On July 1, Karen Carter became CEO of Dow, a company she joined in 1994 as an intern. The headlines wrote themselves: intern to the corner office, first Black woman to lead a major U.S. chemical company, first woman to lead the 129-year-old giant.

What most of the coverage missed is how Carter’s ascent is both remarkable and, among the women who reach the top, almost ordinary.

Carter is one of just seven Black women to run a Fortune 500 company. And her path to get there was far from conventional. She didn’t come up through finance and a P&L, instead rising through Dow’s human resources function, its inclusion office and its plastics business—the kind of long, winding, functionally diverse path women are far more likely than men to have to travel to reach the top.

And yet, Carter’s 32-year road to the C-suite is one that a surprising share of her peers have traveled. Only about 130 women have ever been CEO of a Fortune 500 company per an analysis of Catalyst and Fortune data. Eleven of those women started at the company very early in their careers and never left. Mary Barra joined General Motors at 18 as a co-op student on the assembly line in 1980, and spent her entire career there before becoming CEO in 2014. Tricia Griffith started at Progressive in 1988 as a claims representative in Indianapolis. Kathleen Mazzarella walked into a Graybar Electric customer service job in San Francisco at 19, without a college degree, and now runs the company.

That 11 women—roughly 8% of all the women who have ever held the job—climbed the entire ladder inside one company says something about how women attain power and how rare it is for them to be handed it directly. Across every rung of the corporate ladder, women also face structural barriers that make reaching the next one rarer.

And what this path builds is a different kind of authority. A leader who earns her place at the top inch by inch, without the shortcut of a big title handed over on arrival, arrives with power that doesn’t need the title to hold it up.

A Different Kind Of Authority

The reputational shortcut some men take to a Fortune 500 corner office—arriving with executive credentials built at another company—rarely opens for women. Over the past decade, the majority of women who reached a Fortune 500 corner office got there by internal promotion rather than outside hiring, according to Fortune . In the past year, Newmont, Textron, Murphy USA, DTE Energy and Dow all named women CEOs through internal promotion.

Women are more likely to be handed power once they’re known quantities, having spent years building a track record with the people inside the building before anyone above them will bet on them. That asymmetry is due to performance bias, the phenomenon where men are promoted on potential and women on proof. A man with executive credentials from Company A can often walk into the corner office at Company B on the strength of a name, while a woman with the same credentials typically cannot.

The First Rung Is Where The Gap Opens

Women advance more slowly than men at nearly every rung of the corporate ladder. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager in 2025, only 93 women were promoted, and only 60 Black women, according to Lean In and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2025 report. The gap has been the same or much worse for 11 consecutive years, and because fewer women get the first promotion, men outnumber them at manager level from the start, and the math never fully corrects.

Sponsorship, motherhood and likability biases stack on top. Only 31% of entry-level women have a workplace sponsor, compared with 45% of entry-level men, per Women in the Workplace. Employees with sponsors are twice as likely to be promoted. Employers reviewing identical resumes rated mothers less competent than childless women and recommended starting salaries about $11,000 lower, according to a Stanford study . And researchers have long documented that the assertiveness rewarded in men triggers social backlash when displayed by women.

That the 11 women in our entry-level-to-CEO cohort cleared every one of those biases over 20 to 30 years tells us how steep the real climb is. A woman clears those biases by outlasting them, building a record so long that overlooking her stops being an option.

This path produces its own kind of leader. Beyond Barra, Griffith and Mazzarella, the early career-to-CEO pipeline includes Corie Barry, who joined Best Buy as a financial analyst in 1999 and became CEO in 2019. Jennifer Rumsey interned at Cummins during four summers as a Purdue undergraduate before joining full-time as an engineer in 2000 and reaching the top in 2022. Ursula Burns walked into Xerox in 1980 as a mechanical engineering summer intern and, in 2009, became the first Black woman ever to lead a Fortune 500 company; Anne Mulcahy preceded her at Xerox after joining in 1976 as a field sales representative. Barbara Rentler joined Ross Stores as a merchandising buyer in 1986. Ginni Rometty joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981. Marillyn Hewson joined Lockheed Martin as an industrial engineer in 1983.

Each woman built her career on structural terms she set herself, expanding the scope of her work over decades and staying long enough for the cumulative record to become undeniable. By the time the CEO title arrived, the authority was already in place.

The Carter appointment is worth celebrating. It also reveals how women actually reach the top of American corporations, and what the ladder still asks of them that it does not ask of men.