How to Retain Women in the Workplace: What Actually Works

In many modern organisations, retaining women in senior roles is one of the biggest challenges. Only 22% of UK mid-market businesses have a female CEO or managing director, down from 30% in 2023. It is rarely to do with women having a lack of ambition, or being less capable, but more often, women leave organisations due to their structure and expectations not reflecting the reality of their lives outside of the workplace. When companies look at what women need to stay and progress within the workplace, retention often improves quickly.

"Only 22% of UK mid-market businesses have a female CEO or managing director, down from 30% in 2023."

Here is what the evidence and lived experience tell us, along with some changes you can make to help improve going forward into 2026.

 

Why Retention of Women Still Fails in Many Workplaces

Retention fails because a lot of workplaces are still focused on outdated assumptions about what a leader looks like, and how work actually gets done. Rigid hours and narrow progression routes can often be something that stops women from moving up the ladder – these systems were never designed with them in mind and this is why they struggle with them.

There are some issues that show up time and time again:

• Leadership teams lack diversity and therefore the pipeline for moving people into leadership inevitably reflects this.
• There are structural and social barriers than unintentionally push women out.
• There is a misunderstanding of what women might need in order to thrive long term in a role.

This results in what you’d expect: organisations lose out on exceptional talent, and the needle never moves, leaving leadership teams frustratingly similar as time goes by.

 

What do Women Need to Stay in Senior Roles?

1. The structures need fixing, not the people within them

One of the most consistent messages from women in senior roles is that the problem is not the women in these roles – it’s the structure around them. All too often, we see recruitment and promotion paths reward people who look and think like the people who are already in the team, and even well-intentioned policies can create unintentional barriers. Fixing this starts with rethinking your processes, not your people. Using mixed panels for hiring and progression discussions, and test whether those systems support everyone they’re open to, rather than the people who just fit the existing mold.

"Women held just 36.8% of senior leadership roles in UK workplaces in the year ending March 2025, and this share has declined for the third year running."

2. We need to see real allyship from leaders

Allyship shouldn’t just be a slogan. It should look like leaders using their influence to support and champion people who face barriers others don’t need to think about. This is really important: the biggest career leaps a lot of women make come from the people above them who are advocating for them and holding doors open.

Men have to play a central role here: most senior positions are still held by men, meaning they hold the greatest power to shift what happens next. When men make an active choice to champion women in their team, the impact can be immediate.

It’s helpful too, to distinguish mentorship from sponsorship. Mentorship can absolutely help support confidence, and be a guiding hand for someone; sponsorship is someone who’s already in the room suggesting people pay attention to their sponsor, and putting them forward for opportunities. Women need both of these to progress.

3. Your flexibility can be part of your retention strategy

Flexible working is one of the biggest factors influencing whether women stay with or leave an employer. Research consistently shows that 84% of women said flexibility is a key factor when applying for a new job, and 49% of women said hybrid working contributed to their promotion to a more senior role.  It’s not a soft benefit that only contributes to culture; it’s a critical tool for retention and progression.

"49% of women said hybrid working contributed to their promotion to a more senior role."

One thing some organisations have seen success with is implementing job share models and custom working patterns. With a job share, you get two brains and two perspectives without losing the full weekly coverage a lot of senior roles need, and often result in higher output than one person stretched too thin. Flexibility does need to mean lower standards – its intented to support people to meet those standards sustainably without burning out.

 

The Invisible Load 

This term refers to the mental and emotional work many women carry out when they’re not at their desks – household logistics, childcare planning and emotional labour often sit disproportionately with women, even in dual-career families.

Among hybrid/flexible workers, 68% agreed that flexibility helped level the playing field for women.

This adds an additional layer of responsibility, which inevitably can affect energy, as well as availability and how someone is perceived within the workplace – it’s not about capability, more about what women have the capacity for. If we ignore this, it can lead to organisations misinterpreting what they see from outputs, and inadvertently, it penalises women for managing more than people realise. Creating environments that understand and respect this reality is essential for retention.

 

Diversity of Thought is Good for Business

Companies often talk about diversity in demographic categories, but the real goal people should be chasing is diversity of thought. If there are only similar backgrounds and shared lived experiences at the table, decision-making often becomes predictable – the group reinforces its own ideas, and innovation can stall.

Research shows that gender diverse teams outperform all male teams by around 25%, and ethnically diverse teams rate better in performance by more than a third.

"Gender diverse teams outperform all male teams by around 25%."

Also, we need to think about it from a customer perspective: if your customers are diverse, your leadership team should reflect that. When there are different perspectives represented in leadership teams, organisations make better decisions and can avoid blind spots, all of which results in better outcomes all round.

 

Practical Tips to Improve Retention

These are some evidence-based actions you can take now to help your retention moving forward:

• Redesign roles around outcomes rather than hours worked.
• Develop mixed gender interview and promotion panels.
• Challenge recruitment briefs that replicate the existing team.
• Look at embedding flexibility culturally rather than through policy.
• Consider senior-level job share options.
• Use reverse mentoring to help leaders understand lived experience.
• Focus on diversity of thought when making board and leadership appointments.
• Create environments where honesty about life outside work is safe and supported.

These actions don’t need huge budgets, but what they do require is consistent drive and time to be allowed to work.

Retaining women matters for the performance of your business, and will give you a competitive advantage. Teams that reflect wider perspectives will make smarter decisions and allow you to look at things from a range of people’s points of view. Your organisation will also attract stronger candidates, and hold onto them longer.

 

Retention Requires Action, Not Just Awareness

Women leave their jobs not due to their incapability, or their lack of ambition, but because the structures around them make staying harder. Retention gets better when workplaces work on removing the barriers that sometimes push women out, and then put work into building environments where they can lead without compromising who they are outside of work. Every leader has a part to play in driving this change, and the businesses that take this seriously will hold onto the talent that others may lose.