New York, NY – Despite decades of progress and even though they have the skills to succeed, women remain underrepresented in the top ranks of politics and business. In 2025, only 11% (55) of all Fortune 500 companies' CEOs are women, while women of color occupy even fewer of those roles. New research from Columbia Business School reveals that gaining experience can be critical in closing the gap, and that lack of confidence in women to pursue leadership positions often stems from not having the experience in the first place.
The paper, Gender Differences in Climbing up the Ladder: Why Experience Closes the Ambition Gender Gap, published in Psychological Science, combines nearly a century of U.S. political field data with a preregistered workplace experiment. The researchers found that while women with little experience are significantly less likely than men to pursue higher-level roles, gaining additional years of experience boosts women’s self-confidence and ultimately encourages them to pursue leadership positions, thereby closing the gap in ambition. This stands in contrast to men, who frequently pursue jobs and elected offices even when they acknowledge having little experience to prepare them for the role.
“For decades, we have attributed women’s underrepresentation at the top primarily to discrimination or bias,” said Columbia Business School Professor Mabel Abraham and lead author of the paper. “But our findings reveal that experience in itself can build confidence and level the playing field. With enough experience, women are just as likely as men to feel confident about pursuing leadership roles. That’s a powerful insight for organizations and policymakers contemplating solutions to close the gender gap.”
Abraham and co-authors, Kristina A. Wald of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia Business School Professor Adam Galinsky, the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics and Brian Pike, Partner at McKinsey & Company, conducted two complementary studies. In the first experiment, the team examined 96 years of the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections, analyzing 6,439 politicians (5,900 men and 539 women) who held feeder roles such as U.S. House Representative, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, or Secretary of State between 1920 and 2016. In the second experiment, they conducted a preregistered experiment with 413 full-time employees, randomly assigning participants to “low” (3 years) or “high” (12 years) experience conditions before asking if they would pursue a newly created department head role. Across both studies, the pattern was consistent: women with less experience were significantly less likely than men to pursue higher-level positions, but the gender gap disappeared with additional years of experience.
Key Takeaways:
- In the political study, women with fewer than nine years of experience were less likely than men to run for higher office, but after about nine years, the gap closed.
- In the workplace experiment, only 46% of women with low experience (3 years) expressed interest compared with 60% of men, but at higher experience levels (12 years), 69% of women and 65% of men were equally likely to apply for leadership positions.
- Additional analysis revealed that women with low experience chose not to pursue the leadership role because they doubted their own ability to succeed — not because they believed their colleagues doubted them.
“Experience matters more for women than it does for men,” said Abraham, the Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business. “That means organizations must focus on helping women build and sustain experience early in their careers. Future research could explore which types of experiences are most influential in boosting self-confidence, and how institutions can better design roles and career structures to support women’s long-term advancement.”
