Women executives in corporate America are feeling caught under a microscope.
The Harvard Business Review, a nonprofit publication associated with Harvard Business School, recently revisited 60 years’ worth of data around perceptions of and challenges for women in power in U.S. businesses, and spoke with dozens of senior executives to compare their insights to those gleaned from past research efforts.
They found that 90% of women today feel their fellow women in executive roles are judged more critically than men, while just 35% of male respondents agreed. What’s striking, though, is that in 2006, only 35% of women felt that way (as well as 35% of men). And, 83% of the women who took part in the 2026 survey say they feel pressure to be “more exceptional” than men in order to get ahead. In 2006, just 68% of women responded as such.
Other questions from the survey, such as ones about promotion criteria, further revealed women’s lack of belief in the existence of a true meritocracy for advancement in American businesses.
The problems of blocked advancement and higher standards for women – both persistent ones – stem from the fact that “organizations that most loudly proclaim meritocratic values are often where that interpretation is most skewed against women,” HBR experts said. “Managers in explicitly meritocratic organizations show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women precisely because their belief in the system’s fairness reduces their impulse to self-scrutinize.”
While that is a chronic issue, the newer spike in women’s growing frustrations and falling perceptions of meritocracy observed in this year’s survey comes in large part from growing political polarization and rollbacks in diversity, equity and inclusion measures, researchers continued.
Worse, “women’s heightened awareness of bias against them – an awareness compounded by coverage of the elimination of tools and initiatives aimed to help address it – also seems to be having downstream impacts on their ambition.” In other words, with career hurdles made higher and more visible to women, the drive to leap over them is waning.
Still, the structural barriers are far greater than the feelings of discouragement, those involved in the study noted – and though there are ways to fix the professional pipeline for women, and to ensure that they can thrive in leadership roles, the men who remain disproportionately in charge simply aren’t taking advantage.
“What 60 years of evidence makes clear,” HBR researchers wrote, “is that the barrier was never the tools; it was the willingness to actually use them.”
