication skills without seeing corresponding career advancement, her framework provides a direct explanation: if you are not developing women's business and strategic acumen and creating opportunities for them to demonstrate it, you are developing the wrong 66%. Her firm's programmes have reached women in more than 90 countries across more than 100 companies.

22. Carol Frohlinger

Carol Frohlinger is the co-founder of Negotiating Women Inc. and co-author of Her Place at the Table: A Woman's Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success (Jossey-Bass, 2004), co-authored with Deborah Kolb. Her work focuses specifically on the negotiation challenges that arise in the context of leadership advancement: how to negotiate for resources, recognition, and the assignments that build the experience needed for promotion; how to manage the political dimensions of organisations; and how to build the kind of visibility and sponsorship that produces real career progress rather than just strong performance reviews.

Her framework for "negotiating your way to the table" provides practical tools for women navigating the informal processes through which leadership opportunities are actually allocated in most organisations, which are rarely through formal application processes and much more often through relationship-based sponsorship and assignment decisions. Her work connects the academic research on gender and negotiation, particularly the findings of Deborah Kolb and Linda Babcock, to the practical behavioural steps that women can take in their specific organisational contexts. Her continued work through Negotiating Women Inc. in 2025 and 2026 addresses how hybrid and remote work arrangements have changed the visibility and sponsorship dynamics that negotiation for leadership requires.

23. Betsy Myers

Betsy Myers is the former founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and author of Take the Lead: Motivate, Inspire, and Bring Out the Best in Yourself and Everyone Around You (Atria Books, 2011). She served as the White House Director of the Office on Women's Initiatives and Outreach under President Clinton and as the COO of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, giving her a practitioner depth in large-scale leadership that is unusual among women's leadership voices. Her research and writing focus on the intersection of authentic leadership, motivational leadership, and the specific challenges facing women in public, private, and nonprofit leadership roles.

Her Harvard Kennedy School work on women in public service leadership, her speaking engagements at major leadership conferences in 2025 and 2026, and her coaching work with senior executives address how women can build the authentic authority that produces genuine followership rather than only formal compliance. Her practitioner perspective on what leadership actually looks like inside political and large organisational structures, combined with her academic research background, provides a vantage point on the women in leadership challenge that is grounded in both evidence and extensive direct experience.

Practitioners and Coaches Building the Field

The people in this category are translating research into practice at scale through coaching, consulting, books, and platforms. They are the people women in leadership are most likely to encounter directly, and their practical frameworks are shaped by genuine engagement with both the evidence and the messy reality of how careers and organisations actually work.

24. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is the CEO of 20-first, a global gender balance consultancy working with the CEOs and top management teams of major companies on gender-balanced leadership, customer connections, and talent management. She is the author of multiple books on gender in business, including Why Women Mean Business (Wiley), How Women Mean Business (Wiley), and Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business (Harvard Business Review Press), and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. Her foundational argument, that gender balance is a business imperative rather than a social responsibility obligation, has shaped how the most commercially sophisticated conversations about women in leadership are framed.

Her consulting work with major global companies in multiple industries and geographies has given her a comparative perspective on what gender balance leadership actually looks like in different cultural and organisational contexts that is rare among voices in this space. Her 2025 and 2026 writing on the intersection of gender balance and longer working lives, drawing on her 2022 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative fellowship, extends her framework to the demographic reality of an ageing workforce and the opportunities it creates for organisations willing to rethink how they develop and deploy talent. Her active LinkedIn presence and HBR commentary in 2025 and 2026 address DEI rollbacks, AI and gender, and the CEO role in sustaining gender balance when external pressure pushes against it.

25. Ruchika Tulshyan

Ruchika Tulshyan is the founder and CEO of Candour, an inclusion strategy firm, and the author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work (MIT Press, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent Award and was received as one of the most practically useful books on inclusion published in recent years. Her 2025 book Uncompete: A Woman's Guide to Claiming Space in a World That Tells Her Not To extends her framework to the individual career level, addressing how the competitive framing of corporate success disproportionately harms women and providing an alternative model of advancement built on collaboration and authentic positioning.

