South Africa’s leadership pipeline is still failing women

Dr Shahiem Patel (Dean at Regent Business School)

Women hold 38% of board positions in South Africa’s JSE Top 40 companies. Yet they occupy only 27% of executive positions. Among the JSE Top 200, just 8% of CEOs are women. This should make everyone feel uncomfortable.

South Africa has made measurable progress in bringing women into the boardroom. The figures further down the executive pipeline, however, show that board representation has yet to translate into equivalent opportunities to lead organisations.

As South Africa marks Women’s Month and reflects on National Women’s Day, we should celebrate how far we have come while asking a more difficult question: where in the leadership pipeline are talented women still being lost?

Leadership progress and the executive pipeline

The data suggests that South African business still struggles to progress women into its most senior leadership positions.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s 2025 Sustainability Report records encouraging progress. Women held 38% of board positions in JSE Top 40 companies in 2025, up from 36% in 2024. Women’s representation in executive positions also increased, from 23% to 27%.

By international standards, South Africa performs relatively well on board representation. The same JSE report notes that women occupy 33% of board seats among the top 100 JSE-listed companies, compared with a G20 average of 23%. That progress deserves recognition, although it tells only part of the leadership story.

The gap becomes much more pronounced as we move towards positions carrying direct executive authority. PwC’s 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, analysing the JSE Top 200, found that women account for only 8% of CEOs. Female representation among CFOs is considerably stronger at 25%, having risen from 18% in 2024.

South African companies have demonstrated that board composition can change. The much harder question is why that progress thins so sharply when executive authority is at stake.

Beyond recognition programmes

Every August, South Africa rightly celebrates women through conferences, profiles, corporate campaigns and recognition programmes, while social media fills with messages about women’s resilience and leadership.

These activities have value. Visibility, credible role models and recognition all contribute to changing perceptions of who belongs in leadership.

Their impact will remain limited, however, if the organisational systems responsible for developing, sponsoring and promoting talented women fail them during the other eleven months of the year.

Women’s Month can carry greater weight when celebration is tied deliberately to institutional action, beginning with what happens long before a CEO is appointed.

The questions begin much earlier: who receives the assignments that create executive experience? Profit-and-loss responsibility, sponsorship from influential leaders, succession planning and access to career-defining roles all shape who will eventually be considered “ready” for the top job.

By the time a board begins interviewing candidates for a CEO position, much of the outcome has already been determined by years of decisions further down the leadership pipeline.

Changing the leadership system

That is where organisations must look, but another problem deserves scrutiny.

For years, organisations have responded to gender inequality by creating programmes designed to make women better prepared for leadership. There is certainly a place for leadership development. As an educator, I believe in developing human capability.

We should, however, be careful about the assumption embedded within some of these interventions: that underrepresentation persists because women themselves somehow need fixing.

Another leadership programme will achieve little if a talented woman returns to an organisation in which succession decisions remain opaque, sponsorship is informal and the most career-defining opportunities continue to circulate through established networks.

That question needs to change. Instead of asking, “How do we prepare more women for leadership?”, organisations should also ask, “What is it about our leadership system that prevents capable women from progressing?”

This places greater responsibility on the institution without removing individual agency, and makes gender representation a governance issue rather than simply a human resources initiative.

Vague commitments to “empower women” will achieve little unless South African businesses can demonstrate measurable progress through their leadership pipelines.

Boards should require management to identify gender representation at every significant transition point in the organisation: entry into management, promotion into senior management, appointment into executive roles and inclusion in CEO and C-suite succession pools.

A more revealing measure is where women disappear from the leadership pipeline, and why, rather than the total number employed or represented on the board.

Leadership development should then be linked directly to those pipelines. High-potential women should have access to training, sponsorship, operational responsibility, strategic assignments and roles that build credible pathways towards executive leadership.

The JSE already requires listed companies to adopt policies promoting broader diversity at board level and to report on them annually. The same level of scrutiny now needs to extend deeper into executive succession.

What Women’s Month should test

Women’s Month creates a valuable period of national attention around gender equality.

Corporate South Africa can use that attention to examine who is being prepared to run its organisations five years from now, who receives the opportunities that build executive credibility and where talented women are being lost along the way.

South Africa can rightly point to progress, with women now occupying 38% of board positions in the JSE Top 40. Yet when only 8% of CEOs in the JSE Top 200 are women, the figures show how much work remains beyond the boardroom.

The real test will be found in succession plans: in whether the women now taking their seats at boardroom tables are also being given a credible path to executive authority.

Author Bio

Born and bred in Johannesburg, Dr Shahiem Patel holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Law, an Honours degree in Business Management, a Master of Commerce in Leadership Studies and a Doctor of Philosophy in Leadership. He joined REGENT Business School in 2019 and has led the institution’s flagship Master of Business programme, with a focus on strengthening its relevance to students and responding to developments in business, technology and leadership.

https://regent.ac.za/