Hired 50/50, led 83/17: where your women go in mid-career
Look at your graduate intake. Then look at your leadership team. In most companies, they look like two different organisations.
They start equal
Women make up 60% of EU university graduates (DLA Piper). In the companies tracked by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, women are 49% of entry-level employees (Women in the Workplace 2025). At the start, the pipeline is full.
They disappear in the middle
Then, at every step up, the share of women drops: 42% of managers, 39% of directors, 35% of vice presidents, 32% of senior vice presidents and 29% of the C-suite. For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women are. These figures come from US and Canadian companies, but the shape will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a European corporate.
In male-dominated fields the drop is steeper. Research by Accenture and Girls Who Code found that half of women in tech leave the industry by the age of 35 (World Economic Forum).
The top stays male
In the Netherlands, women hold 17% of executive board seats at listed companies, and 57 listed companies have no woman on their executive board at all (Female Board Index 2025). Across the EU, only 8% of CEOs are women (DLA Piper).
And the rules have changed
Since 30 June 2026, the EU Women on Boards Directive requires listed companies to have at least 40% of non-executive directors, or 33% of all directors, from the under-represented sex. Dutch law already requires a one-third quota on the supervisory boards of listed companies and asks large companies to set targets for their board and the level below it. And from 2027, Dutch employers will start reporting their gender pay gap (Global Workplace Insider).
You can't meet a board target without a pipeline. And the pipeline breaks in the middle.
It isn't ambition
The easy explanation is that women don't want it enough. The numbers say otherwise. The number of female entrepreneurs in the Netherlands grew by 62% in ten years, to 715,383 (KVK, via Taxlive). Women aren't leaving work. Many of them are leaving employers to build something of their own.
The Women in the Workplace report puts it plainly: "When women receive the same career support that men do, this gap in ambition to advance falls away."
What it costs you before she leaves
Most women don't leave the day the gap opens. They stay, and slowly give less: they stop volunteering, stop pushing, stop raising their hand. In our experience, by mid-career many of these women are delivering around 60% of what they could, at 100% of their salary. Then they leave, and replacing them costs between one-half and two times their annual salary (Gallup).
The causes are rarely about capability. They are things like invisible workload, rewards that don't match what motivates them and decisions made in rooms they're not in. We explain the pattern in Why the check-in, the pep talk and the PIP don't fix disengagement.
Where to start
Find out where your own pipeline leaks. The free Engagement Gap Check takes five minutes and shows your team's effective output, what the gap costs in euros and the three causes most likely behind it.