More firms have women at the top, an ILO survey shows. Yet pay gaps barely move and equality programmes are shrinking.
Women chair the boards of 30.9% of firms in a new International Labour Organization survey covering 99 countries. That compares with 13.1% in the ILO’s 2013 survey. Published on 3 November, the 2025 survey also shows firms with a woman chief executive rising more slowly, from 23.4% to 28.2%.
The global gender pay gap, at about 18% in the ILO’s latest estimates, is just two points narrower than in its 2018 estimate. “A reduction of just two percentage points in ten years is simply not enough,” said Gilbert F. Houngbo, the ILO’s director-general, in September. At 0.2 points a year, a simple sum by RESET gives about 90 more years.
Firms have changed who sits at the top faster than they’ve changed pay or promotion below it. A woman in middle management has seen little of this shift, and the same survey shows gender balance falling at her level.
The thinning middle
Gender balance rose by 5 points in top management between 2013 and 2025, and by 1.6 points in senior management. Over the same years, it fell by 6.4 points in middle management and 1.4 points in junior roles. Without investment in early careers, the report warns, the pipeline “will narrow”, which leaves today’s gains “structurally fragile”.
The 2013 survey was “significantly smaller and did not include any developed countries”, a footnote says, so those long comparisons need care. Still, modelled ILO estimates also show slow change. Women held 24.5% of management jobs in 2000 and 30.5% in 2025.
The report finds women concentrated in human resources, at 62.5%, and under-represented in roles linked to profit and loss, at 19.8%. Younger workers face separate pressure too, as RESET reported on entry-level hiring in AI-exposed jobs.
Policies on paper, fewer in practice
Almost three in four firms surveyed, 74.8%, have a gender equality or diversity policy or the equivalent. However, the share putting such plans into practice fell from 37.4% in 2018 to 26.5% in 2025. The report treats those two surveys as alike in size and make-up, so this is its firmest trend.
Equal pay work fell by 19.6 points, and maternity leave and support by 11.3 points. Yet firms rate those same measures among their most effective, with 70.1% naming equal pay work and 74.7% maternity support. They also see more gain: 68.5% reported good results from equality schemes in 2025, up 11.1 points from 2018.
Firms report these results themselves, so they show what firms believe more than what caused their gains. Maria Paz Anzorreguy, director of the ILO’s Bureau for Employers’ Activities, said “leaving women’s potential untapped makes little business sense”. The report’s summary doesn’t say why firms are doing less.
Two figures for one gap
The ILO’s new report also uses a different pay figure from its September estimates. It says women earned 22% less than men in 2025, or 78 cents for every dollar. Neither ILO summary squares that with the 18% figure, so the direction is firmer than the exact level.
In roughly six out of ten countries, the pay gap among managers is wider than among all employees, the report says. So reaching management doesn’t end the gap, and it often widens.
A test in Europe
The EU has written pay transparency, one of the ILO’s suggested remedies, into law. Its directive was due in national law by 7 June, yet only Italy, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia had fully adopted it by then. Larger employers face their first gender pay gap reports in June 2027. A gap of 5% or more left unfixed can then trigger a joint pay assessment.
The first reports will show whether disclosure moves pay where boardroom gains haven’t. The next ILO survey will show whether the fall in middle management and equal pay work has continued.
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