The findings from Women’s Agenda’s 2026 Workplace Visibility Survey, conducted in partnership with Cultivate Sponsorship across April 2026, offer one of the sharpest pictures yet of what is holding women back in Australian workplaces and what organisations can do to better support them.
Women are not being held back by a lack of ambition or capability. More than half want a promotion in the next three years, yet the biggest barriers are structural: 43 per cent say they lack clear options for progression and 37 per cent say they lack visibility. Only 12 per cent point to insufficient skills. This tells us the problem is not readiness. It is access. Women know they want to move forward, but many cannot see the pathway, and the people making promotion decisions may not be seeing them.
At the same time, employer support appears to be moving in the wrong direction. Forty-three per cent of respondents say their employer has pulled back on initiatives supporting women in the past year, while 75 per cent believe their organisation could do more to improve gender equality in leadership. This matters even more when around half the sample is 15-plus years into their career. These are not early-career women waiting to find their footing. They are experienced professionals whose ambitions are often shared with line managers and family, but rarely with senior leaders or industry decision-makers. The sponsorship pipeline is getting stuck before it reaches the people with real influence.
We unpack the key findings below.
Women’s ambition is strong but the pathways aren’t
Australian women are proactive and ambitious when it comes to their careers, wanting to keep moving forward, no matter the stage they are at.
With a clear majority hoping to get a promotion in the next three years, combined with half our sample being 15 years or more into their career, it’s evidence that women aren’t quietly opting out of advancement and that ambition is sustained by women into the later years of their career.
When asked which factors they believe are affecting how others perceive their abilities at work, age was identified more often than caring commitments, part-time status, flexible working status, health, or career breaks. For a sample dominated by women 15+ years into their careers and in management positions, this is striking. Suggesting ageism is operating as a brake on advancement for senior women in particular, even those at the height of their experience and capability.
The conversation stops at the line manager
One of the survey’s key findings concerns who women actually talk to about their ambitions. Immediate managers and family members are the most common audiences, each cited by around half of respondents. Peers and friends follow. But senior leaders inside organisations, and leaders in the wider industry, are cited far less often.
As one respondent wrote: there are “no clear pathways” and that “the systemic issues that mean I am likely to always remain the 2IC cannot be changed by chatting to peers, colleagues or friends in the industry.”
These findings show that career advocacy tends to stop at the line manager, and that the most senior people in organisations are not hearing about women’s ambitions, further highlighting a need for formalised sponsorship within the workplace.
Culturally diverse women face greater barriers
A quarter of respondents identified as being from a culturally or linguistically diverse background and this group were more likely to identify at least one structural barrier to advancement.
Discrimination among culturally and linguistically diverse women was more prominently cited as a promotion barrier (around 25 per cent versus around 20 per cent), and the burden of caring responsibilities was more pronounced (27 per cent versus 22 per cent).
Competition for a role was cited more often by culturally and linguistically diverse women (32 per cent versus 26 per cent), a finding that reflects the often-cited expectation that women from culturally diverse backgrounds need to outperform to be considered.
Within this broader pattern, Indigenous respondents described a distinct form of leadership value that is often poorly understood or under-recognised in Western workplace settings. Their answers pointed to community obligation, collective responsibility, leadership through an Indigenous lens, and “Ways of Being” shaped by the world’s oldest living civilisation. One respondent captured this clearly: “People don’t understand me as an Indigenous woman, i.e. my worldviews, concept of leadership from an Indigenous lens plus stereotypes of Indigenous peoples.”
The large number of “N/A”, “None” and “not sure” responses, many appearing to come from Anglo-Australian respondents, is also revealing. It suggests that some people read “cultural background” as something other people have, rather than something that shapes everyone’s assumptions about leadership, merit and professionalism.
Employers are pulling back on gender equality
Sixty-three per cent of respondents said their employer does not offer adequate mentorship or sponsorship opportunities for women.
Forty-three per cent said their employer has pulled back on initiatives supporting women over the past year. And a massive 75 per cent said their employer can do more to achieve gender equality in leadership roles.
The retreat from gender equity initiatives, at a moment when women with 15-plus years of experience are still describing invisibility and blocked pathways, is alarming.
It suggests that whatever ground has been gained over the past decade is being actively stripped back by many organisations.This reflects trends seen globally, especially in the US, where the Trump administration has propelled forward a rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the government and private sector.
What sponsorship can change for women
The case for sponsorship isn’t simply a “nice to have” for women’s careers, it’s a tool that can help senior leaders and decision makers actually hear what women want.
Currently, the pipeline of advocacy stops at the line manager, but more formal sponsorship programs could help extend this pipeline by connecting women directly with senior leaders who otherwise wouldn’t hear from them.
For culturally diverse women who are facing more structural barriers, targeted sponsorships could be the key to address these compounding issues that limit career progression. For women experiencing ageism in the workplace, sponsors may be able to make them visible or advocate for them. For Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander women, it’s about cultural capability uplift in the workplace and bringing in concepts of leadership from an Indigenous lens breaking stereotypes and tokenisms.
There’s no doubt the women we surveyed are ambitious and clear-eyed about wanting to progress their careers.. As one respondent wrote: “I have learned through experience how to kick career goals twice as high and twice as hard as my male colleagues to be able to gain the same career progression.”
It’s now time for organisations to catch up.
The 2026 Workplace Visibility Survey was conducted by Cultivate Sponsorship in April 2026, drawing 372 responses from women across career stages in Australia.