On paper, SA’s record on women in corporate leadership looks good. According to the SNG Grant Thornton Women in Business 2026 report, 47.3% of senior management roles are held by women – one of the highest proportions in the world, and well above the global average of 32.9%.

Not one surveyed local company reported an all-male senior management team. Yet the same report notes that executive authority remains concentrated in far fewer hands, arguing that the challenge has shifted from representation to ensuring women occupy positions with genuine decision-making power.

Looking at the corner offices, only three of the JSE Top 40 have female CEOs. Women executive directors account for 19% of the top tier – against 39% of non-executive directors, the seats with less operational power.

The gap between representation and real authority is, in SA’s case, unusually wide. The question is no longer whether women belong in corporate leadership or whether there is a sufficient number of qualified women for the job; it’s what is standing between women and the reins of power?

‘The glass ceiling persists because organisational culture, biased promotion processes and lack of sponsorship prevent women from accessing the high-stakes mandates that lead to CEO positions,’ says Leoni Grobler, director of executive education at Wits Business School.

Across SA, executive education providers have invested heavily in programmes designed to prepare women for senior leadership, board appointments and executive roles.

Wits Business School has expanded its focus considerably in recent years. Alongside its long-running Women in Leadership (WIL3) programme – specifically designed to equip women with a practical toolkit to navigate stumbling blocks to career advancement and break through the gender barrier at boardroom level – the school recently established a Chair in Gender Equality in partnership with the Female Academic Leaders Fellowship, signalling a shift from simply delivering executive education to addressing the root causes of women continuing to disappear from CEO pipelines.

The school also partnered with Transnet to co-create the Executive Leadership for Women programme, which had 126 graduates this year.

‘South Africa has solved entry into leadership but not progression to power,’ says Grobler.

She adds that leadership programmes are a critical part of the solution. ‘We believe that systematic leadership programmes, equal gender policies and assertive mentoring play a major role in advancing women in top jobs, and executive coaching is a useful tool for addressing glass ceiling barriers for women leaders in South Africa.’

A common critique of women’s corporate leadership programmes is that they ask women to adapt to a system that was built by and for men. This, Grobler categorically denies. ‘We’ve taken a dual approach as we equip women with critical tools to navigate existing barriers while simultaneously driving systemic organisational transformation […]. As our interim director recently stated, the launch of the WBS Chair in Gender Equality could not have come at a more opportune time as the school seeks to enhance its societal impact.’

Not everyone accepts the familiar metaphor of a glass ceiling.

Colleen Larsen, CEO of Business Engage, a corporate platform dedicated to advancing gender ‘mainstreaming’ in the private sector, and president of the SA charter of the global 30% Club, argues that it obscures where the real problem lies.

‘I have never been a great believer in the concept of the glass ceiling,’ she says. ‘The issue is far more nuanced than that.’

Instead, Larsen describes what she calls the ‘slippery ladder’, a term she uses in her book, Gender Matters: A practical response to the slippery ladder. ‘By the time organisations are looking for CEO candidates, the pool of women has already narrowed significantly.’

For decades, she posits, women were encouraged to become outstanding technical specialists – in finance, HR, law, marketing or other fields. That expertise often became a limitation rather than an advantage.

‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with [specialisation]. However, many then have to wait for the one senior role in that function to become available and can inadvertently be viewed as specialists rather than enterprise leaders,’ she says.

The implication is that the success of leadership programmes depends not on ‘fixing’ women, but on broadening their exposure to enterprise-wide decision-making.

‘The reality is that this is not a women’s issue. It is a business issue. If organisations are not harnessing the full diversity of talent available to them, they are simply not doing effective business.

‘I also do not believe that programmes providing broader exposure and leadership capability need to be women-specific. They are good leadership interventions for anyone with potential. […] Leaders do not need to know everything. They need to ask good questions, connect the dots and be able to engage strategically.’

