Author: Patrick Mataix

CEO Worldwide - CEO & Founder Patrick founded CEO Worldwide in 2001 because, as co-founder and COO of Vistaprint (www.vistaprint.com; Nasdaq : CMPR), he had first-hand experience of how difficult it is to find the right international executive quickly. Traditional headhunters were too slow, too expensive, and too narrowly focused for the cross-border challenges he faced daily. CEO Worldwide was built to solve that problem — a global executive recruitment service that delivers a professional selection of C-level candidates in days, searching worldwide, with a highly flexible operational model that puts results first. In 2018, CEO Worldwide has created a platform dedicated to recruiting female leaders – Female Executive Search – to promote executive gender balance at top management level and boards. Today, CEO Worldwide and Female Executive Search have vetted more than 28,300 international C-suite executives covering 183 countries. He has been awarded "CEO of the Year" by EuropeanCEO.com in the Executive Recruitment Industry category. LinkedIn URL https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmataix/

Six Instruments: How Boards Build a Gender-Diverse Leadership Pipeline

Posted on by Patrick Mataix

Published August 2026. Statistical references current as of the date of publication. This article is general information, not legal advice.

Most boards I speak to have accepted the diagnosis. Board representation has improved; the executive layer has not; the internal successor slate for the top three roles is thin, and in some cases empty. Very few have translated that acceptance into anything a committee can schedule — which is what building a gender-diverse leadership pipeline actually takes.

It is not a culture problem. It is a governance problem, and governance problems are solved with instruments: a named owner, a fixed cadence, a metric, and a consequence for missing it. What follows are six.

Instrument 1 — Succession maps that go two layers below the ExCo

Most succession maps stop at direct reports to the CEO. By that point the composition is already set; the map records an outcome rather than influencing one.

The useful map covers N-1 and N-2 — the executive committee and the layer beneath it — and it separates two things that boards routinely conflate: who is ready now, and who is being developed toward readiness. Gender composition should be reported for both columns, separately, every year.

If the N-2 layer is 30% women and the “ready now” column is 8% women, the board has learned something specific: the constraint is not supply, it is the transition between those two states. That is an actionable finding. A single aggregate percentage would have hidden it.

Owner: Nomination committee. Cadence: annual, with a mid-year delta. Metric: women as % of N-1 and N-2, split ready/developing.

Instrument 2 — Treat P&L rotation as a board-tracked metric

The evidence on why women do not reach CEO is not mysterious. The World Economic Forum’s June 2026 leadership report found that routes to the CEO seat remain anchored in the CFO and COO functions — and women hold under a third of those positions. LinkedIn data in the same report puts women at roughly a quarter of CFO and COO roles globally, against around two-thirds of CHRO and CPO roles.

That distribution is the product of thousands of individual assignment decisions, each defensible on its own, which together determine the shape of the slate a decade later.

So track the assignment decisions, not just the outcomes. The metric is simple: of the executives given a new P&L, turnaround, market-entry or major-transformation mandate in the last 24 months, what share were women? Report it to the board. Where it is low, the committee should ask which specific assignments were considered and what the alternative rationale was.

Owner: Nomination committee, with CEO. Cadence: every 24 months, rolling. Metric: gender split of substantive line assignments.

Instrument 3 — Audit the definition of “ready”

The WEF’s 2026 analysis identifies something boards should find uncomfortable: women who reach the C-suite tend to have broader experience across functions and industries than their male peers — but that breadth was more often accumulated at lower levels of seniority. Organisations then apply readiness criteria calibrated to a narrower, more linear, more senior-weighted career shape, and the breadth reads as a deficit rather than an asset.

The same report finds women are 55.2% more likely than men to take a career break, largely for caregiving, and that this gap does not narrow at higher seniority. A readiness model built on continuous tenure will therefore filter systematically, and it will do so while looking perfectly objective.

The instrument is an audit, not a lowering of standards. Take your written criteria for the top twenty roles and ask, line by line: does this requirement predict performance in the role, or does it describe the career of the last person who held it? Continuous service, single-industry depth, and “time in seat” are the three that most often fail that test. Reading a set of women executives’ actual career histories alongside your own criteria is a quick and slightly bracing way to see which of your requirements are predictive and which are merely familiar.

Owner: Remuneration and nomination committees jointly. Cadence: every three years, or on any major role redesign.

Instrument 4 — Make sponsorship a duty with a name attached

Mentoring is advice. Sponsorship is advocacy — putting a name forward, allocating a stretch assignment, spending capital in a room the person is not in. The two are not substitutes, and organisations that report healthy mentoring programmes frequently have no sponsorship at all.

McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace 2025, drawing on pipeline data from 124 organisations employing around three million people, found that 31% of entry-level women had a sponsor compared with 45% of men — and that employees with a sponsor were promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without. Entry-level women were also around half as likely as men at their level to have multiple sponsors, or a sponsor senior enough to influence an appointment.

The consequence shows up one rung later. For the eleventh consecutive year the study recorded a broken first promotion: for every 100 men moved up to manager, 93 women were promoted — 82 for Asian women and Latinas, and 60 for Black women. Men then outnumber women at manager level permanently, and no amount of senior-level intervention closes a gap created that early.

The governance version of this is unglamorous. Each executive committee member is accountable for a named, documented sponsorship relationship. It appears in their objectives. It is reviewed. It is not delegated to the HR function, because the entire point is the seniority of the person doing it.

Owner: CEO, reported to remuneration committee. Cadence: annual objectives cycle.

Instrument 5 — Refresh the external benchmark on a fixed cycle

Internal pipelines are slow instruments. They should be built, and they will not solve a 2027 vacancy.

A nomination committee should therefore maintain a current external view — not an active search, but a standing map of who exists in the market for its critical roles, refreshed on a fixed cycle rather than assembled in panic after a resignation. This is where the “there are no candidates” conversation is either substantiated or, far more often, quietly disproved.

There are three ways to run that refresh, in ascending order of cost. The cheapest is to interrogate a database directly: the Female Executive Search Engine filters vetted women executives by function, sector and country, and the wider CEO Worldwide search engine does the same across the full 28,000-plus network if the role is not gender-specific. The middle option is to post the role to the community and see who raises a hand — a low-commitment way of testing genuine market appetite for a mandate before committing to a full search. The most thorough is a retained mandate, which is what you want when the role is critical and the benchmark has to be defensible.

One practical note on that last word. Under the EU Women on Boards Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2381), an unsuccessful candidate for a board position may request the qualification criteria the selection was based on and the objective comparative assessment of the candidates. Where that candidate establishes facts suggesting they were equally qualified, it falls to the company to show the decision did not breach the rule. Selection reasoning is becoming disclosable and, in places, defensible on demand — so it pays to have some.

Owner: Nomination committee, with an external search partner. Cadence: 12–18 months for the top five roles.

Instrument 6 — Treat the search brief as a governance artefact

The single highest-leverage document in an executive appointment is the brief, and it is usually written in an afternoon by whoever is least busy.

A brief that opens with a list of required credentials will return the incumbent profile. A brief that opens with the outcomes the role must produce in 24 months — and then asks what evidence of capability would satisfy a reasonable board — returns a materially different pool. The second version is also far easier to defend, which matters more each year as selection reasoning becomes disclosable.

The committee should see the brief before the search opens, not the shortlist after it closes. By shortlist stage, every consequential decision has already been made.

Owner: Nomination committee chair. Cadence: every senior search.

What a gender-diverse leadership pipeline actually requires

None of them is about intent, and none requires anyone to believe anything in particular about gender. They are about where decisions are made and whether anyone is looking. Europe’s boards moved because they became measurable: EIGE data puts women at just under 40% of non-executive director seats across the largest listed companies in the EU. Over the same period executive directors reached only 18.5%. The difference between those two numbers is the difference between a layer someone was counting and a layer nobody was.

A committee that adopts three of these six will know more about its own pipeline within a year than most boards know today. That is a low bar, and it is worth clearing. Where the sixth instrument turns into an actual appointment, our board and executive search practice exists for exactly that step.

If your committee is refreshing its external benchmark or opening a search, you can submit a search mandate or browse the search engine.

Sources

World Economic Forum, Closing the Gender Gap in Senior Leadership, June 2026 — weforum.org
World Economic Forum, “Gender parity in senior leadership: progress at a turning point”, 18 June 2026 — weforum.org
LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace 2025, December 2025 (February 2026 update) — mckinsey.com · leanin.org
Directive (EU) 2022/2381 on improving the gender balance among directors of listed companies (Women on Boards Directive) — EUR-Lex
European Institute for Gender Equality, Gender balance in business and finance 2025 — eige.europa.eu

Patrick Mataix

CEO Worldwide – CEO & Founder
Patrick founded CEO Worldwide in 2001 because, as co-founder and COO of Vistaprint (www.vistaprint.com; Nasdaq : CMPR), he had first-hand experience of how difficult it is to find the right international executive quickly. Traditional headhunters were too slow, too expensive, and too narrowly focused for the cross-border challenges he faced daily.

