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"Second-generation bias creates a context — akin to something in the water — in which women fail to thrive."
— Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely & Deborah Kolb, "Women Rising," Harvard Business Review
For years, we’ve told ourselves a neat story about why people struggle to progress at work. It’s the demands of young children, the intensity of caregiving, the “choices” people make outside of work. But spend time inside organisations, really listening, and that story starts to unravel.
Because it isn’t only mothers of small children who are hesitating. It’s women navigating perimenopause alongside caring for aging parents and quietly questioning whether senior roles are still sustainable. Men trying to play a more active role in raising neurodiverse children, while still being seen as committed by their manager. One part of a couple carrying the weight of a partner’s mental health. Dual-income families who can no longer afford for one career to step back but feel forced to choose anyway. Different lives, same question: can I actually make this work here?
Through our work, we get to spend time with incredibly capable, ambitious people who don’t want less from their careers - if anything, they want more. More progression, more responsibility, more meaning, more alignment with the lives they’re actually living. And yet something shifts. Not suddenly, but gradually. They hesitate, they hold back, they stop putting themselves forward in the way they once did. It’s tempting to read this as ambition softening, but that isn’t what’s happening. The ambition is still there, the capability is already there. What’s missing is the belief that the system will meet them where they are.
One experienced woman said to me recently, “I know where I want to get to. I just don’t know what the next move is.” That sentence has stayed with me, because it captures something we don’t often name - not a lack of direction or drive, but the absence of a clear, supported way through; a sponsor; transparency. When that’s missing, we’re seeing that women don’t push harder. They adjust. Quietly, but consistently.
The system isn’t loosening. It’s tightening.
And in the current environment, where performance is under constant scrutiny and ambiguity is the new norm, organisations aren’t loosening the system - they’re tightening it. Flexibility becomes a mandated three-plus-two, and the flexibility that ought to be accessible within it (flex on flex, as we like to say) is too often disappearing. Leaders are expected to deliver outcomes, but not given the permissions to interpret those rules for the people they lead. So what could be flexible becomes fixed. And what could create trust starts to feel like compliance. Flexibility isn’t failing. It’s being constrained. People aren’t reacting to flexibility - they’re reacting to the absence of agency (ability to control their life) within it.
Over time, that shows up in ways organisations don’t always measure. People stop applying for more senior roles. Those who keep going often find themselves navigating the system alone - expressing ambition without sponsorship. As one woman put it to me, “mentoring gives you advice; sponsorship opens doors.” Without that advocacy in the rooms that matter, ambition doesn’t convert into progression.
“We just didn’t have enough women ready”
And here’s the pattern I keep hearing from leaders, almost word for word:
“We were surprised so few women applied.” “The restructure showed us we just didn’t have enough women promotion-ready.” “We need to build a stronger pipeline of women.”
These observations are usually offered with genuine concern. But they often miss what’s actually happened. Because in many of these organisations - particularly those with strong representation of women at entry and middle levels - the pipeline isn’t missing. It’s been quietly disqualified. By unwritten rules that say management and leadership must be full-time. By assumptions about availability and visibility that haven’t meaningfully shifted in twenty years. By role designs that have never been adjusted to reflect the way people actually live. And by what McKinsey’s global Women in the Workplace research has named the broken rung - for every 100 men promoted to manager, only around 81 women are. That gap, locked in at the very first rung of leadership, compounds at every level above. By the time we’re asking why we don’t have enough senior women, the answer was quietly decided years and many promotions earlier.
So the women who might have stepped forward don’t, because they can already see the role - and the conditions - isn’t built for them. And many of those who do are filtered out long before any formal decision is made. The issue isn’t pipeline. It’s conversion. And it’s the conditions that are doing the converting.
“Does the gender pay gap account for tenure? For experience”
There is another question I hear in almost every Gender Deep Dive I run with a leadership team, often within the first few minutes of the gender pay gap data being presented. “Does the data account for tenure and experience?” Sometimes more sharply: “Are you telling us that if we pay two people in the same role differently based on tenure, that’s against pay equity law?” Or, “but the women don’t tend to manage portfolios/deals/clients/stores as big as the men.”
They’re questions worth pausing on. Because in the moment, it sounds like analytical rigour. But what it’s really doing is reaching for a reason that explains - and quietly justifies - the gap. The instinct isn’t to interrogate the system. It’s to assume the women must have less of what the men have. That tenure itself, after all, is gender-neutral.
Except it isn’t.
In 2022–23, fewer than one in 14 Australian managers worked part-time. For Key Management Personnel, the figure was 5%. For CEOs, just 3%. The further up the leadership ladder you go, the less compatible the role is with the way most people actually live. And what little part-time leadership exists isn’t being created by promoting capable part-time employees into senior roles. It is overwhelmingly the result of women already in those roles seeking reduced hours, often after parental leave or to manage care. The path up is functionally closed to the part-time worker. Tenure, in the leadership tier, is almost by definition the tenure of someone who has been able to operate full-time, every year, without interruption - and who has been promoted on the assumption they always will.
But here is the finding that should stop the tenure/experience question in its tracks. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency's own data, segmented by age, shows that women managers earn less than men managers at every single age. The gap doesn’t close at 30, before one could attribute it to parenting interruptions. It doesn’t close at 40 or 45. It peaks in the 55–59 bracket at an annualised gap of more than $85,000. Tenure isn’t the explanation. Age isn’t the explanation. Even when you control for both, the gap holds.
