Women in the workplace face new challenges as access wanes and gaps widen

While women spent decades making progress in corporate America, new research indicates a widening gender pay gap and new hurdles for advancement.

Widening pay gap? Some 63% of women said they would feel pressure to accept a lower-paying job after a layoff, compared to 52% of men, according to a recent Glassdoor survey seen by Bloomberg. That could exacerbate the pay gap that’s been widening since 2024, the Economic Policy Institute reported.

“In a weakening labor market, it’s the most exposed workers who are going to feel it the hardest, and they’re going to feel it first,” Chris Martin, senior economist at Glassdoor, told Bloomberg.

The gap is worse for Black women. While Black women in the US are just as likely to have advanced education as white men, the average Black woman makes 69% of what the average white man earns, according to a recent report from The 75 Million.

Furthermore, Black women are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed (6% vs. 3%), and more likely to work part time, than white men, exacerbating the wage gap. They are also less likely to have employer-sponsored healthcare than white men (69% vs. 81%), no matter their level of educational attainment.

Some funding has dried up. Targeted college scholarships have historically helped women gain access to white-collar and STEM careers, but those grants have decreased by 19% since 2023, Bloomberg reported.

Some universities with strong technology programs, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, are eliminating their women’s scholarships. Meanwhile companies like Google and Palantir, which previously funded scholarships for women, have also ended their programs, like many companies that have pulled back on DEI efforts seemingly to avoid scrutiny from the Trump administration.

Fewer women at the top. Just 31% of senior leadership positions at US companies were held by women in 2026, down from 35% just two years ago, according to a March report from consulting firm Grant Thorton.

Boardroom gender diversity has declined as well, from a high of 47% in 2020 to just 29% in 2026, Reuters reported.

“We were making such progress,” Kristin Hull, chief investment officer at Nia Impact Capital, told Reuters. “Now the bro culture is alive and well.”

“There’s been a real conflation with the rhetoric of empowerment with women’s actual access to power, which really hasn’t shifted over the time,” Stefanie O’Connell, author The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down, previously told HR Brew. “People have enormous misperceptions over how well or how poorly women are actually represented or not represented.”