As a Singaporean woman who has lived in multiple countries and worked across four continents, she brings a genuinely international perspective to the equity and inclusion conversation that most US-centred women in leadership work lacks. Her work addresses not only gender but the intersection of gender with race, nationality, and class in ways that make her frameworks more applicable across the full range of women who encounter leadership barriers. Her active LinkedIn content and her contributions to the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg in 2025 and 2026 address imposter syndrome (critiquing rather than reinforcing the narrative), inclusive language, and the structural conditions that make belonging more or less possible for women of colour.

26. Stacy Blake-Beard

Stacy Blake-Beard is a Clinical Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where she previously held the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University. Her research focuses on mentoring relationships in the context of gender and workforce diversity, and she is one of the foremost researchers on how mentoring dynamics change when gender and race intersect. Her work on formal mentoring programmes in corporate settings, on the specific challenges women face in developing effective mentoring relationships across race and gender lines, and on how mentoring is being transformed by diversity, digitalisation, and the changing nature of careers, provides the most rigorous academic foundation available for organisations designing mentoring initiatives intended to advance women.

Her international work, including her Fulbright research in India on the career experiences of Indian women and her faculty role at the Indian School of Business and the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women in Delhi, gives her a comparative cross-cultural perspective that makes her frameworks more broadly applicable than most US-centred mentoring research. Her collaboration with ExecOnline and Tuck Executive Education in online leadership development programmes, and her active LinkedIn presence in 2025 and 2026, make her one of the most accessible academic voices on gender, mentoring, and career development for HR and talent management practitioners.

27. Tiffany Dufu

Tiffany Dufu is the founder and CEO of The Cru, a peer coaching platform that uses algorithm-matching to connect circles of women who support each other in achieving personal and professional goals. She is the author of Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less (Flatiron Books, 2017), with a foreword by Gloria Steinem, which examines how the expectation of perfect domestic management alongside ambitious career pursuit is a structural trap that disproportionately constrains women's leadership advancement. Her argument, that the solution is not better time management but deliberately lowering one's domestic standard and redistributing household responsibility, challenges the "have it all" framing directly and connects the domestic division of labour to the women in leadership pipeline in a concrete and personally actionable way.

Her previous roles as Chief Leadership Officer at Levo League and her work as a speaker at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, the MAKERS conference, and TEDxWomen have made her one of the most widely heard voices at the intersection of women's career development and domestic equity. Her 2025 and 2026 work through The Cru addresses how AI tools are changing what the "dropped ball" actually means in the current moment, and how women can use AI-mediated flexibility to reclaim the bandwidth that domestic over-responsibility has historically consumed. Her LinkedIn and speaking content in 2025 and 2026 are consistently substantive and directly actionable.

28. Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the founder and CEO of Disruption Advisors and the author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) and Disrupt Yourself (Bibliomotion, 2015). She is a leading voice on the S-curve learning framework, applying it to individual and organisational development, and her work on women's career development focuses on how the disruption and risk-tolerance required for breakthrough leadership advancement are systematically undervalued in the way women are socialised and in how women's careers are managed by organisations. She has been included in the Thinkers50 top 10 management thinkers and her LinkedIn following, which exceeds 300,000, makes her one of the most amplified voices at the intersection of career development and gender in leadership.

Her podcast Disrupt Yourself and her 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn content address how women can use the S-curve framework to navigate career transitions, build new capabilities, and position themselves for leadership advancement in a moment of substantial technological and organisational disruption. Her work with major corporations on talent development and her executive education delivery at multiple business schools and organisations make her one of the most practically influential voices on how organisations can develop women as leaders through career architecture rather than through training programmes alone.

29. Liz Wiseman

Liz Wiseman is CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm based in Silicon Valley, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (HarperBusiness, 2010; revised 2017). She was named the top leadership thinker in the world by Thinkers50 in 2019 and is a member of the Marshall Goldsmith MG 100 Coaches. Her Multipliers research, which surveyed and interviewed hundreds of employees and leaders to identify the behaviours of Multipliers versus Diminishers, found that leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the intelligence of those around them produce significantly stronger team performance than leaders who use their own intelligence as the solution.

