Women are already a major part of the technology and design workforce, yet their representation drops as careers progress into leadership. In UX and CX, this creates a particularly important gap: organizations depend on skills like empathy, research, collaboration, strategic thinking, and customer advocacy—but women who demonstrate these capabilities are not always given the opportunity to lead.
The Broken Rung
The leadership gap often starts long before the C-suite.
McKinsey's Women in the Workplace research calls this the “broken rung”: the first step from entry-level to manager. In 2024, for every 100 men promoted from entry-level to manager, only 81 women received that promotion.
That first management opportunity matters. It gives people experience leading teams, influencing strategy, navigating organizational politics, and making decisions—the very experience companies later require for director and executive roles.
In UX and CX, the pattern can be especially damaging. A woman may already be leading research, influencing product decisions, mentoring teammates, solving complex customer problems, and improving processes, yet be passed over because she hasn't formally managed a large team.
Organizations cannot require leadership experience while simultaneously failing to provide women opportunities to gain it.
What makes a great leader?
These behaviors map closely to what successful UX and CX leaders need:
Listening and understanding people
Building trust and collaboration
Developing team members
Influencing without relying on authority
Connecting customer needs to business strategy
Navigating complex stakeholder relationships
These aren't “soft” skills. They are leadership skills.
Why This Matters
UX and CX leaders sit at the intersection of customers, design, technology, and business. Their job isn't simply to produce better interfaces or experiences. It's to help organizations understand people and make better decisions.
That requires leaders who can ask difficult questions, synthesize competing perspectives, build alignment, and advocate for customers while remaining grounded in business realities.
Women already demonstrate many of these capabilities. The opportunity is to recognize that leadership before the title appears on a résumé.
Instead of asking only:
“Has she managed a large team?”
Hiring managers should also ask:
Has she influenced decisions without authority?
Has she mentored or developed others?
Has she led complex research or design initiatives?
Has she improved a process?
Has she resolved stakeholder conflict?
Has she connected customer insights to business strategy?
Has she created clarity in ambiguous situations?
Those are indicators of leadership too.
Fix the Pipeline, Not Just the C-Suite
Hiring more women into executive positions is important, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem if the leadership pipeline remains broken.
Organizations can start earlier by:
Creating clear, structured promotion criteria
Giving women leadership opportunities before they have the title
Providing mentorship and sponsorship
Recognizing influence, collaboration, and team development as leadership
Evaluating demonstrated capability—not just previous titles
The goal is to stop overlooking qualified leaders because they don't fit an outdated definition of what leadership looks like.
For UX and CX organizations, fixing the broken rung isn't just about representation. It's about making sure the people best equipped to understand customers have a genuine path to influence the organizations serving them.
Don't wait until the C-suite to look for women leaders. Fix the rung that gets them there.