Earlier this year, I applied for a senior executive role alongside more than five hundred other applicants, fifty of whom were interviewed. These weren’t entry-level candidates. They were presidents, CMOs, CFOs, operators who had led multimillion-dollar turnarounds and guided teams through the pandemic, much like me. And yet, there we all were: seasoned women, competing for a single seat.
While this experience isn’t new, after my decades-long climb it has become all too common and familiar. That moment crystallized something I’d already been feeling: the corporate ladder is splintering. Across industries, restructuring is rewriting the org chart. From tech to retail to hospitality, companies are trimming leadership ranks and flattening hierarchies. Meta, Google, and Disney alone have collectively cut tens of thousands of roles in the past eighteen months. Each announcement sounds the same, often described as a “strategic realignment” or an “efficiency initiative,” but behind those euphemisms are talented leaders suddenly out of the game in staggering numbers.
Women are bearing the brunt of it. And it’s not going unnoticed. In fact, there is growing attention being paid to this reality—quietly, behind the scenes.
The Great Global Reshuffling, Revisited
McKinsey and Lean In called it The Great Breakup: women leaving corporate leadership at the highest rate in a decade. In the UK’s FTSE 250 index of mid-sized public companies, female executive-director roles have fallen 11 percent since 2022. In the United States, women hold only about 29 percent of top leadership-team positions, despite being half the population.
COVID accelerated the cracks. When schools and childcare centers closed, millions of women were forced to step back. Even now, nearly one in five cite the cost or availability of childcare as a barrier to staying in the workforce. Add the “return-to-office” mandates, record burnout, and a wave of layoffs targeting marketing, HR, and communications, the very functions where women are most represented, and you get a perfect storm of disruption.
These moves are short sighted. Female executives, whose leadership drives growth, retention, and strategy, and who often carry the emotional weight of an organization, are being cut at disproportionate rates. The result is glaring gaps that ultimately hurt fiscal performance, culture, and long-term growth.
This shift has been happening slowly, then suddenly. The reality is that for every new leadership role opening, dozens are disappearing. The funnel is shrinking. But the talent isn’t.
The Shift: Writing Our Own Narrative
Instead of waiting for the next offer letter, many women are writing their own.
Fractional leadership, executives serving multiple companies on a part-time or contract basis, has quietly become one of the fastest-growing movements in business. Research from Revelio Labs shows fractional executives are more likely to be women, especially in CMO and CFO roles. It’s not hard to see why. It offers flexibility, autonomy, and the chance to create impact without the constraints of corporate politics.
I felt that pull myself. After years as a brand president leading national turnarounds, I stepped off the full-time track to become a fractional CEO. I started The C Society, a collective of C-suite leaders who partner with emerging restaurant and retail brands to help them scale profitably and intentionally.
Before that transition, I spent time in my own shift, listening to leaders across the industry, hearing their stories, grasping their thoughts, and giving a voice to so many who were quietly carrying the weight of their observations. Through The Shift Chronicles, a storytelling platform I created to explore change, leadership, and identity, I began to notice recurring themes. The personal research became a mirror, validating what I was observing and sensing within my own network.
The commonalities were not coincidental. They reflected a cultural system that, for generations, has worked against women in ways both visible and subtle. These stories of exhaustion, ambition, creativity, and reinvention revealed that the shift wasn’t just happening to us. It was being led by us.
Within months, I saw firsthand how powerful this model could be, helping one client save over $400,000 annually through supply chain restructuring while coaching founders on culture, values, and leadership. I realized I didn’t need to sit in one corner office to make an impact. I could sit at five different tables, helping five brands grow faster.
From Flexibility to Power Move
The word fractional once sounded like a compromise. Today, it sounds like strategy. For many women, it’s not about working less—it’s about working smarter. It’s the freedom to choose projects aligned with purpose, the ability to set boundaries, and the chance to design leadership on our own terms. The data backs it up: the number of fractional executive roles has tripled globally in the past five years. North America now accounts for roughly 60 percent of that talent pool. Women in Revenue, an advocacy organization, notes that more women are “leaving full-time roles to embrace fractional work for flexibility, variety, and leadership on their own terms.” The corporate system wasn’t built for modern realities of caregiving, mental health, or
multidimensional ambition. Fractional leadership is becoming the correction—a way for highly skilled executives to remain in the game without burning out or opting out.
Entrepreneurship Meets Executive Work
What’s emerging is a new hybrid identity: the executive entrepreneur. She’s leading strategy sessions on Monday, advising a startup on Wednesday, mentoring a founder on Friday. She’s a CEO, consultant, coach, and operator rolled into one.
This model is unlocking something larger than flexibility. It’s restoring agency. It’s giving women permission to build lives that reflect ambition and sustainability at the same time.
It’s not just women in marketing or HR. Fractional CFOs, COOs, CROs, and CTOs are redefining how companies scale. I met with a founder last week who was considering hiring a full-time CFO but couldn’t afford the cost. His solution was to hire a junior-level analyst instead. Going fractional allowed him to bring in the right strategic leadership for the organization at the same cost as the entry-level hire.
For founders, it’s a win: access to senior-level expertise without the full-time cost. For leaders, it’s liberation.
A Redefined Future of Leadership
Women aren’t leaving leadership—they’re redefining it. We are building portfolio careers, curating impact, and showing that influence isn’t confined to a single org chart. The Great Breakup wasn’t an ending. It was a beginning—a collective decision to reclaim power, rewrite identity, and lead differently. In a world still clinging to outdated models of success, that’s not a retreat. It’s a revolution.