While her Multipliers framework applies to all leaders, it has particular resonance for women in leadership: the Multiplier model aligns with leadership styles that women disproportionately tend to exhibit, and her research provides evidence that these styles produce better outcomes than the Diminisher behaviours more commonly associated with the heroic, individual-contribution model of leadership that has historically been coded as masculine. Her 2025 and 2026 writing and speaking on the implications of AI for multiplier versus diminisher leadership, and on how the proliferation of AI tools makes the Multiplier approach even more strategically important for team performance, extends her framework to the most urgent current conversation in leadership.

30. Sally Helgesen

Sally Helgesen is one of the world's premier authorities on women's leadership and the author of The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership (Doubleday, 1990), which challenged the deficit framing of women in leadership by documenting the specific organisational strengths women brought to leadership roles. Her 2018 book How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job (with Marshall Goldsmith, Hachette Books) provides the most comprehensive practical inventory of self-defeating behaviours specific to women's career advancement, co-authored with the world's leading executive coach. It has been widely adopted in women's leadership development programmes globally.

Her subsequent research on what she calls "the web of inclusion" introduced an alternative to the hierarchical organisational model that has been increasingly adopted by organisations seeking to build more distributed, collaborative leadership cultures. Her 2025 and 2026 keynote speaking at major women's leadership conferences and her ongoing writing for Harvard Business Review and leadership publications address how the organisational models she identified as aligned with women's strengths three decades ago have become increasingly mainstream in organisations that have learned to value collaboration, distributed decision-making, and relational intelligence as competitive advantages.

Entrepreneurs, Executives, and Advocates

The people in this category are the practitioners who have built organisations, platforms, and programmes from scratch to advance women's leadership. They combine the authority of direct executive experience with the advocacy credibility of having put their careers behind the issue.

31. Sallie Krawcheck

Sallie Krawcheck is the founder and former CEO of Ellevest, the investment platform for women that she built to address the gender investing gap in the United States. Previously she was one of the most senior women in the history of Wall Street, serving as CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, President of Global Wealth and Investment Management at Bank of America, and CFO of Smith Barney. Her book Own It: The Power of Women at Work (Currency, 2017) makes the case that the traits most often associated with women, including empathy, long-term thinking, risk awareness, and relationship-building, are precisely the capabilities that the modern economy most rewards and that women should build their careers on owning rather than suppressing.

Her candid account of being fired during the financial crisis, her experience as one of the few women at the very top of Wall Street, and her public advocacy for structural changes to the financial industry and corporate America more broadly have made her one of the most credible and commercially grounded voices on women in leadership. She stepped down as Ellevest CEO in December 2024 following a health diagnosis, and her public engagement in 2025 and 2026 has addressed the intersection of women's financial independence and leadership advancement. Her LinkedIn content and public commentary continue to provide one of the most practically grounded perspectives on what it actually takes to lead at the top level as a woman in a male-dominated industry.

32. Liz Elting

Liz Elting is the founder and CEO of The Elizabeth Elting Foundation and one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in American business history. She co-founded TransPerfect, the world's largest privately held language services company, from her graduate school dormitory room at NYU, growing it to a $1.2 billion global enterprise. She is the author of Dream Big and Win: Translating Passion into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business (Portfolio, 2023). The Elizabeth Elting Foundation, which she established after transitioning from TransPerfect, focuses on tackling systemic barriers to success and equality and developing the next generation of women business leaders.

Her active LinkedIn presence and public advocacy in 2025 and 2026 address the structural barriers facing women entrepreneurs, the specific challenges of building a business while navigating gender bias in funding and partnership decisions, and the philanthropic strategies most likely to produce sustainable change in women's economic leadership. Her experience as both a builder of a major global enterprise and a philanthropic advocate for women's advancement gives her a dual authority that is rare in the women in leadership space: she is not only a researcher or a coach but someone who has actually built one of the largest companies in her industry from nothing.

33. Jennifer Brown

Jennifer Brown is the founder and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting, the author of How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (Berrett-Koehler, 2019; second edition 2022), and the host of The Will to Change podcast, which has produced more than 250 episodes addressing inclusion, leadership, and the development of diversity champions within organisations. Her framework for the Inclusive Leader Continuum, which moves from Unaware through Aware, Active, and Advocate, provides one of the most practical assessment tools for organisations and individuals trying to understand where they are in their inclusion leadership development and what next steps look like.

