Women in Leadership 2025:
What the Trends Mean for Black and Minority Women and What Must Happen Next.
Something has shifted in leadership, but not in the way headlines suggest. Progress has not disappeared. It has slowed, narrowed and quietly changed direction and for Black and minority women, that change has been felt first and hardest.
The leadership story of 2025 is not one of collapse, but it is no longer one of momentum either. After nearly a decade of steady progress, the pace of advancement for women has slowed and in some cases quietly reversed. According to LinkedIn State of Women in Leadership 2025, gains that once felt inevitable have stalled over the past two years.
What is often missed in headline summaries is who feels this slowdown most sharply. Black and minority women, already navigating steeper structural barriers, are absorbing the greatest impact.
One of the most striking signals came from workforce participation data. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 300,000 Black women exited the United States workforce, according to the Women Business Collaborative.
This was not driven by choice or lack of ambition. It was the consequence of large-scale job eliminations in sectors where Black women were disproportionately represented. When those roles disappear, the leadership pipeline does not merely narrow. It fractures.
At senior levels, the contrast between progress and exclusion is even more pronounced. The United Kingdom reached a symbolic milestone with women holding over 43 percent of FTSE 350 board roles. Yet women of colour remain largely absent from these gains. Globally, women hold roughly 28 percent of leadership positions and just 24 percent of board seats.
The share held by Black and minority women is significantly smaller. In the United States, McKinsey Women in the Workplace 2025 points to declining corporate commitment to women’s advancement and widening promotion gaps for women of colour, even as organisations continue to speak the language of inclusion.
Representation, however, tells only part of the story.
Black and minority women continue to operate within distinct power dynamics that shape how their leadership is received. Research consistently shows they face higher scrutiny, reduced access to influential networks and persistent stereotypes that limit room for error.
In 2025, leadership discourse increasingly celebrated adaptability, collaboration and authenticity. Yet many women found themselves in environments that invited authenticity in theory while penalising it in practice.
Yet still, leadership did not disappear. It shifted. Black and minority women continued to lead powerfully outside traditional corporate structures.
Through entrepreneurship, community building, advocacy and cultural leadership. When institutions stalled, they built parallel systems. When pathways closed, they created new ones. This is not a retreat from leadership. It is a redefinition of where leadership lives.
What Must Happen in 2026 and Beyond
Progress will not return on its own. It must be designed, protected and measured.
Organisations must rebuild and safeguard the leadership pipeline by tracking intersectional data and intervening early where Black and minority women are exiting. Sponsorship must replace surface-level mentorship, ensuring access to real power networks and decision-making rooms.
Leadership criteria needs to be redesigned to value inclusive, future-focused capabilities rather than outdated norms. Accountability must be enforced by tying diversity outcomes directly to performance metrics.
But above all, cultures must be created where psychological safety is real and where authenticity is not quietly punished.
This is not about optimism or pessimism. It is about precision. The data is clear. The leadership potential is present. The question for 2026 is whether organisations are willing to act with the same seriousness that Black and minority women have shown in sustaining leadership under pressure.
CareerTalk community, this moment calls for more than observation. The shifts happening across sectors are not neutral and they are not evenly distributed.
Some leadership doors are quietly closing through restructures, redundancy cycles and “role recalibration,” while others are opening in less visible spaces such as portfolio careers, advisory work, entrepreneurship, policy influence and community-led leadership.
The critical question is not simply what has changed, but who is being positioned to move forward and who is being left managing the consequences of change without protection or sponsorship.
Your insight matters here.
Naming what you are seeing helps surface patterns that data alone often misses. Sharing where opportunities are narrowing or emerging creates collective intelligence, not individual frustration. This is how CareerTalk moves from conversation to clarity.
If this resonates with your experience, like this post so it reaches others navigating similar shifts. Comment with what you are seeing in your sector and where leadership pathways are evolving or disappearing. Share this with a colleague who needs language, perspective, or reassurance that what they are sensing is real.
The future of leadership will not be defined only by those who already hold power, but by those willing to speak clearly about how power is changing.
