Women’s Path to CFO — Top Barriers and Why They Persist

The glass ceiling is a term we all recognize — an invisible barrier holding back women. Ultimately, it’s a metaphor for bias, lack of representation, lack of mentorship, and pay and promotion differences. But what about the “glass chair”?

Specific to finance, the glass chair is the chief financial officer (CFO) seat that talented women can see but remains elusively out of reach. While the glass ceiling blocks upward mobility across industries, the glass chair symbolizes a visible yet inaccessible leadership role. It’s a role for which women are often groomed but to which they’re rarely appointed.

This post delves into the issues blocking women from reaching that coveted CFO seat, in the order of most impactful to least, according to our research.

1. Economic Downturns Impacting Organizational Structure

During recessions or periods of volatility, companies often flatten hierarchies, consolidate business units, and centralize decision rights to preserve cash and speed execution. Those actions mean fewer rungs between vice president (VP), senior vice president (SVP), and enterprise CFO roles. Plus, incumbents usually have longer tenures as boards and chief financial officers (CEOs) defer leadership changes in favor of continuity.

In short, the number of paths (and open seats) temporarily contracts, even amid expanding expectations for the CFO role.

Consultancies that guide these transformations describe the mechanics. In essence, delayering reduces management levels and broadens spans of control, often eliminating mid‑to‑upper‑management steps that historically served as springboards to enterprise CFO roles. Finance is asked, in parallel, to deliver tighter forecasting and risk visibility. Such expectations can freeze lateral moves and external rotations that otherwise build enterprise scope, another practical limiter on near‑term progression.

Bottom line: In downturns, the org chart literally gets “tighter,” promotion velocity slows, and the CFO chair turns into a scarce asset.

2. Navigating Complex Organizational Politics

Senior finance leaders consistently point to “navigating complex organizational politics” as a brake on advancement. In practice, “politics” is the web of formal authority, informal influence, and implicit norms that govern how decisions get made. The impacted decisions range from budget trades to investment priorities, hiring slates, and cross‑functional compromises.

Our report catalogs this issue as a core barrier. Ultimately, modern CFOs must both broker across the enterprise (strategy, go-to-market, product, supply chain, risk, and audit) and advise the CEO and board.

Harvard Business Review’s framework highlights four distinct political terrains: weeds, rocks, high ground, and woods. Each demand different influence strategies. When able to diagnose the terrain (e.g., when unwritten norms trump org charts), leaders can avoid friction and unlock sponsorship for stretch roles like division or regional CFO.

3. Lack of Access to Mentorship

Reaching the CFO seat is about more than just technical excellence. Reaching that level also requires navigating unwritten norms, finding visible role models, and mapping a credible route to work that shapes profit and loss (P&L). Yet many women report a lack of structured, high‑quality mentorship touchpoints to consistently meet those requirements. That reality is especially true during periods when companies pull back on development programs.

That’s why OneStream is investing earlier in the pipeline. For instance, our partnership with Girls Who Code (GWC) is designed to build confidence, community, and career exposure long before title-gated networks form. These aspects help women translate potential into opportunity. Concretely, the GWC program includes the following:

• Hands-on technical education (e.g., exposure to OneStream’s no-code, click-to-configure development platform) to help participants gain practical skills needed in finance and enterprise tech.
• Guided mentorship with OneStream employees for real-world advice on career paths across tech and finance.
• Introductions to our Women in Finance community to widen participants’ professional circles.
• Internship pathways for GWC alumni, creating a tangible bridge from learning to meaningful early career roles.

In these ways, we’re prioritizing early access to mentors, skills, and networks to address a root cause of the “glass chair” barrier. That barrier manifests in too many talented women reaching pivotal career moments without the relationships and real‑world reps that signal readiness for bigger scopes.

Our GWC partnership is built to change that trajectory, expanding who gets coached, who gets seen, and who gets considered for the finance leadership track. In other words, we’re looking to get women in the room and in the running when the biggest roles open.

4. Skills Gaps in the Finance Department

Today, the CFO role is changing fast. Finance leaders now steer automation, data strategy, and cross‑functional transformation. Based on our research and market analyses, a digital literacy gap exists across finance leadership — as does uneven adoption of AI skills for women. These dynamics slow women’s progression into roles increasingly framed as “tech‑forward.”

Finance is digitizing, but leaders aren’t upskilling fast enough. Per Gartner, the lack of digital skills among senior finance leaders could drive half of unwanted turnover by 2026, widening competency gaps with digital‑savvy teams.

When promotion criteria emphasize tech fluency and data storytelling, uneven access to upskilling programs (or time to use them) becomes a structural barrier.

5. Difficulties Maintaining a Healthy Work-Life Balance

The CFO role is “always on” — with the monthly close, quarterly reporting, annual planning, and multi‑year strategy are just a few examples. The CFO role also includes ad‑hoc board cycles, capital markets events, and merger and acquisitions (M&A).

Our report captures “difficulties maintaining a healthy work‑life balance” as a pragmatic barrier (not a personal failing). Importantly, that barrier stems from periodic overload potentially stalling the very learning loops that produce the next‑level CFO.

According to recent well‑being research, leaders must normalize a sustainable pace, create predictable time off, and leverage automation to strip out low‑value tasks. Such leaders report better engagement and retention — conditions that keep high‑potential finance leaders in the race long enough to finish it.

Evidence reviews also show that thoughtfully designed work‑life approaches can be effective when implemented with managerial accountability. For instance, flexible windows during peak cycles and elder‑ and childcare‑conscious policies are two such approaches.

Get to That Glass Chair!

The barriers keeping women from the CFO seat aren’t about talent.

Economic volatility, opaque politics, limited mentorship, evolving skill demands, and work-life pressures all intersect to slow progress. But these challenges are solvable. Organizations must simply commit to the following structural changes:

1. Sustaining development programs through downturns
2. Making advancement criteria transparent
3. Investing in digital upskilling
4. Protecting flexibility as a leadership standard

Companies with women CFOs consistently outperform, and automation is creating new pathways for wide-ranging expertise to thrive in finance leadership. Thus, the payoff is clear. The question isn’t whether women are ready for the “glass chair” — it’s whether organizations are ready to offer it.

Visit https://onestream.com/women-in-finance to explore insights, resources, and programs designed to accelerate parity in finance leadership.