Women hold just 28% of C-suite roles according to a 2023 Women in the Workplace Report. This is a record high, yet still far from equal representation. So why aren't there more? During an executive panel session at From Day One’s Brooklyn conference, leaders discussed the best pathway forward, built on trust, understanding, and respect.

We’re now at a pivotal moment to make a change for women’s representation in the workplace. “We’re at a breaking point because AI is what everyone's talking about. [Women] are three times less likely to put their hand up for proactive training as it relates to AI. Only 20% of leaders in AI are women,” said Anita Jivani, global head of innovation at Avanade. “We know in about 10 years, 90% of jobs are going to be impacted by AI. If that’s the case, and we’re not playing around personally and professionally as women in this space, we’re already lagging.”

But while AI is certainly at the forefront of everyone’s minds, there’s more to the leadership gap than technology alone. “There are some really deeply entrenched and systemic reasons why there aren’t more women in the C suite, and one of those is gender bias and stereotypes,” said Lisa Moore, chief people officer at Yahoo. Even young people are still holding on to outdated notions of what an executive should look like. “There are a lot of different strands to a leadership skill set today, and they don’t all look like one thing.”

Covid shed a light on the workload gender gap—both in the workplace and at home. “Since the pandemic, productivity has increased notably every year for women leaders,” said Laura Lomeli Russert, head of executive engagement at BetterUp. “With that increase, what else might have increased? Burnout.” But that has not been the case for men, as they still don’t hold as many housework responsibilities as women. Combine this with the fact that women feel that they must maintain high productivity to get to the next level of their careers, and exhaustion takes hold.

Preventative and Proactive Tools

Organizations can take steps to support women in their career growth while allowing them the flexibility to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Possible tools include employee resource groups, mental health support, and career coaching. It’s on HR to make sure that the tools are easy to access and understand. “Are you providing the right tools, and are they easily found by anyone in that company?” said Matt Jackson, GM, VP of Americas, Unmind.

“AI has the potential to democratize access to resources or anything that is otherwise unavailable to people right now, across all genders,” he said. Jackson also refers to a longstanding homogenous leadership layer at the top of many companies that may be a barrier to focusing on “soft” offerings like mental health support. Coaching those male executives on compassionate leadership can make a difference.

Remote work options have allowed workers the flexibility they need to accomplish their household tasks during working hours, so that they have leisure time leftover at the end of the day. But with return-to-office mandates coming down fast and fierce, the threat of burnout is on the rise.

“We know from data that any underrepresented group in the workplace expresses a preference to be able to exercise flexibility and work-from-home with some degree of discretion for them,” Moore said. “One unconscious bias we have is that being in an office makes you more productive. That is categorically false.”

You might feel more engaged in-person, Moore says, but ultimately, the sweeping decision is hurting women and underrepresented groups, who lose the ability to manage their own time and “be themselves” in their space of choice.

It’s not just biases that come down to gender or racial identity, says Antoinette Handler, deputy chief HR officer and chief people officer, Americas at  Dentsu, noting that as an introvert she thrives in a lower-pressure work-from-home set up. “It’s also a bias about different ways of working, your different personality styles, your different leadership styles,” she said.

But striking the right balance is important, panelists noted, citing the loneliness epidemic and lack of engagement that has plagued workers since the pandemic. Most agreed hybrid work (but not a full RTO mandate) can help strike the right balance, even if in-person gatherings happen only quarterly.

Amping Up Your Benefits Offerings

For companies that do mandate at least a partial return to office, adjusting their benefits program can help offset some of the loss of flexibility felt by women employees. “Offering better childcare could be a great solution for that,” Lomeli Russert said. “That might actually make parents excited about going back to work!”

Organizations also need to be flexible in offering resources to an aging and changing workforce. “The whole leadership structure is going to change. Half of middle management will be people who started onboarding during Covid. They don’t even understand the concept of working in-person. The next generation [is] more oriented toward values, and they care about skills more than what Ivy League school you went to. It’s a totally different game,” Jivani said. One way to maintain flexibility is to stop talking in absolutes. “Companywide mandates are too broad. The day-to-day is more important,” Jivani said. “Happiness and retention are tied to your ability to connect to your manager.”

Gen Z’s focus on health and wellness also means HR needs to take company culture and support resources seriously to nurture the next generation of leaders. “People entering the workforce now have a much higher expectation of the culture that you create and that you provide for them,” Jackson said. “For so long, we’ve been able to ignore that, because driving people to the point of burnout has led to hitting numbers that you need to hit. But now we have a big enough generation coming in who says, ‘No, I don’t like that. I don’t want that. I’m going to go elsewhere.’”

Lowering the Pressure

Managers, many of whom are women in the sandwich generation, in charge of childcare and elder care at home, are especially feeling the crunch in today’s workforce. “They're told to manage stakeholder expectations of the executives [and] at the same time, pass down messages that they don’t necessarily believe in,” Jivani said. “I think the best investment we could do is invest more in managers,” she said.

Companies should provide managers with the time and the training to develop the skills they need to thrive. “It’s not a coincidence that a lot of women leave the workplace at that management level,” Jivani said. Many women at that mid-level also struggle when returning to the workforce after parental leave. “How can a company and managers create a positive experience of reintegration into an employee's job?” asked moderator Emma Hinchliffe, senior writer and author of MPW daily newsletter at Fortune. Extending the length and flexibility of parental leave offerings is one way to lower the pressure.

“You’re expected to carry a human for nine months and work up until the point you give birth, but get back to the office after 12 weeks or we’re not paying you? That’s absurd,” Jackson said. He suggests a method called the “20% contract,” where managers and new mothers discuss what doing just 20% of one’s former job might look like, and allowing the mother to slowly work her way back up to giving 100% when she’s ready. It all comes down to trust and respect.

Creating a welcoming environment where women leaders feel fully supported takes time, planning, and nuance. Simply put, Lomeli Russert said, “We all have a lot of work to do.”

Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.