As an openly LGBTQ+ leader, she brings a distinctive perspective to the intersection of gender and sexual orientation in leadership that adds an important dimension to the typically heteronormative women in leadership conversation. Her 2025 book The Future of Belonging and her 2025 and 2026 podcast and LinkedIn content address how inclusion is evolving under the pressure of DEI rollbacks, economic uncertainty, and the AI transformation of work. Her consulting client base includes Starbucks, BMW, Dow Chemical, and other major corporations, giving her work a practical commercial grounding.

34. Kim Scott

Kim Scott is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity (St. Martin's Press, 2017; revised 2019), one of the most widely read management books of the past decade, and the founder of Candor Inc., which provides training programmes and software based on the Radical Candor framework. Her work has direct implications for women in leadership because the Radical Candor framework addresses a dynamic that women specifically navigate: the social pressure to be either "nice" (caring but not challenging) or "tough" (challenging but not caring), when what produces the best leadership results is being genuinely both. Her framework names this pattern "ruinous empathy" on the caring-but-not-challenging side and "obnoxious aggression" on the other, and provides a practical path between them.

Her 2025 book Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better extends her framework to the full range of workplace dynamics that produce or prevent respectful and effective working relationships, with particular attention to the ways in which bias, prejudice, and discrimination show up in the management behaviours that either support or undermine everyone's ability to do their best work. Her LinkedIn content and podcast in 2025 and 2026 address how AI tools are changing what managers need to be good at, and how the Radical Candor framework applies to the AI-augmented workplace. Her work is widely used in management training programmes globally, with particular uptake in the technology sector.

35. Bonnie Marcus

Bonnie Marcus is the author of The Politics of Promotion: How High-Achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead (Wiley, 2015), Not Done Yet!: How Women Over 50 Reclaim Their Power and Find Their Voice (New World Library, 2021), and Positioned for Success: How High-Achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead (2025). She is a certified professional coach, former Fortune 500 executive, and a regular contributor to Forbes on women's leadership, career advancement, and workplace politics. Her work addresses an aspect of women's career development that more idealistic frameworks often avoid: the political dimension of advancement decisions in organisations, and the specific ways in which women's disinclination to engage with organisational politics costs them promotions, assignments, and influence.

Her book on women over 50 addresses the specific intersection of ageism and sexism that affects women in the second half of their careers, a dimension that the women in leadership conversation has historically underweighted by focusing primarily on pipeline barriers for early and mid-career women. Her 2025 LinkedIn content and Forbes writing address how DEI rollbacks are specifically affecting women over 50, who face compounded barriers from both the current political environment and the persistent age-gender intersection that her research documents. Her coaching work and speaking at major women's leadership conferences in 2025 and 2026 extend her research into the practitioner community.

36. Tara Mohr

Tara Mohr is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead (Avery, 2014) and the founder of the Playing Big Facilitator's Training programme, which has trained coaches and facilitators in 30 countries to use her framework with women in leadership development contexts. Her work addresses the inner life dimension of women's leadership development: how the internal voices and patterns of thinking that hold women back are not simply confidence deficits but specific learned strategies for safety that made sense at an earlier point in their lives and careers but are now constraining their effectiveness as leaders.

Her framework distinguishes between fear (a practical response to genuine threats) and "inner critic" (a mental habit pattern built on imagined threats), and provides specific practices for working with both without being trapped by either. For women's leadership development practitioners who have found that skills training alone does not produce the behaviour change they are looking for, her framework provides one of the most structured and evidence-informed approaches to the internal dimension of women's leadership development available. Her 2025 and 2026 coaching and facilitator training programmes and her LinkedIn and Substack content address how the current moment of political and economic uncertainty is activating specific inner critic patterns in women leaders and what to do about them.

Intersectionality, Data, and Emerging Voices

The people in this category are either extending the women in leadership conversation into new areas or building the evidence base for the next generation of structural understanding.