When I shared this finding with a senior woman in one of our coaching sessions recently, she went quiet for a long moment. Then she said, simply: “So it wasn’t me. It was never me.” That recognition matters. Because once you can see it as a system, you can stop wearing it as a verdict.
The conditions that change this aren’t accidental. Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre research using WGEA data found that when organisations adopt a formal flexible work policy, the share of part-time women managers rises by 7.5 percentage points. When that policy is reinforced by formal reporting to company boards, the share rises by 13.6%. Permissions and governance are doing the work.
So when the tenure question gets asked, it isn’t really asking what it sounds like. It’s reaching for a variable the system has already produced, and treating that variable as if it explains itself. This is one example of what second-generation bias looks like today.
Men get promoted on potential. Women get promoted on proof.
Beneath this sits something more fundamental, and harder to see. Herminia Ibarra and her colleagues first named this pattern more than a decade ago. Second-generation bias, they wrote, doesn't require any intent to exclude — it operates through the customary cultural and organisational practices that quietly shape who gets seen as "ready," who gets sponsored into stretch roles, and who gets read as a safe bet for leadership.
It’s why moderately qualified men are routinely promoted on what they might do, while equally qualified women are asked to demonstrate they’ve already done it. It’s why “think manager” still cues “think male.” And it’s why women, in study after study, are perceived as riskier appointments - even when their track record says otherwise. (When a woman’s name is replaced with a man’s on the same CV, evaluators are 60% more likely to say they’d hire the applicant.)
This bias rarely shows up as overt prejudice. It shows up in well-intentioned moments - protecting a working mother from a stretch project, deferring her promotion until she’s “got more experience under her belt.” The catch: the very experiences women are denied are the ones later cited as the reason they weren’t promoted. Which is why the only meaningful path into part-time leadership is through women already at the top stepping down - not through promoting the capability that already exists at every level beneath them.
It also shows up in conversations leaders don’t realise they’re having differently. When organisations are about to appoint a woman with children to a senior role, the leaders responsible often come to us first - to talk through transitions, the support she’ll need, how the role will be designed around her. The conversation simply doesn’t happen when the appointee is a man. The framing is always developmental, always supportive. But beneath it sits a question leaders almost never say aloud: is she a risk?
Imagine if those conversations were also happening with the men. Imagine if leaders called us in before appointing a father of young children or with ageing parents to a senior role, to talk through transitions, the conditions he’d need, how flexibility might be afforded to him too. It would feel strange at first. But it would normalise something fundamental -that caring and leading aren’t in tension, and that the leadership legacy of being present at home is one men can build openly too. The risk frame around women would begin to dissolve. Because it was never really about her. It was about who we believed had to keep care invisible to be taken seriously.
So when, after a restructure, a leader says “we just didn’t have enough women in the pipeline,” what’s often closer to the truth is: we didn’t extend the same assumption of potential, or the same access to stretch experience, that we extended to the men beside them. The tenure and experience were rarely the explanation. It was always the residue.
What changes when agency is present
What I find most powerful is what happens when that dynamic shifts. In our empowerment coaching, this is the pattern we see most often: not a capability gap, but an agency gap. Capability that’s already there, ambition that’s already there - but disconnected from the belief that the system will recognise either.
Our coaching starts with what we call Professional Vision. We help people step back - not to plan within the system, but to think beyond it. We surface the evidence of the capability they’ve stopped seeing in themselves. We reconnect them with their value and their potential, and this reignites their ambition and belief that they are worthy of leadership, of power.
And from that foundation, we equip them with the language and the confidence to negotiate the role, the conditions, and the future they actually want. And every time, the shift is the same. Ambition stops being a question. It becomes non-negotiable.
One woman described it as the first time in twenty-three years she had been asked what she wanted to do next. Another realised she didn’t have to give something up to be a good parent - she could reimagine both. Just last week, a woman whose request for part-time after being appointed into a senior role had been rejected said to us simply, “I know what I’ve got to do.” That’s what agency sounds like. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just clear.
The real question your Execs should be asking
This is the part organisations often miss. When people reconnect with their potential, they don’t wait - they act. They renegotiate, reshape, or leave. The conditions you create determine which. The question isn’t whether your people have agency. The question is whether your leaders have the conditions to receive it, and the decision-making flexibility to keep them as they grow into it.
As one participant put it, “Without this, I would have stayed stuck - less optimistic, more pessimistic, feeling like I was losing out. It changed how I see what’s possible for me and my family.” That’s the shift. Not satisfaction. Not engagement. What’s possible. It’s why, consistently, the people who experience this work give it an NPS of 89+ - not because we’ve made work easier, but because, often for the first time, we’ve made it feel possible.
Another participant put it more starkly: “Women don’t want to be exceptions. They want a system that works.”
For organisations serious about closing their gender pay gap, strengthening representation in leadership, or meeting their WGEA commitments, this isn’t a marginal issue. It’s the work.
Because targets don’t shift on intent alone. They shift when people are connected to their own ambition. When leaders have the conditions to enable it. And when we stop designing workplaces around the assumption that some people have lives and others don’t.
Because everyone - everyone - has both. Career and care. Ambition and family. A life and a leadership trajectory.
Care isn’t an exception to leadership. It’s the precondition for sustainable leadership. And the workplaces that build for that won’t just close their gender pay gaps. They’ll redefine what sustainable leadership looks like.
Published 15 May 2026
