My wife sent me another statistical report from this week. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/WESOUpdate_May2025_1.pdf . We were talking about our daughter’s future on her birthday.
What kind of world will she enter when she starts working in 15 or 20 years? The data surprised me. Across the past decade, women have been moving into high-skilled work faster than men in many economies. I started thinking this isn’t just about my daughter. It’s about economic competitiveness.
For centuries, societies designed systems to keep women out of high-skilled work. However, in the last few decades, as the barriers fall, women are moving faster than the systems designed to absorb them.
But here’s what matters for economies:
- Countries that remove barriers tap larger talent pools.
- A good number of companies that promote women into real authority perform better over time.
As they say, equity is not a favour but an advantage.
Let’s dig deeper into corporate leadership.
In 2025, women led 55 of the Fortune 500—about 11%. That is the highest number in 71 years of the list. My wife’s remark was “that’s painfully low.”
Well I saw something about performance, I didn’t know prior:
- Under Mary Barra, General Motors delivered a record profit of 14.9 billion dollars in 2024, up 21% from the year before.
- Under Lisa Su, AMD’s market value has multiplied many times over the past decade as the company repositioned itself in high‑performance chips.
- A few examples do not prove that all women CEOs outperform all men. But markets reveal a pattern: when women reach the very top, they are true value creators. It shouldn’t even be a discussion.
ILO and OECD data show the pattern: women’s participation in professional and managerial roles is rising. When economies close gender gaps, GDP grows.
At the same time, the pay gap across the whole workforce persists. So although women are accelerating in spaces where power is built, while the system still pays them less for it.
The ILO data also reveals how progress is constrained.
Women’s high-skilled jobs tend to cluster in certain fields: healthcare, education, and social services. Men dominate others: engineering, IT, finance, and many top executive roles.
Both clusters matter. Only one consistently leads to power. But they do not carry the same pay, the same board exposure, or the same pathways into state and corporate power.
Women are advancing faster into high-skilled work—that’s true. But advancement into segregated fields can mean progress with a ceiling.
So my daughter will enter a workforce where:
- Women hold more high-skilled jobs than ever before,
- Women are more visible in leadership than when her great- grandmother started working
- And yet pay gaps, leadership gaps, and field segregation still shape how far that progress can travel.
All three can be true at the same time.
Artemis just returned from the moon, back on Earth, in boardrooms and classrooms. We no longer say women don’t belong in engineering or capital. If we can engineer spacecraft to travel 238,000 miles, we can engineer workforces where gender does not determine career ceilings.
Tiger’s Roar: My demands, as a father and an analyst
My daughter is three years old.
By the time she enters the workforce in the 2040s, we should have made progress. I am demanding systems that move faster.
- To policymakers:
British Columbia showed that design works: targeted trades programs shifted women’s participation in pre‑apprenticeship to roughly one‑third of participants.2024-25-Labour-Market-Development-Programs-Public-Report.pdf
Apply that same urgency to leadership pipelines, STEM fields, and high‑wage sectors. Equity is NOT a side project. - To business leaders:
The market has already answered the question “Can women lead?” with profits, valuations, and resilience. - To educators and parents (including me):
Occupational segregation starts in childhood. Girls nudged toward care work. Boys nudged toward machines and money.
Break those patterns early. Make all pathways visible to all children.
I want my daughter to enter a workforce where her skills, not her gender, define her ceiling.
I want my son to enter a workforce where his success does not depend on his sister’s exclusion.
The data already show this: when we design for equity, talent rises.
Tiger Rifkin analyzes power systems from African geopolitics to global labour markets. Founder, The Witty Observer.