This research builds on a Harvard Business Review article first published in 1965, when researchers surveyed 2,000 executives about how they perceived women in leadership. The study has been repeated roughly every twenty years since, in 1985 and 2006, to track how those perceptions shift over time. This latest installment, published this July, revisits the same questions six decades later.
Ask a room of male executives whether women have to work twice as hard to succeed at the top, and about a third will say yes. Ask the women in that same room, and nearly nine in 10 will give the same answer.
That gap isn't new. It's been measured since 1965, when Harvard Business Review first surveyed 2,000 executives on how they viewed women in leadership. Researchers have repeated the study roughly every twenty years since, most recently in a piece published this month. The headline finding is encouraging: outright skepticism about whether women belong in the executive suite has largely disappeared. But one number hasn't moved. Men's belief that women must outperform to succeed sits at 35 percent. Women's sits at roughly 90 percent. It sat there in 1965. It sits there now.
What that tells us is less about progress than about perception. Two people can sit in the same meeting, read the same performance review, and walk away with entirely different accounts of what just happened. And because leadership runs on evaluation, not just job description, that difference isn't cosmetic. It shapes who gets the stretch assignment, who gets sponsored quietly in rooms they weren't in, and who gets read as "not quite ready" one more year running.
It's probably part of why so many women we know have stopped waiting for that evaluation to catch up. They're building board seats, portfolios, platforms, and networks that don't depend on any one manager's read of their potential. Not because they've given up on the traditional path, but because they've stopped treating it as the only one.
None of this means the research is wrong, or that nothing has changed. It has, meaningfully. But a leader who assumes everyone in the room is playing by the same rules, when half of them don't believe that, is missing something worth taking seriously. Closing that gap starts with a smaller, more useful question: when you evaluate someone's readiness for the next role, could you explain, in specific terms, what "ready" required of them? If not, that's worth sitting with before the next round of promotions comes up.