CEO Worldwide was built to solve that problem — a global executive recruitment service that delivers a professional selection of C-level candidates in days, searching worldwide, with a highly flexible operational model that puts results first.

In 2018, CEO Worldwide has created a platform dedicated to recruiting female leaders – Female Executive Search – to promote executive gender balance at top management level and boards.

Today, CEO Worldwide and Female Executive Search have vetted more than 28,300 international C-suite executives covering 183 countries.

He has been awarded “CEO of the Year” by EuropeanCEO.com in the Executive Recruitment Industry category.

LinkedIn URL https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmataix/

https://www.ceo-worldwide.com/

Hiring women executives at the top without signalling: when to post a role anonymously, and when to run a search

Posted on by Patrick Mataix

The hardest part of hiring women executives at the top isn’t finding them. It’s needing to hire without the market — or your own team — finding out. Here are the two discretion-preserving ways to do it, and how to tell which one you need.

The real question isn’t cost. It’s signal.

When a company delays hiring a senior executive, the reason it gives is usually that it couldn’t find the right person. The real reason, more often, is that it couldn’t afford to be seen looking.

At junior and mid levels, a public job posting costs nothing but attention. At the executive level, it costs information. Post that you are hiring a Chief Financial Officer and you have told your competitors, your clients, your investors and your existing finance leadership that a senior seat is in play. The market reads that as instability. Your current executive reads it as a countdown. So the role goes unposted, the search runs on a handful of warm introductions, and the shortlist is shallow before it starts.

This is felt most sharply in the layer that matters most right now. Boards across Europe have moved to meet gender-representation targets, but the executive suite that feeds those boards has moved far more slowly. Filling it means hiring senior women executives into confidential, high-stakes roles — exactly the roles a company can least afford to advertise.

The good news: advertising is not the only option. There are two ways to hire at this level while protecting the signal. The difference between them is simple, and it decides which one you need.

Path one: post the role — always anonymously.

If you can run your own hiring process — you have the time, the internal capacity, and a clear picture of the role — but you can’t be seen to be looking, this is the route that removes the one problem stopping you.

This is now something you can do directly, and every posting through Female Executive Search is anonymous: the role is extended to a community of 5,000+ vetted women executives, with no company name, logo or identifying detail attached. A candidate learns who you are only when you decide to take them to interview. They see a verified, credentialed opportunity; the wider market sees nothing. You keep control of the process end to end — you have simply removed the market signal that was in your way.

Posting is the right call when the blocker is exposure, not access. You know how to find and assess the person. You just can’t be seen to be doing it publicly.

Path two: run a confidential search.

Sometimes the problem is deeper than exposure. The person you need isn’t reading listings at all — anonymous or otherwise. She’s placed, senior, not looking, and will only consider a move through a conversation that never becomes public. Reaching her isn’t a posting problem; it’s an access problem. It requires someone who already knows her, can approach her discreetly, and can carry the process without a public footprint at any stage.

That’s a retained search. Nothing is ever posted. The reach is confidential and so is the search itself — the identification, the approach, the assessment, the shortlist. You retain it precisely when you need someone to find and approach people who aren’t looking at all.

Post anonymously when the obstacle is exposure. Retain a search when the obstacle is access.

A simple way to choose.

Ask two questions.

Can I run the process myself?

If yes, and the only obstacle is being seen — post anonymously. If you need the search run for you, discreetly — retain it.

Is the person I need actively open to moving?

If she might answer a well-framed, name-free listing — post anonymously. If the person you actually want is placed and would never respond to a listing — retain it.

Most companies find they need one path for one role and the other path for the next. The two aren’t rivals; they’re the same commitment to discretion at two levels of intensity.

One thing the candidate side requires.

Anonymity cuts both ways. A senior woman executive is right to be cautious about a faceless listing — her time and her reputation are on the line too. So an anonymous posting only works if the network trusts that the poster is real and credentialed. Every anonymous role posted through Female Executive Search is verified before it goes live, so discretion for the employer is matched by assurance for the candidate. Without that, the listing underperforms and no one is served.

Where this leaves you.

The board numbers were the visible part of the last few years. The executive layer underneath is the harder, quieter work now — and it’s work that mostly can’t be done in public. Whether you post a role without your name on it or run a search with no public footprint at all, the principle is the same: at this level, discretion isn’t a preference. It’s the requirement that makes the hire possible.

You run the process

Post a role anonymously

Your role is extended to our community of 5,000+ vetted women executives — always without your company’s name attached.

Post a role anonymously →

We run the search

Discuss a confidential search

For when the person you need isn’t looking and must be approached discreetly. Nothing is posted — we run the whole search through to placement.

Submit a search mandate →