Women are losing ground in the executive ranks of Australia’s biggest listed companies, with a new report showing the first setback in a decade.
It also points to a growing backlash against gender equity inside workplaces and fresh pressure on companies to set gender targets.
The latest Chief Executive Women (CEW) census found women’s share of ASX 200 executive leadership roles slipped from 32 per cent to 31 per cent over the past year, while more ASX 300 companies now have all-male executive teams.
Senior women leaders also reported a sharper rise in resistance to gender equity, even where formal commitments still exist.
CEW president Helen Conway said the 2026 CEW Census puts “every board and executive team on notice that hard-won gains can no longer be taken for granted”.
The report shows stalled progress has now gone backwards.
Across the ASX 300, the number of companies with no women in executive team roles rose from 17 to 25.
Women’s share of key stepping stone roles to chief executive also fell by two percentage points to 18 per cent.
That weakening pipeline is now showing up at the top. Women received just 13 per cent of ASX 300 chief executive appointments this year, down from one in four in 2025.
Women currently hold 11 per cent of ASX 300 chief executive roles, with 31 companies led by women, four more than last year.
CEW chief executive Lisa Annese linked the downturn to a wider shift in workplace culture.
“In a global climate of open pushback against gender equity, a fall in women’s representation in Australia’s largest companies shows that progress here is under the same pressure,” Ms Annese said.
For the first time, the census also included a survey of CEW members, who are among the country’s most senior women leaders.
It found respondents were 2.3 times more likely to report growing opposition to gender equity than growing support over the past 12 months.
Nearly one in three observed stronger resistance inside their own organisation.
The message from respondents was that gender equity has not necessarily disappeared from corporate policies, but it is being pushed down the priority list.
University of Sydney business school professor Dimitria Groutsis said equity was being stripped of attention and resources, and increasingly reframed as a debate about “merit”.
The long-term figures show progress has been real, but painfully slow.
Over the past decade, women’s share of ASX 200 executive leadership roles has risen from 21 per cent to 31 per cent, while the share of women chief executives has lifted from 5 per cent to 11 per cent.
But at the current pace, the report found women may not make up half of ASX 200 executive leadership teams until about 2043.
Equal representation in chief executive roles may not be reached until around 2085.
The census also highlights a sharper gap for women from culturally diverse and First Nations backgrounds.
In its first look at likely cultural origins among women in ASX 300 executive teams, the report found 23.5 per cent were from backgrounds other than Anglo-Celtic or northwest European, compared with 38.9 per cent of adult women in Australia.
The figures for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were even lower. They make up less than 0.7 per cent of women senior executives in the ASX 300, despite First Nations people accounting for 3.8 per cent of the national population.
Director of the Indigenous People and Work Research and Practice Hub at UTS Professor Nareen Young said that when looking at the corporate leadership of this country, “Blak women are all but absent from it”.
CEW argues companies with clear targets perform better.
The report found businesses with a 40:40 gender target were four times more likely to have balanced executive teams than those without one, yet only 39 per cent of ASX 300 companies had adopted that benchmark.
CEW is now urging companies to set and publish gender targets, strengthen pathways into top jobs, push back against internal resistance and broaden how leadership potential is judged.
“Addressing this decline will take concrete commitment from every company, and it begins with setting targets,” Ms Conway said.