The P&L Gap: Why Women Build CPG Brands but Still Rarely Get to Run the Business

As I have observed during my travel including daily commute, there is a peculiar flaw in some beautifully designed buildings. The staircase looks continuous from the lobby. Every floor appears accessible. Yet somewhere near the top, the architecture changes. One staircase continues towards the executive floor, while another quietly ends. You discover the difference only after climbing most of the building.

There is something uncomfortably similar about the career architecture of women in consumer-packaged goods. Women have built formidable careers across brand management, consumer insights, marketing, innovation, communications and customer experience. In many CPG organizations, they are shaping some of the most valuable assets on the balance sheet that never actually appear on it: consumer trust, brand preference, cultural relevance and demand.

Yet the closer we get to the CEO office, the representation changes. I believe we often diagnose this incorrectly as a leadership pipeline problem. It is more specifically an experience pipeline problem. The route from CMO to CEO is rarely blocked because marketing is considered unimportant. It is blocked because boards eventually ask a different set of questions. Has she owned a P&L? Has she managed margin pressure? Has she run a market? Has she dealt with manufacturing economics, working capital, channel conflict, supply disruption and capital allocation? Has she made decisions where protecting the customer proposition and protecting profitability pulled in opposite directions? Too often, organizations begin asking these questions when a woman is already being considered for the top job.

By then, the architecture has done its work.

I call this the P&L Gap, and in this article, I will focus on three aspects of it.

1. Functional Excellence Can Become a Very Elegant Career Trap

There is a paradox in corporate development that we rarely discuss. The better someone becomes at a function, the more likely the organization is to keep rewarding them with larger versions of that function.

A brilliant brand manager receives a larger brand. A successful marketing director gets a country portfolio. The outstanding country marketer becomes regional CMO. Eventually, she leads marketing globally. Every promotion looks like progress.However, progress upwards is not always progressing towards the CEO role.

PwC’s 2025 CPG Executive Survey makes the context particularly relevant. It found that 49% of CPG executives believe their current business structure will not hold up for another decade. Sixty percent also said their financial reporting does not align with how their business is structured. PwC describes a sector confronting outdated operating models, fragmented AI adoption and internal misalignment.

This is important because tomorrow’s CPG CEO will need considerably more than functional mastery. Reinvention demands leaders who can connect consumer behaviour with pricing, supply chains, technology, route-to-market, portfolio choices and capital.

Yet consider what can happen to an exceptional woman in marketing. At 35, she is promoted because she is outstanding at marketing. At 40, she receives an even larger marketing mandate because she has proven herself again. At 45, succession planning begins and someone notices that she has never run a business. The organization has spent a decade rewarding her performance while unintentionally reducing her CEO optionality.

That, to me, is the first ceiling.

The solution is not another senior title. It is a deliberately constructed experience portfolio. If an organization genuinely regards someone as enterprise leadership material, the CEO, CHRO and board should know which experiences she still lacks. Market ownership, pricing responsibility, commercial leadership, operations, transformation and P&L accountability should be treated as succession assets. At times the promotion that creates a CEO will look sideways on an organization chart (sounds familiar?)

2. CEO Diversity Is Decided Long Before the CEO Search Begins

Boards understandably receive enormous scrutiny when they appoint another male CEO. But I would move the lens backwards by at least a decade.

PwC’s latest analysis of S&P 500 CEO turnover makes the issue stark. From 2016 through 2025, only about one in ten CEO appointments went to women in an average year. In 2025, women accounted for just 6% of newly hired S&P 500 CEOs. There is another number in the research that deserves equal attention: only 20% of CEOs appointed during the past decade came from outside the company. Well. that changes the conversation.

If four out of five CEOs are selected internally, the decisive diversity intervention is not executive search. It is what happens to high-potential women ten or fifteen years before a CEO vacancy exists.

This is why I reckon that conventional sponsorship needs an upgrade. Mentorship gives someone perspective. Sponsorship puts someone’s reputation behind another person’s progression. Both matter. But organizations now need mobility sponsorship, where influential leaders actively move talented women out of the environments in which they are already successful.

