Every August, we celebrate Women's Equality Day. It's an opportunity to recognize the women who challenged expectations, broke barriers, and opened doors for those who followed. They deserve to be celebrated.
But after more than 40 years in leadership, I find myself asking a different question: If women have proven they can lead, why are they still so underrepresented at the very top?
In 2026, women run roughly 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies — a record high. It's an achievement worth recognizing. But it's also worth pausing on what that record actually means: If 11 out of 100 is the bar we're celebrating, we need to reevaluate what “success” looks like.
I've spent my career as a technology executive in government, including at the Department of Defense and Department of Justice, as well as in academia, healthcare, and corporate America. More often than not, I was the only woman in the room.
I remember one day, decades into my career, when I was a senior executive at Intel, sitting in a conference room at J.P. Morgan surrounded entirely by men. I looked around the table and realized I was the only woman there — again. Not a woman in the room. The woman.
Dark suits. White shirts. The same haircuts. An identical sense of certainty. And then me, quietly calculating the visual math problem unfolding in real time. What struck me wasn't that it had happened. By then, I was used to it. Maybe that was the problem. Decades into my career, why did so many rooms at the highest levels of business still look like that?
People often ask what it took for me to get into those rooms. Grit, perseverance, confidence. All of these mattered. I also had to unlearn something many women of my generation were taught early: Do great work, keep your head down, and eventually someone will notice. I learned that performance is the price of admission, and execution is table stakes. But leadership also requires visibility, enterprise impact, relationships, and sponsors, the people willing to advocate for you when you're not in the room.
Learning those rules helped me advance. But I began asking a more uncomfortable question: Why have we spent so much time teaching women how to navigate the system instead of asking whether the system itself needs to change?
For decades, our answer to women's underrepresentation has been to speak up more, negotiate harder, build confidence, network more strategically, find sponsors, and, of course, lean in. But frankly, leaning in was never enough.
Women leaned in, worked harder, and became more resilient. We learned how to navigate rooms that weren't built with us in mind. Some of us kicked doors down and cleared obstacle after obstacle to reach the C-suite. And then we celebrated women's ability to overcome those obstacles as evidence that the system was working.
It wasn't.
Many of the assumptions that still shape corporate leadership were built for another era: career paths organized around uninterrupted employment, leadership models that reward constant visibility, and informal networks where opportunities are discussed long before the position ever gets posted.
Women entered those systems and accomplished extraordinary things. Not because the systems suddenly became equitable, but because women learned how to succeed despite them. We've celebrated that resilience. And we should, but resilience should never have been the requirement.
There has been real progress. Women now hold about 29 percent of C-suite positions, up significantly over the past decade. But 29 percent is still nowhere near parity, and women continue to receive less effective sponsorship and senior-level career support than men. That matters because employees with sponsors are promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without them.
We still ask women to build careers and families inside systems that often treat those responsibilities as if they exist in completely separate worlds. The U.S. still lacks the kind of universal infrastructure — from paid family leave to affordable child care — that would make combining the two less punishing. Building a career and building a family are both full-time jobs everywhere except on the org chart, where only one of them counts.
And now we're standing at another inflection point. Artificial intelligence is reshaping organizations faster than any transformation I've witnessed in my career. Companies are reconsidering jobs, workflows, organizational structures, skills, and even what uniquely human contribution looks like. That disruption creates risk, but it also gives us something extraordinary: an opening.
For the first time in generations, companies are being forced to reconsider how work actually gets done. The question is whether we’ll simply use new technology to digitize yesterday's assumptions, or whether we'll have the courage to redesign work itself. As I see it, these are the issues we need to tackle:
- Will flexibility become a strategic advantage rather than a career penalty?
- Will we reward outcomes instead of proximity and visibility?
- Will access to AI tools and training create opportunity broadly, or become another advantage distributed unevenly? (Already, research finds that entry-level women are considerably less likely than men to say their managers encourage them to use AI tools.)
- Will the people designing the future of work actually reflect the workforce they're designing it for?
Women's Equality Day should absolutely be a day to celebrate the women who changed history, but celebration without examination isn't enough.
The question facing leaders today is no longer whether women are ready to lead. Women have answered that question in businesses, governments, universities, hospitals, and every other institution where they've been given the opportunity. The harder question is whether we're finally ready to build organizations where women no longer have to succeed despite the system.
I've spent much of my career kicking down doors. I don't want my daughters to have to kick down the same ones. I want them walking into rooms that were built with them in mind.
Lisa Davis is a bestselling author, Fortune 500 executive, and keynote speaker who spent four decades leading in rooms where she was often the only woman at the table. Her book, The Only Woman in the Room: How to Win in a Workplace (Still!) Built For Men, is available now.
