While diversity metrics often show progress at junior levels, look further up an organisation and it’s clear that diverse talent is not sticking around or not being afforded opportunities. Dr Aidan McKearney looks at why senior-level diversity is a progression not a pipeline problem. 

Across many of the biggest companies at entry-level, diversity is reasonably healthy.

Furthermore, the business case for diverse leadership – wider perspective, stronger innovation, greater resilience and improved organisational performance – is now widely accepted.

Yet, when you look at the executive floor, where the big decisions are made, the picture changes sharply.

Senior leadership benches remain stubbornly homogeneous in many sectors. Women and minority professionals enter organisations at healthy rates but begin to stall at mid-level.

The reality is that the challenge isn’t getting diverse talent through the door. Progression typically falters later – between entry and senior level.

An ‘escape room’ career

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 47 leaders across diverse global contexts, a qualitative study at Hult International Business School revealed how women and minority professionals navigate pathways to senior leadership.

It explored the systemic barriers that impede their advancement, the critical enablers that accelerate it, and the pivotal role mentoring plays in building inclusive and sustainable leadership pipelines.

What participants described was not, for the most part, a story of overt discrimination or bad intent. It was something subtler: systems that were never designed with everyone in mind, and that have not changed quickly enough to keep pace.

As one participant said: “As a female, you have to prove yourself. It’s almost like you’re in a game – like an escape room. You get from one room to the next, but then you have to prove yourself all over again.”

One engineering firm in our study celebrated its first Black partner in 2023 – among 400 partners. A financial services professional told us that at “partner level, it’s still mostly white men.”

The research shows clearly that the issue is not a shortage of capable people, but rather a failure to advance them.

What’s stalling progression?

Our research identified 10 systemic barriers to advancement, which are embedded in organisational structures, cultures and leadership norms:

1. Vertical segregation. Diversity at entry level simply does not translate into diversity at the top.
2. Affinity bias. “People hire who they identify with,” as one mentor put it. This “halo factor” favours those who resemble current leaders in background, education and communication style.
3. Narrow leadership norms. Leadership remains coded as masculine, alpha-male and individualistic. Those who don’t conform feel they must “put on an act” or leave.
4. Political backlash. Organisations are quietly rebranding diversity work as “belonging” to sidestep controversy, leaving progress vulnerable to shifting external pressures.
5. Authenticity penalties. Underrepresented leaders report constantly monitoring their dress, voice and behaviour. “To get noticed, it feels like you have to put on a bit of an act.”
6. Inconsistent buy-in. Progress depends on the commitment of individual leaders rather than systemic accountability. As one participant observed, “the people who need the learning aren’t the ones who come.”
7. Policy-practice gaps. Flexibility exists on paper but dissolves in practice: “We’re told the organisation supports flexible work. But when you request it, the answer is no.”
8. Return-to-office mandates. Post-pandemic office requirements disproportionately harm caregivers and reverse hard-won, pandemic-era gains on inclusion.
9. The confidence gap. Men tend to apply for roles when they meet half the requirements; women often won’t unless they meet 80%.
10. Mental health stigma. “Invisible disabilities are still stigmatised. You hide it because you want to be seen as capable.” Organisations accommodate physical disabilities but rarely neurodiversity or mental health needs.

What actually works

Taken together, these barriers create that escape-room career mentioned before.

Unfortunately these barriers are not confined to one corner of the organisation. They sit across its structures, systems, leadership styles, reward mechanisms and shared values. Because these barriers operate at a systems level, they cannot be fixed with isolated initiatives.

The encouraging news is that none of this is inevitable – it is, quite simply, in the gift of organisations to remedy the situation.

Our research highlighted the characteristics shared by successful organisations, where genuine progress is being made.

These were the key lessons:

It begins at the top: Where senior leaders visibly champion inclusion in who they hire, who they sponsor and how they behave day to day, culture shifts beneath them. These same leaders tend to model flexibility rather than merely permit it. As one woman put it: “We have a senior female CEO who role models not being in the office because she needs to be home for her family. That matters. It signals that it is allowed.”

Successful organisations treat progression as something to be designed, measured and held to account. They embed diversity into leadership KPIs alongside financial and sustainability targets.

Focusing on internal talent makes a difference: The best organisations back their own people, resisting the instinct to reach for “someone who’s tried, tested, been there, done it”, instead of coaching the capable person already in post. They give employee networks real influence by pairing them with executive champions who can feed issues back to senior level.

Mentoring – particularly external cross-company mentoring – is crucial: The research showed that this is the catalyst that accelerates everything else. Mentoring builds the confidence that closes the application gap, and it changes mentors as much as mentees, deepening the empathy on which inclusive leadership depends.

The talent diverse organisations need is (for the most part ) already present. The task is not to recruit more of it at the bottom, but to stop losing it on the way up.

Changing the conditions that will make diverse professionals want to stay and develop in the organisation is more likely to happen with honest reflection and committed, long-term systemic change in the way the organisation thinks about difference, inclusion, talent, and leadership.

 

 

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