Someone has to say, “She has never owned a market. Give her one.” Or, “She understands the consumer better than almost anyone here. Now let her own the economics of serving that consumer.”

That may mean putting a marketing leader into a difficult country business, commercial role, transformation assignment or operating position. It may mean accepting that an executive who looked exceptionally polished in marketing will temporarily look less polished while learning another part of the enterprise.

That discomfort should be welcomed. Looking at this objectively, CEO development should systematically eliminate the sentences that later begin with: “She is exceptional, but she has never……”never managed a P&L. Never run operations. Never led through a restructuring. Never owned a business unit. Never managed capital.

By the time those words enter a succession discussion, the organization is no longer assessing potential. It is auditing opportunities it previously failed to provide.

3. Stop Giving Women More Development. Give Them More Consequence.

The third point is the one on which I am most opinionated. Corporate organizations have become extremely sophisticated at developing high-potential women. There are leadership academies, mentoring networks, executive coaching programmes, diversity councils and carefully designed development journeys. All can be valuable.

But at a certain level, leadership is no longer developed primarily through programmes. It is developed through consequence.

Deloitte’s Women @ Work 2025 research, based on 7,500 women across 15 countries, places the progression challenge within a wider structural reality. Women represent an estimated 50.1% of the global working-age population but account for only 35.4% of management positions globally. Deloitte’s research also highlights continuing challenges affecting women’s career progression, workplace experience and ability to remain and advance within organizations.

At senior levels, however, development must translate into ownership. A future CEO needs to experience a quarter where the numbers are missed and explain why. She needs to make a pricing decision that may cost volume. She needs to inherit a business nobody is volunteering to run. She needs exposure to retailer negotiations, working-capital pressure, channel conflict, restructuring and investment decisions where every available option has an uncomfortable consequence.

These experiences create something leadership programmes cannot manufacture enterprise scar tissue.

And scar tissue matters because boards rarely appoint CEOs simply for what they know. They appoint people whom they trust to make consequential judgments when the answer is unclear.

CPG companies should therefore build deliberate P&L bridges between functional leadership and enterprise leadership. A high-potential marketing executive might spend three years running a country business. A consumer-insights leader might move into commercial strategy. A brand leader could take responsibility for a challenged category with full revenue and margin accountability. These should not be observational rotations designed to decorate a résumé. The numbers should belong to them.

This matters even more because CPG itself is being reinvented. PwC reports that 49% of CPG executives already question the decade-long viability of their existing structures, with AI, changing channels, new consumer behaviours and operating-model pressures forcing companies to rethink how value is created. The sector therefore has an interesting opportunity. Instead of asking women to conform to yesterday’s archetype of the CEO, companies can broaden the experiences of leaders who already possess one of tomorrow’s most important capabilities: understanding how consumers perceive, choose and assign value.

Hence, the way I see it, Marketing expertise is not the weakness in this equation. Keeping that expertise trapped inside marketing IS.

The debate around women reaching CEO positions consequently needs to move beyond counting how many women occupy senior roles. A leadership team can look diverse while its enterprise succession pipeline remains remarkably homogeneous.

Boards should ask a harder set of questions much earlier. How many high-potential women currently own revenue as well as reputation? How many control margin as well as marketing investment? How many have been deliberately moved from functional excellence into situations of genuine commercial consequence? How many are being trusted today with the experiences that will make their CEO candidacy difficult to question ten years from now? That is the metric I would watch.

Because women do not need another staircase that takes them higher inside the same function. They need access to the staircase that leads to enterprise ownership. Now take a moment, pause and think, the real ceiling is not the CEO appointment. It is the accumulation of P&L opportunities that determines who becomes credible enough to be considered for it.

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The gap between senior women in functional roles and senior women in P&L roles is where most consumer goods companies lose their pipeline. Female Executive Search works on exactly that step — see our consumer goods page for the current data and the executive-level rules now in force in France and Spain.

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