Equileap’s 2026 gender equality assessment of 3,430 companies finds that women hold just 7% of CEO roles globally, unchanged for three consecutive years.
Pension fund managers now face a question that has moved well beyond diversity commitments: how to quantify and act on leadership representation as a governance risk indicator with direct implications for stewardship and long-term portfolio value.
Stewardship obligations are tightening across the UK, US, and Nordic markets, with regulators and beneficiaries demanding evidence that portfolio companies meet baseline governance standards. Equileap’s 2026 Gender Equality Report and Ranking, which covers 3,430 companies across 24 developed markets, finds that while global overall gender equality performance is slowly improving, progress at the leadership level has stalled. This brief sets out what the data shows, why it translates into governance risk for pension portfolios, and what leading funds are already doing about it.
The data: what Equileap’s 2026 assessment found
Equileap’s annual assessment scores companies across 19 gender equality criteria, spanning pay equity, workforce composition, parental leave, and leadership representation. In 2026, leadership composition at executive and CEO level remains the area of weakest performance globally. Only 51 of the 3,430 companies assessed have achieved gender balance, defined as 40-60% women, across all organisational levels simultaneously.
The widening divergence between leaders and laggards is one of the sharpest signals in this year’s data. The average score across the full dataset has risen from 37% in 2022 to 47% in 2026, but the Top 100 threshold has risen even faster. Companies that are not actively improving are losing ground in relative terms, and that gap is now visible to investors in a way it was not five years ago.
The US position is particularly striking. Despite representing 42.5% of companies in Equileap’s developed markets universe, only seven US companies made the Top 100 in 2026, down from 15 in 2024. US companies average just 32% women on boards, which is 12 percentage points behind the UK and 14 points behind France’s world-leading 46%. At the executive level, US companies report 25% women, ranking last among anglophone markets.
Key finding · Equileap 2026 Gender Equality Report & Ranking
Just 7% of CEOs are women globally
Women hold 33% of board seats, 23% of executive roles, and 28% of senior management positions across 3,430 companies in 24 developed markets. The figure at CEO level has not moved in three years.
Source: Equileap 2026 Gender Equality Report & Ranking
Why it matters: the investor and regulatory angle
Board diversity has migrated from ESG preference to governance baseline. The UK Stewardship Code explicitly requires pension funds and other asset owners to explain how they assess governance at portfolio companies, and diversity at board and leadership level is an increasingly central expectation within that framework. In France, mandatory quotas for 40% women on boards have been in place since 2011, with executive team quotas added in 2021, and the data shows this has produced results: French companies lead globally in board gender balance.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive, effective June 2026, has unified reporting standards across European member states, mandating disclosure of pay levels for equivalent work and requiring corrective action when the gender pay gap exceeds 5%. The effect is already visible in Equileap’s data: European pay gap disclosure rates jumped from 59% in 2025 to 74% in 2026, a 15-percentage-point shift in a single year.
Denominator’s analysis of the Smart Pension Sustainable Growth Fund, covering 1,751 public equity holdings, adds a portfolio-level dimension to this picture. That analysis found that companies performing best on gender representation show significantly lower drops in women’s representation as seniority increases.
Among worst performers, women’s representation falls by 28% from workforce to middle management level; among best performers, the drop is just 15%. That gap points to something structural about how these organisations manage talent, retain women, and build management pipelines, with direct implications for long-run portfolio resilience.
Smart Pension was the first UK pension fund to apply this kind of comprehensive human capital analysis to its portfolio, using the findings to inform stewardship priorities and voting strategies at AGMs.
Who is leading: named companies and markets as benchmarks
Australia dominates Equileap’s 2026 Top 100, with 31 companies making the ranking, nearly one-third of all spots. The country’s average company score rose from 51% in 2025 to 56% in 2026, driven largely by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s strengthened mandatory disclosure requirements, which came into force in 2024.
The top five companies globally, National Bank of Canada (86%), Transurban Group (83%), Helia Group (81%), GPT Group (81%), and Coles Group (80%), all scored above 80%, a first in Equileap’s ten-year history.
The UK secured 21 positions in the Top 100, with AstraZeneca, Standard Chartered, GSK, and National Grid all placing in the global Top 20. Ten UK companies achieved gender balance across all four organisational levels, a measure of depth of commitment rather than just headline board statistics. The UK’s 84% pay gap disclosure rate, built on mandatory reporting requirements since 2017, places it among the top five countries globally.
What this means for pension fund managers: three actionable conclusions
- Map your exposure by leadership level, not just board composition. Equileap’s 2026 data shows that board-level representation has improved across most markets, but executive and senior management representation lags significantly. Pension funds that assess portfolio companies only at board level are missing the part of the leadership pipeline where governance risk is most concentrated.
- Use disclosure gaps as engagement triggers. Equileap’s data shows that the US has the lowest gender pay gap disclosure rate of any developed market at 15%, down 2 percentage points from 2025. Companies that do not disclose are not automatically low-risk. Systematic non-disclosure in voluntary reporting markets is itself a governance signal, and pension funds with significant holdings have the stewardship leverage to press for change.
- Integrate Equileap and Denominator’s data into proxy voting policy. Smart Pension’s approach of using Denominator’s human capital analysis to inform targeted voting interventions on remuneration packages and board appointment resolutions demonstrates how human capital and equality data can move from screening input to active stewardship tool. Funds that have not yet formalised this approach are leaving a lever unused.
Board diversity data is governance data, and the evidence base for treating it as such has never been stronger. Pension funds that quantify their exposure using Equileap and Denominator’s company-level data, engage systematically with laggards, and formalise proxy voting thresholds are better positioned to meet both their stewardship obligations and their beneficiaries’ long-term interests.
To read the full insights from Equileap’s Global Gender Equality Report and Ranking 2026, Developed Markets edition, click here. The Denominator 2026 Smart Moves Report is available here.