37. Mary Brinton

Mary Brinton is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and one of the foremost comparative researchers on gender, work, and family across different institutional contexts. Her comparative research on Japan, South Korea, and other East Asian societies, as well as her work on the United States, provides essential cross-cultural evidence for understanding how different policy and institutional arrangements produce different outcomes for women in leadership. Her research shows how institutional factors, including childcare provision, parental leave policy, educational structure, and employment law, shape the degree to which women's career advancement is structurally supported or constrained.

Her book Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 1993) and her subsequent comparative work provide the most rigorous sociological foundation available for understanding how national-level institutional arrangements shape women's labour market outcomes. Her ongoing research in 2025 and 2026 addresses how the policy responses to demographic change in East Asia and the United States are reshaping the institutional context for women's career advancement, with particular attention to how low fertility rates and ageing populations are creating political pressure for structural support for working mothers that has historically been absent in many contexts. Her work is essential reading for anyone interested in the institutional rather than individual-level determinants of women's leadership.

38. Mita Mallick

Mita Mallick is a Head of Inclusion, Equity, and Impact with more than a decade of experience in corporate inclusion and leadership roles across Unilever, Carta, and other major organisations. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice with more than 180,000 followers, making her one of the most amplified practitioner voices on women in corporate leadership and inclusive workplaces on the platform. Her writing in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and the Wall Street Journal in 2025 and 2026 addresses how DEI rollbacks are affecting women of colour in corporate leadership, how leaders can build inclusion in their teams without relying on formal programmes that are under political threat, and how authentic representation in advertising and communications supports rather than distracts from the business case for women's advancement.

Her particular focus on women of colour in corporate leadership, and her practitioner perspective from senior inclusion roles in major consumer companies, provides a grounding in the day-to-day reality of how inclusion does and does not work in large organisations that academic research often lacks. Her LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 are consistently substantive, evidence-based, and directly actionable for managers and HR leaders trying to navigate the current environment. She is one of the most practical and honest voices on what inclusion actually requires when the formal infrastructure for it is weakening.

39. Dolly Chugh

Dolly Chugh is a Professor of Management and Organizations at NYU Stern School of Business and the author of The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias (HarperBusiness, 2018). Her research focuses on the psychology of ethical and unethical behaviour in organisations, with a particular emphasis on how well-intentioned people contribute to bias and discrimination through what she calls "bounded ethicality": the limits of our awareness of our own moral blindspots. Her specific contribution to the women in leadership conversation is her research and writing on how white women can be more effective allies for women of colour, which she addresses directly and honestly in a way that many voices in this space avoid.

Her 2025 and 2026 LinkedIn content and Harvard Business Review writing address how the current political and social moment is activating specific forms of avoidance and rationalisation in well-intentioned people, and what psychological practices can help people engage more honestly with their own contribution to inequality. Her podcast and speaking work in 2025 and 2026 address how AI is creating new forms of bias amplification that require the same bounded ethicality awareness that her foundational research developed for human decision-making. She is one of the most honest and psychologically sophisticated voices on the inner life of people who want to be on the right side of gender equity but consistently fall short.

40. Linda A. Hill

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where she is also the Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative. She is the co-author of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011, with Kent Lineback), Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014, with Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback), and 20 Years Ahead (2025). Her foundational research on what it means to become a boss, drawing on her longitudinal study of 19 new managers across their first year in management, provides the most empirically grounded account available of the psychological and behavioural transition that promotion into management requires.

Her specific contribution to the women in leadership conversation is her research on how that transition is experienced differently by women: the double burden of being perceived as both new to leadership and subject to pre-existing gender expectations about how leaders behave. Her Harvard Business School executive education programmes for senior women leaders, her 2025 and 2026 speaking at global leadership conferences, and her ongoing research on how leadership is being transformed by AI and demographic change make her one of the most institutionally central academic voices in the field. Her LinkedIn presence and Harvard Business Review contributions in 2025 and 2026 are authoritative and practically grounded.

41. Kweilin Ellingrud

Kweilin Ellingrud is the McKinsey Global Institute Director and Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer for McKinsey, and is the co-author, with Lareina Yee and Maria del Mar Martinez, of The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2025), which received the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Award. The Broken Rung offers women practical tools to identify and overcome the hidden barriers to career progression by building what the authors call "experience capital": the skills, wisdom, and relationships accumulated through specific types of work assignments, mentors, and development experiences that compound into career advantage.

