Equality requires Inequality
Companies are cutting development programs for women in leadership - and that’s a big problem on many levels.
Anyone working on driving women in leadership knows that investment in it is significantly down with no sign of coming back. According to McKinsey’s 2025 data, over 20% of companies have discontinued career-development programs specifically tailored to women. My bet is the 2026 data will be even worse.
Interestingly, it’s not explained by budget cutting: general skill-building and leadership training is considerably more likely to be maintained and a significant number of companies are eliminating their women’s-specific courses and redistributing the funding and parts of the content to gender-neutral programs.
So if the general training is still there, why is this a problem?
Because if a company cuts its investment in developing women it means it probably means that it doesn’t care about developing women. It doesn’t care that 90% of its leadership are men. It doesn’t care that it isn’t doing anything to ensure a pipeline of women that will change that.
And if they do care but they still cut the women’s leadership programs anyway then they don’t get it. They don’t get that gender-neutral training simply will not work for women (or certainly won’t be enough in itself), because most of the issues and barriers that are holding women back in their careers are specific to women and driven by the male-dominant culture. Men do not feel these issues, they are not affected by them (in fact the male culture favours and benefits them, they are the goldfish in the water) and so a training course about addressing these issues would be completely irrelevant to them.
If a company wants to develop women for leadership, it needs to understand all the invisible forces and barriers that hold them back (see WHY MEN WIN AT WORK…) and it needs to invest in programs and training to help women overcome them.
And if there is a concern on the unfairness of giving budget to women and not men, I would say have a look at your gender pay gap and you’ll see where the unfairness in investment really is. Trust me, men are being very well looked after by companies.
There’s one more problem: a significant portion of learning budgets are going to AI. And I get it, we all need training on that or we’ll get very left behind very quickly. But let’s pause to think about this: a world full of companies that don’t care about women in leadership, that don’t get what it takes to develop women and that are on AI autopilot without enough human judgment and intervention…
It may just look like a small training budget shift from women to gender-neutral to AI, but it’s a much, much bigger issue than that.
It may look more equal and more fair but big picture it’s not, because the context and culture is not equal or fair and it needs intentional intervention to re-balance it.
Equality requires Inequality