practical solutions
How can a business give women fair access to career-building assignments?
It needs to make the experiences that count for progression visible before someone is informally chosen to get them. Waiting for the right person to be noticed is not a fair allocation method.
Illustrative business scenario—not a reported client result.
A business is discussing its next cohort of senior leaders. The panel notes that few women have led a turnaround, owned a major customer relationship or presented a consequential recommendation to the board. Those experiences are treated as evidence of readiness. Yet none of them appears in a published development route. They arise when a senior sponsor thinks of someone, when a vacancy opens unexpectedly or when a complex piece of work needs an immediate owner.
The problem is not that the women in question lack confidence. The problem is that the organisation has made career-building work visible only after it has already been allocated.
The assignment often matters before the promotion conversation
A promotion decision is usually the end of a longer sequence. By the time a panel asks who has demonstrated commercial judgement, enterprise leadership or board-level exposure, someone has already had access to the work that demonstrates it.
Not every important assignment should be rotated: some require expertise, continuity or local knowledge. The question is whether experiences treated as readiness evidence have a visible route towards them.
The UK government’s evidence review on women’s progression identifies lack of formality and transparency in progression as a barrier. It also notes that informal networks can shape access to advancement and work allocation. 1 The mechanism is simple: if career-defining work is allocated through private familiarity, the later panel may appear to assess merit while relying on a record of opportunity that was not equally available.
Why “put yourself forward” is not enough
Telling people to volunteer creates a partial route at best. An individual cannot put herself forward for an assignment she does not know is being considered, or for a role already discussed informally. Initiative matters but cannot repair an opaque opportunity system.
The 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that women continue to receive less career support and less sponsorship and manager advocacy. It is based on data from 124 participating organisations, surveys of 9,500 employees and interviews with 62 HR leaders in the United States. Its setting does not make it a direct diagnosis of a UK employer, but it reinforces the distinction between individual ambition and access to support. 2
Make the experiences visible, not the people “high potential”
A bounded change is to define a short list of career-building experiences for a leadership level or succession route: leading a cross-functional commercial decision, owning a recovery plan, presenting a risk case to the board, or taking responsibility for a customer or operational outcome.
Describe the work, decision rights and evidence it should generate. Do not make the list a personality label, automatic promotion gate or promise of progression. It should turn “she has not had enough exposure” into a testable question: exposure to what, through which route, and by when?
A business can then make upcoming opportunities visible through its existing leadership forums. A manager might still appoint the person with the right fit for an urgent piece of work. The decision is more defensible when the criteria, scope and rationale are clear, and when the same small pool is not selected by default.
Give sponsorship a defined job
Sponsorship is often discussed as a relationship quality. In an allocation system, it has a practical function: an informed senior person names a capable leader for a particular opportunity and explains why the match is credible.
That is different from asking a sponsor to make a general endorsement. The opportunity, the relevant evidence, the decision point and the support required can all be stated. It also makes room for a transparent “not this time” decision with a clear reason, rather than leaving someone to infer what happened.
A short assignment record can capture the opportunity, nomination route, selected person, selection rationale, scope, support and learning review. This is not a claim that documentation makes a decision unbiased. It makes the basis of allocation visible enough to test later.
Measure access, not just representation at the end
The potential payoff is a more reliable route into work that builds evidence for future decisions. It is not a guarantee that every person will want the same role or that the next promotion outcome will change.
Useful measures might include the number of career-building assignments announced before selection; nominations and acceptances by gender and level; the share of selected leaders who receive agreed decision rights and support; and the mix of people gaining the experiences the business says matter. Review a defined period and the actual work, not only a list of intentions.
The measures need context. A small team will not generate enough high-profile assignments to support fine-grained conclusions. A role may require expertise that legitimately narrows the field. The question is whether those constraints are explicit and whether the route into the next opportunity is clear.
Keep individual development and organisational design separate
A leader can map the experiences her target role appears to require, identify evidence already available and ask a manager or sponsor about the next relevant opportunity. Those are useful individual actions. They are not a substitute for fair allocation.
The organisation owns the work design: how opportunities are defined, where they are announced, who can nominate, how selection is explained and whether experience is treated as a private favour. Those are decision-system questions, not evidence of a woman’s confidence or capability.
For a related view of how access and information can form before a formal meeting, read See the Decisions Before the Meeting.
If you want a clearer picture of the political and stakeholder conditions around your own next opportunity, start with the Free Performance Assessment. It takes 15 minutes, with no cost and no commitment.