Her foundational McKinsey research on gender equality, including the Power of Parity series and the annual Women in the Workplace reports she has contributed to, makes her one of the most credible quantitative voices on the economics of gender equity in corporate settings. Her Forbes column and speaking at global conferences in 2025 and 2026 address how AI and the future of work are creating new forms of the broken rung dynamic that women need to navigate, and how organisations can design the structural changes required to prevent the AI gender gap from compounding the existing representation gap. Her membership on the Council on Foreign Relations and her background living in China, Ecuador, France, and Japan give her a genuinely international comparative perspective on gender equity.

42. Amy Diehl

Amy Diehl is a gender equity researcher and Chief Information Officer at Wilson College, and the co-author, with Leanne Dzubinski, of Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024). Her research focuses on how gender bias operates not as a single glass ceiling but as a series of glass walls that surround women at every level of organisations: male gatekeeping, role incongruity, identity bifurcation, unequal penalties, delayed recognition, and invisibility. Her empirical documentation of these six mechanisms provides one of the most practically useful taxonomies of organisational gender bias for HR and DEI practitioners working on structural intervention.

Her writing in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company in 2025 and 2026 addresses the intersection of gender bias and AI in hiring and performance evaluation, extending her glass walls framework to the specific ways in which algorithmic bias reproduces and amplifies the six barriers she has documented in human organisational settings. Her speaking circuit in 2025 and 2026, covering women's leadership conferences and HR professional development events, and her active social media presence make her one of the most accessible practitioner-researchers in the current field. Her distinctive combination of IT leadership experience and gender equity research gives her a credibility in technology and higher education contexts that more humanities-focused researchers sometimes lack.

Building the Next Generation

The people in this final category are either building new platforms, challenging old assumptions, or bringing fresh perspectives to the conversation about what women in leadership requires in 2026.

43. Bridget Griswold

Bridget Griswold became the CEO of Lean In in 2026 at 25 years old, appointed by Sheryl Sandberg to lead the organisation's pivot toward addressing the AI gender gap. A Lean In survey of 1,000 US adults, released in April 2026, found that 33 percent of men use AI daily compared to 27 percent of women, that women are 23 percent less likely to receive manager support to use AI, and that men are 27 percent more likely to have been praised for using AI (CONFIRMED RESULT). Griswold's appointment and her framing of the AI gender gap as the defining women in leadership challenge of 2026 represents a generational shift in how the most prominent women's leadership advocacy organisation thinks about its core problem.

Her work makes the connection between AI adoption as a career tool and women's leadership advancement explicit: if women are systematically under-supported in AI adoption by their managers, and if AI competency is increasingly rewarded and correlated with advancement, then the AI gender gap is not a technology problem but a leadership development and equity problem. Her 2026 public commentary, media appearances, and advocacy through Lean In address this connection directly and position it as the next chapter in the women in leadership story that Sheryl Sandberg began with the original Lean In. She is the most visible emerging leader in the institutional women in leadership advocacy space.

44. Ruth Gotian

Ruth Gotian is the Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and one of the world's leading researchers on the habits and practices of high achievers. Thinkers50 named her the number one emerging management thinker in 2021 and she was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award in 2025, placing her among the top eight coaching and mentoring thought leaders globally. LinkedIn recognised her as a Top Voice in Mentoring. She is the author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance (Kogan Page, 2022) and the Financial Times Guide to Mentoring.

Her research on the habits and mindsets of high achievers, including Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, Olympic and NBA champions, has produced a framework that is particularly valuable for women in leadership because it identifies the specific development practices that produce peak performance across diverse contexts rather than the traditionally masculine individual-hero model of success. Her HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers, co-authored with Elisa Farri and published in 2025, extends her success science framework to the AI transformation of management, with particular attention to how leaders can develop their AI capabilities without undermining the human skills that remain essential. Her active LinkedIn presence, her Forbes column, and her Psychology Today writing in 2025 and 2026 make her one of the most accessible research-to-practice voices on women's leadership development.

45. Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, a social sex media platform she founded in 2012 to tackle the gap between real world sex and pornography. Before that, she had a distinguished career as a senior advertising executive and founder of IfWeRanTheWorld, a platform for turning good intentions into good actions. Her broader contribution to the women in leadership conversation is her public and forceful advocacy for women's economic empowerment, for ending what she calls the "actionable sexual discrimination and harassment and abuse" that systematically disadvantages women in leadership roles across industries, and for the specific ways in which women of all ages can build economic independence and leadership authority on their own terms rather than waiting for permission.

Her TED Talk, her prolific and often provocative LinkedIn presence, and her speaking at major business and advertising conferences in 2025 and 2026 make her one of the most visible voices on the structural economic and cultural barriers to women's leadership that are too often addressed only politely in corporate contexts. Her advocacy for age-positive leadership, for the value of women's full life experience at every career stage, and for treating sexual harassment and abuse as the leadership development barriers they actually are provides a complement to the more individually focused coaching and academic research in this space.

46. Mary-Frances Winters

Mary-Frances Winters is the founder and CEO of The Winters Group, a global diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm, and the author of multiple books on inclusion and leadership, including We Can't Talk About That at Work (Berrett-Koehler, 2017), Inclusive Conversations: Fostering Equity, Empathy, and Belonging Across Differences (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), and Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives (Berrett-Koehler, 2023). Her work focuses on how organisations can build the conversational and structural foundations for genuine equity rather than performative diversity commitment.

Her specific contribution to the women in leadership conversation is her work on the intersection of race and gender in organisational life, and on the conversational barriers that prevent organisations from doing the genuine systemic work required to advance women of colour. Her LinkedIn presence and HBR writing in 2025 and 2026 address how the current political retreat from DEI is requiring organisations to find new language and new structural approaches to equity work that are less dependent on the formal DEI infrastructure that is under threat. Her 40-year career in diversity consulting and her track record of influencing major organisations gives her a practitioner authority that academic voices in this space often lack.

47. Lila Ibrahim

Lila Ibrahim is the Chief Operating Officer of Google DeepMind, one of the most senior women in the global artificial intelligence research and development landscape. Before joining DeepMind, she served as President of Coursera, where she oversaw the company's rapid global growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her career trajectory, from Intel to Kleiner Perkins to Coursera to DeepMind, provides one of the most direct models available of senior leadership in deep technology fields for women navigating the intersection of gender and the AI transformation of every industry.

Her public speaking in 2025 and 2026, including at major technology and leadership conferences, addresses how to build and sustain diverse leadership teams in the most technically competitive environments in the world, where the gender representation challenges are among the most acute in any sector. Her specific insight, that the structural and cultural conditions required to attract and retain women in AI leadership are the same conditions that produce the most innovative and high-performing teams for everyone, connects the women in leadership agenda directly to the AI competitiveness agenda that organisations are urgently trying to address. Her LinkedIn presence and public commentary make her one of the most visible examples of senior female leadership in the most consequential sector of 2026.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

A number of additional researchers and practitioners were considered for this directory and deserve acknowledgement here. Lareina Yee and Maria del Mar Martinez, co-authors with Kweilin Ellingrud of The Broken Rung, are themselves significant McKinsey contributors to the women in leadership evidence base. Barbara Annis, whose work on gender intelligence with Keith Merron provides an alternative framework for thinking about gender difference in leadership, was considered. Annalise Presutti, Priya Parker on facilitation and women's voice, and several DEI practitioners building on Dobbin and Kalev's structural approach in specific industry contexts are all worth following. The gender and leadership research cluster at INSEAD, where Herminia Ibarra has trained a generation of researchers, continues to produce important work.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most persistent error in the women in leadership conversation is treating the gap as primarily a confidence problem. The evidence does not support this framing. Shelley Correll's research on the motherhood penalty, Joan Williams's documentation of four distinct bias patterns, and Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev's analysis of what intervention types actually work all point in the same direction: the gap is structural, not individual. Programmes designed to build women's confidence, networking, and negotiation skills without addressing the organisational systems that disadvantage them produce individual improvement without systemic change.

A second common mistake is treating "women in leadership" as a homogeneous category. The experiences of white women and women of colour are significantly different in ways that Tsedale Melaku, Deepa Purushothaman, Mita Mallick, and Ruchika Tulshyan document with specificity. Programmes designed for the average woman, which in practice means programmes designed for white women, fail women of colour in predictable and documented ways. The most effective organisations design explicitly for the intersection rather than the average.

