South Africa has a leadership paradox.
Women are increasingly visible around the boardroom table. Yet when the conversation shifts from board representation to executive power, that progress begins to disappear.
Women now hold 38% of board positions in JSE Top 40 companies. But they occupy only 27% of executive positions. Among the JSE Top 200, just 8% of CEOs are women.
Those figures should make Corporate South Africa uncomfortable.
They also raise a much bigger question:
If women are reaching the boardroom, why aren’t more of them reaching the top job?
That is the challenge explored by Dr Shahiem Patel, Dean at REGENT Business School, as South Africa marks Women’s Month and reflects on National Women’s Day.
The boardroom is changing — but not fast enough
There is genuine progress to celebrate.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s 2025 Sustainability Report shows that women held 38% of board positions among JSE Top 40 companies in 2025, up from 36% in 2024.
Women’s representation in executive positions also increased, moving from 23% to 27% over the same period.
By international standards, South Africa also performs relatively strongly on board representation.
According to the same JSE report, women occupy 33% of board seats among the top 100 JSE-listed companies, compared with a G20 average of 23%.
That progress matters.
But boardroom representation tells only part of the story.
The real test is what happens after women get through the boardroom door.
The leadership gap gets wider at the top
The numbers become considerably more striking when executive authority enters the picture.
PwC’s 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, which analyses the JSE Top 200, found that women account for just 8% of CEOs.
The picture is stronger at CFO level, where women represent 25%, up from 18% in 2024.
So South African businesses have demonstrated that leadership structures can change.
The harder question is why that progress becomes thinner as women move closer to the most powerful executive positions.
And according to Patel, the answer requires businesses to look much further down the leadership pipeline.
The CEO race starts years before the CEO appointment
By the time a board begins interviewing candidates for its next CEO, the most important decisions may already have been made.
Who was given responsibility for a major project?
Who received profit-and-loss experience?
Who had access to influential executives?
Who was sponsored by senior leaders?
Who was included in succession planning?
Who received the career-defining assignment that demonstrated they were ready for the next level?
These decisions accumulate over years.
Patel argues that the leadership pipeline needs to be examined long before someone is considered for the CEO position.
That changes the conversation completely.
Instead of asking why there are not enough women ready for the top job, organisations should ask whether they have given talented women the opportunities required to become credible candidates in the first place.
Is the problem really that women need fixing?
For years, organisations have responded to gender inequality with leadership-development programmes designed to prepare more women for senior positions.
There is undoubtedly value in developing skills.
Patel, an educator and leadership specialist, makes that point himself.
But he warns against an assumption that can sit beneath some of these initiatives: that women are underrepresented because women themselves need fixing.
Imagine giving someone another training course while the biggest opportunities continue to circulate through the same informal networks.
Imagine improving someone’s leadership skills while succession decisions remain unclear.
Imagine preparing talented women for executive responsibility without giving them the operational experience that makes that responsibility possible.
That is where development alone can fall short.
As Patel argues, another leadership programme will achieve little if women return to organisations where sponsorship remains informal, succession decisions are opaque and career-defining opportunities continue to move through established networks.
The question therefore needs to change.
Not only:
“How do we prepare more women for leadership?”
But also:
“What is it about our leadership system that prevents capable women from progressing?”
Gender representation is a governance issue
That shift puts greater responsibility on institutions.
Gender representation should not be treated simply as an HR initiative or an annual Women’s Month conversation.
It is also a governance issue.
Patel argues that vague commitments to “empower women” are not enough.
Businesses need measurable evidence of what is happening throughout their leadership pipelines.
That means boards should examine gender representation at significant transition points.
How many women enter management?
How many move into senior management?
How many are appointed to executive positions?
And, critically, how many are included in CEO and C-suite succession pools?
The most revealing number may not be the number of women employed by a company.
It may be the point at which they disappear from the leadership pipeline.
Give women the experiences that create leaders
If businesses identify where women are falling out of the pipeline, the next step is to intervene meaningfully.
Leadership development should be connected directly to those pipelines.
That means giving high-potential women access to:
- Leadership training
- Executive sponsorship
- Operational responsibility
- Strategic assignments
- Career-defining opportunities
- Credible pathways towards executive leadership
The objective is not simply to prepare women to lead.
It is to ensure they have a realistic opportunity to prove that they can.
That distinction matters.
A leadership title without meaningful responsibility does not necessarily create executive readiness.
Neither does a certificate without access to the assignments that build experience.
South Africa already has a framework. Now the pipeline needs scrutiny.
The JSE already requires listed companies to adopt policies promoting broader diversity at board level and to report on them annually.
Patel argues that similar scrutiny now needs to reach deeper into executive succession.
That is where the next phase of progress could be measured.
Not simply by asking how many women sit on boards.
But by asking:
Who is being prepared to run these companies five years from now?
Women’s Month should be more than celebration
Women’s Month creates an important moment for recognition.
South Africans celebrate women’s achievements through conferences, profiles, campaigns and awards.
That visibility matters.
Role models matter.
Recognition matters.
But Patel argues that these efforts have limited impact if the organisational systems responsible for developing, sponsoring and promoting women fail them for the other eleven months of the year.
That is the uncomfortable part of the conversation.
Celebrating women who have already reached the top is important.
But building the pathway for the next generation may be even more important.
The question should therefore extend beyond who is currently sitting in the boardroom.
It should ask who is being prepared to occupy those seats — and eventually lead from them.
The real measure of progress is still ahead
South Africa can rightly celebrate the fact that women now hold 38% of board positions among JSE Top 40 companies.
That is measurable progress.
But the 8% female CEO representation among the JSE Top 200 makes the remaining challenge impossible to ignore.
The boardroom door may be opening wider.
The CEO door is still proving much harder to enter.
And perhaps that is where South Africa’s next leadership conversation needs to begin.
Not with another question about whether women are capable of leading.
But with a much more uncomfortable one:
Are organisations building leadership systems that actually allow capable women to reach the top?
The answer will ultimately be found in succession plans, career opportunities and the decisions being made years before the CEO appointment.
Because representation at the boardroom table is progress.
Representation at the top is the next test.