Larsen points to Business Engage’s 24-module course that covers governance, strategy, finance, sustainability and leadership. ‘Through our Board Masterclass Series, we have seen a remarkable shift,’ she says. ‘A number of board appointments have been the result.’

The change, she argues, comes from expanding participants’ confidence rather than their technical competence.

‘They begin to see themselves, and are seen by others, as leaders capable of contributing to broader business conversations and leading larger platforms. They realise they do not need to know everything; they need the confidence and breadth to engage strategically.’

Larsen says Business Engage is seeing an increasing number of companies entering and wanting to share their journeys through the company’s Africa Gender Mainstreaming Awards. Now in their 14th year, the awards recognise and reward private sector firms committed to advancing gender equity.

‘To me, that is significant. Organisations would not be investing time and resources in this work if they were not seeing value from it. There is a growing willingness to showcase what is working, learn from one another and contribute to a broader movement for change,’ she says.

Like Larsen, Marieta du Plessis, director of the Centre for Responsible Leadership Studies at Stellenbosch Business School, dismisses the ‘glass ceiling’ metaphor as outdated. Instead, she makes reference to researchers Alice Eagly and Linda Carli of Northwestern University and Wellesley College in the US, who argue that the metaphor may, in fact, lead managers to overlook interventions that would attack the problem at its roots.

Recent SA evidence supports this, she says, citing a 2025 study of 15 senior women leaders across local industries. The women reported encountering additional glass-ceiling effects specifically at C-suite level, with persistent gender stereotypes constraining their progression into executive roles.

‘Most women’s leadership development has historically taken one of two flawed forms. [Researchers] Ely, Ibarra and Kolb described them as “add women and stir”, delivering to women exactly what is delivered to men, or “fix the women”, training them to be “as good as” men,’ says Du Plessis.

She argues that ‘neither approach accounts for the systemic biases in organisations, so a programme built on either premise produces confident, capable women and then returns them to an unchanged system that still funnels authority elsewhere’.

Programmes earn their place when they do three things the conventional model does not, argues Du Plessis.

‘They treat leadership development as identity work, helping women internalise a leader identity and an elevated sense of purpose in an environment that subtly signals that leadership is not for them; they make […] bias visible and discussable, so that women can name what they are experiencing rather than absorbing it as personal inadequacy and, crucially, so that the men in the room learn to see it, too; and they build sponsorship architecture, not just networks – deliberate mechanisms that connect high-potential women to the decision-makers who will advocate for them when consequential roles open up.

‘Where I would push the design further, and this is where my own work sits, is that the most effective programmes increasingly develop women and men together around a shared and broadened, more conscious definition of what good leadership actually is,’ she says. ‘Isolating “women’s development” from the wider leadership culture can quietly reinforce the very assumption we are trying to dislodge: that women are the variable in need of adjustment.’

DuPlessis, who believes that leadership is ‘about unlocking passion and purpose in others’, cites the Employment Equity Amendment Act, which took effect on 1 January 2025, as a positive development. ‘On 15 April 2025 the Minister of Employment and Labour gazetted sector-specific numerical targets for 18 economic sectors, covering a five-year period to 2030 across the top management, senior management and middle-management levels, together with a new Employment Equity compliance certificate that is required for access to state contracts. Education is one of the named sectors, as is finance. This matters because it moves transformation from voluntary aspiration towards measurable, enforceable expectation.

‘The design point worth watching is that these are framed as flexible sectoral targets, with room for justifiable non-compliance, rather than rigid quotas. The real test will be whether they shift authority, and not just head count,’ she says.

Regulatory pressure may accelerate change at the margins, but sustained shifts in CEO pipelines will hinge on how far companies are willing to redesign sponsorship, promotion and exposure to risk.

If, however, those mechanisms remain largely unchanged, the current plateau in executive power may prove more durable than the headline gains in gender representation suggest.

By Robyn Maclarty
Image: iStock