A third common mistake is assuming that the research consensus in this field is stable. It is not. The Dobbin and Kalev finding that mandatory diversity training reliably backfires was a significant disruption to a large industry. The Correll finding on the motherhood penalty created a shift in how performance evaluation systems should be designed. Staying current with the research, rather than relying on frameworks that were current five or ten years ago, is essential for anyone designing women in leadership programmes in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the current research say about the best interventions to advance women in leadership?

The strongest evidence, summarised by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev's Getting to Diversity and their underlying research, supports structural interventions over individual-focused ones. Mentoring programmes (when well designed), transparency in hiring and promotion criteria, work-life balance initiatives that are available to everyone rather than coded as "women's programmes," and the creation of cross-functional teams that mix groups who rarely work together have the most consistent positive effects. Mandatory diversity training alone, diversity committees without organisational authority, and diversity targets accompanied by punitive sanctions consistently show no positive effect and sometimes produce backlash.

Why is the broken rung more important than the glass ceiling?

The glass ceiling metaphor implies a single barrier near the top of the corporate hierarchy. The research, including the McKinsey Women in the Workplace data and The Broken Rung by Kweilin Ellingrud and her co-authors, shows that the most consequential barrier for most women is not at the top but at the very first promotion to manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager in the United States, only 81 women are promoted. This gap compounds throughout careers, meaning that the demographic underrepresentation of women at the C-suite level is not primarily explained by what happens in the C-suite but by what happens at that very first promotion. Fixing the broken rung requires redesigning the hiring, performance evaluation, and sponsorship systems at the manager level.

How should organisations respond to DEI rollbacks in 2026?

The research from Dobbin and Kalev provides the most evidence-based guidance: the most effective approaches have always been structural rather than rhetorical, and structural changes to hiring, evaluation, and promotion systems do not require the political vocabulary of DEI to be implemented or defended. Jennifer McCollum at Catalyst and Mita Mallick have both argued publicly in 2025 and 2026 that the organisations most likely to maintain their progress on women's advancement during DEI rollbacks are those that embedded structural changes into core business processes rather than maintaining them as separate programmes that could be cancelled. The framing most likely to survive political pressure is business performance and talent competitiveness rather than social justice.

Final Thoughts

The 47 people in this directory represent a fraction of the serious contributors to the women in leadership field globally. What they share is a commitment to evidence over aspiration, structure over individual, and the long work of changing organisations rather than simply inspiring individuals. The research has never been clearer about what the barriers are, what works to address them, and what does not. The gap between that evidence base and what most organisations actually do remains enormous.

Following these voices is not an act of advocacy. It is an act of staying current with a knowledge base that is directly relevant to whether the organisations and teams you lead are making the best use of everyone's capabilities or wasting the majority of them on structural friction that does not have to exist.

For leadership teams that want to build the communication, accountability, and team health structures that make all of these ideas translatable into daily practice, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, listeners in 150+ countries), works with teams globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

McKinsey and LeanIn.org. Women in the Workplace 2025. McKinsey and Company.

Grant Thornton. Women in Business 2026: The Value of Visibility. Grant Thornton International.

Ellingrud, K., Yee, L., and Martinez, M. The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It. Harvard Business Review Press, 2025.

Dobbin, F. and Kalev, A. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn't. Harvard University Press, 2022.

Eagly, A. and Carli, L. Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders. Harvard Business Review Press, 2007.

Ibarra, H. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Harvard Business Review Press, 2015.

Correll, S. and Benard, S. Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? American Journal of Sociology, 2007.

WEF. Global Gender Gap Report 2025. World Economic Forum.

Lean In. AI Gender Gap Survey. Lean In.org, 2026.

Next Read

The leadership challenges facing women in the workplace are inseparable from the broader people and culture conversations happening in every organisation right now. For a broader view of the thought leaders shaping how organisations build high-performing, human-centred cultures where everyone can do their best work, the companion directory at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-people-and-culture-2026 provides the wider organisational context. For the thought leaders shaping HR and talent management strategy, see the HR directory at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-human-resources-2026.