Over the last fifteen years, the share of women on UK FTSE boards has climbed from 9.5% in 2011 to 43% today; genuine progress, and proof that voluntary, business-led targets can move the needle. But look one rung down the ladder and the picture changes sharply. Women hold roughly one in six executive director roles. Just 17% of chairs are women, 8% are CEOs, and 21% are finance directors.

This isn't a pipeline problem in the way it's usually described. It's an institutional one. When board representation began rising, many organizations assumed executive leadership would naturally follow suit. It hasn't. That miscalculation meant companies under-invested in the deeper structural barriers, leaning instead on board-level targets set by campaign groups like the 30% Club. The result: a visible win on boards, and a stalled one where the actual power sits.

Name the real gatekeeper: sponsorship, not merit

A new report from the FTSE Women Leaders Review , co-authored by Professor Elena Doldor (Queen Mary School of Business) and Dr Madeleine Wyatt (King's Business School), puts data behind what many practitioners have long suspected. Drawing on promotion records from a global consulting firm and 91 interviews with senior leaders, HR and D&I professionals, and promotion candidates, the research names sponsorship, not merit, and not simply representation, as the real gatekeeper to senior leadership.

Sponsorship as a career intervention was popularized by economist and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett , whose research distinguished it sharply from mentorship: sponsors don't just advise, they spend political capital on someone else's behalf. Dr Wyatt, the report's co-author, put the challenge plainly: "Sponsorship is about advocacy, sharing networks and taking political risks for someone else, but the reality is that not everyone has equal access to these relationships at work. Inclusion initiatives that match diverse talent with sponsors are an excellent starting point to address this, but quality sponsorship depends on how those relationships are supported to flourish."

The report finds that promotion decisions are still shaped by informal conversations and organizational politics that operate largely out of view. One recurring barrier is what Harvard Business School's Alexandra Feldberg calls the "task bind", the penalty women face for gravitating toward team-contributor and front-line work, at the expense of the visible, strategic roles that actually get noticed for promotion.

Vivienne Artz, CEO of the FTSE Women Leaders Review, framed the stakes: "While transformational progress has been achieved from 9.5% to 43% women's representation on the boards of the FTSE 350, there is still much to do to progress women Chairs at 17%, women CEOs at 8%, and women Finance Directors at 21%. The 'sponsorship gap' described in this report helps explain why women and other under-represented professionals are advancing into senior leadership roles more slowly. Closing this gap requires action, making sponsorship a core leadership skill and a priority for senior leaders."

Professor Doldor, the report’s lead author, explained why this gap persists, even when organizations believe they are being fair: "Many organisations present leadership promotions as objective and meritocratic. Our research shows that when it comes to senior promotions, many talented leaders are measured against rules they are never explicitly taught. Sponsorship, visibility, and informal political dynamics remain unevenly visible to leaders in the pipeline, and sponsorship is a key mechanism through which people learn how the system really works."

Only a quarter of sponsorship relationships actually deliver

Sponsors are meant to do three things: create opportunities, deliver candid strategic feedback, and advocate behind closed doors for people who aren't in the room. Historically, the model has depended on two shaky assumptions, that leaders will recognize their own role in widening the pipeline, and that women will self-advocate to initiate these relationships in the first place. The report finds both assumptions break down along the same fault lines: gender and ethnicity. Building mutual trust and sustaining active advocacy proved hardest precisely for the groups most underrepresented in leadership.

The report sorts sponsorship into four archetypes: assigned, resistant, shallow, and reciprocal and only one of them, reciprocal sponsorship, is associated with meaningfully stronger promotion outcomes. Less than a quarter of sponsorship relationships fall into that category. That figure alone should reframe how organizations think about sponsorship programs: pairing people up isn't the intervention. The quality of the pairing and commitment to the process make the difference for success.

Reciprocal sponsorship is also not a new discovery. It’s the same pattern identified a decade ago in global research I conducted with Kitty Chisholm, published in Championing Women Leaders . What distinguishes it is how allyship gets framed, as a genuine two-way investment rather than an act of charity. Leaders who treat sponsorship this way build reputations as people top talent wants to work for, which in turn makes them more likely to keep scouting for the next person worth backing. It compounds.

Effective sponsorship isn't a "women's issue"

The cost of uneven sponsorship isn't confined to individual careers. Over time, it narrows the leadership pipeline and thins out the quality of decision-making at the top. Women, in particular, read an organization's willingness to invest structurally in female talent as a signal of whether it's serious about advancement at all.

As former C-suite leader and executive coach Lori Marcus put it in a World Economic Forum report on sponsorship, “it's not a Hallmark movie. A sponsor doesn't put an arm around your shoulder and adopt you”. In her own account, the leaders who did the most for her career were often the hardest to work for, they pushed relentlessly, and only in hindsight did she recognize they'd been pulling her up the entire time. Sponsorship, done properly, is hard graft rather than kindness.

That’s the piece organizations keep getting wrong. Sponsorship was originally promoted as a way to level the playing field for women who didn’t have access to the ‘boy’s network’ but this intervention still needs conscious effort and a storng commitment from leaders to advocate for women, and particularly for women from ethnic minority backgrounds.