Career Plateau for Women: What to Do When There Is No Next Rung and How to Build What Comes Next
Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.
You did everything they told you to do. You got the title, the team, the pay, the track record that nobody can argue with. And then one ordinary Tuesday you looked up at the ladder you had been climbing for twenty years and realized there was no next rung. Or there was one, and you didn’t want it.
Nobody prepares you for that part. A career plateau for women usually arrives dressed as success. Same title, same paycheck, nowhere left to put any of it.
The career plateau for women that nobody warns you about
Here is what I know to be true. You are still good at your job. You are maybe the best you have ever been at your job. The work is not the problem.
The problem is that the map ran out. The next move is the same job at a bigger company, with a longer commute and a worse boss, and the thought of it makes you tired in your bones. (After all, you are already working 50+ hours a week, and barely keeping your head above water… how the hell are you supposed to take on more?!?!?!)
Raise your hand if you have caught yourself doing the math on how many more years you can hold this. Raise your hand if you have googled something like "what do I do after Chief People Officer" at eleven at night. Raise your hand if you have told exactly nobody at work that you are even asking the question. (I think you are out of hands to raise, am I right?)
I will go first. I hit the Chief People Officer role, and I remember sitting there thinking, okay, what the heck am I going to do next? This same job at a bigger company? That is some bullshit. I do not want to do that, al all. Ya’ll, the ladder had run out. There was no other place to go. And because I had no idea what came next, I did what a lot of us do, which is nothing. For a while.
A plateau is a planning problem, and it arrives exactly when you have the least energy left for planning.
Where this came from
This week on Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors I talked with Natalie Benamou, founder and CEO of Her C-Suite, a portfolio career network for women leaders in the second half of their careers. She also hosts the podcast Women Leaders on the Move. Natalie built the thing she needed when her own industry stopped overnight in March 2020 and she had to decide what she was going to be next.
I asked her about women who hit this exact wall. She was blunt about the board path, which is where a lot of women land when they are looking for a next chapter: "it is the highest position in a company, it is the hardest position to get, and it is not something that you're just gonna get tapped on the shoulder for."
What I found interesting is how much that one line explains, because the waiting-to-be-tapped thing is the whole spell we were taught. Do good work, keep your head down, somebody will notice.
What the data says about the top of the ladder
I went looking for the data, because I wanted to know whether the plateau was in my head or in the pipeline. It is in the pipeline.
The 2026 Spencer Stuart Board Index found that 29 percent of new independent directors appointed to S&P 500 boards were women. In 2025, that figure was 38 percent. In 2021 it was 43 percent.
Uhhhh, excuse me? That is nine points in a single year, and fourteen points off the high. (And let's be clear, a chunk of that is the political landscape we are living in, where everything with a diversity label on it is being quietly defunded.)
It gets more specific the higher you look. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org published the 2025 Women in the Workplace report in December 2025, and the pipeline reads like a staircase with the top two steps sawed off. Women hold 35 percent of vice president roles, 32 percent of senior vice president roles, and 29 percent of C-suite roles.
And the same report, the part that explains the whole shape is this: for every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, 93 women are promoted. For women of color, it is 74. Disgusting. Gross, really.
(This one confirmed exactly what I lived as a Chief People Officer. The leak does not start at the top. It starts at the very first promotion, and by the time you are the one woman in the room at 29 percent, the math was decided a decade earlier. What they call the “Broken Rung.”)
And then there is the part that gets layered on when you have been working for a couple of decades. AARP published survey results in January 2026 showing 64 percent of workers age 50 and older have seen or experienced age discrimination at work. Thirty-three percent said older employees are assumed to be less tech-savvy.
Ugh. So you are expected to have more experience AND to somehow be presumed obsolete at the same time. (Which one resonates with you? One or two, or all three?)
Why this lands harder on women
Men hit career plateaus too. The difference is what each of us has in the bank when we get there.
Natalie named it on the episode, and it is the thing I see over and over in HER Collective. The women who have spent twenty years inside one company have deep relationships, and almost all of them are inside that company. When the ladder runs out, the people who could vouch for her are the same people competing with her for the one role left.
I told her the truth about why: we do not have the luxury of the happy hour after the dinner, because we are at home doing homework and running the house. No matter how modern your household is, it is a rough day at my house if I am not there to help with fractions. The networking that men did on a Thursday night, we were doing bath time.
So the plateau hits a woman with a thinner outside network, a title she has welded to her identity, and a salary she cannot walk away from without a plan. That is structural, and structural problems close with a plan and a calendar.
If you want to see how sticky floors and glass ceilings work together, start here.
What do you do when there is no next rung on the ladder?
You build the next thing while you still have the job. That is the whole move, and here is how to run it.
1. Do the love, like, capable audit before you do anything else
Natalie walked me through an exercise she learned from one of her founding members, and it is the most useful thing in this entire blog. Three columns. What do you LOVE doing every day, the stuff that lights you up. What do you like doing, fine, happy to do it. What are you capable of doing, meaning you can do it well and you do not particularly enjoy it.
Most of us built a whole career out of column three. We got good at something, got promoted for being good at it, and then got handed more of it.
Do this on paper, not in your head. Then look at column one and ask the only question that matters: is any of this monetizable? Because the answer tells you whether your next chapter is a role, a business, a board seat, or some combination of all three.
2. Sort your options into easy, short, mid and long
When I asked Natalie what a woman should do when she wakes up and finds herself with no runway, she said assess your opportunities: easy, short-term, mid-term and long-term.
I love this because it stops the spiral. You could absolutely be a Chief People Officer again one day. That is a long-term play with a long runway. You could take one advisory project next month. That is easy. Both go on the list, in different columns, and suddenly you are not choosing between "stay forever" and "blow up my life."
Write down three things in each column this week. A list. That is all. The plan comes later.
3. Build the outside network now, while you still have a title
Your title is the most valuable networking asset you will ever hold, and it is on loan. People take the call when you are the CPO at a known company. The call is harder to get six months after you leave.
So use it now. And be specific about the rooms. I am not saying go to whatever meetup at whatever brewery, because you do not know who is going to be there. Go to the people you already know who have the right connections and ask them a direct question: where are you meeting people? What rooms are you in? Pull me in.
Curated rooms work because you skip the "tell me about yourself" part and go straight to business.
4. If you want a board seat, say the words to twenty-five people
This is where Natalie was most useful, and most honest. She said the path to a board almost always comes from the twenty-five closest people to you, and sometimes just five. And it starts with being able to say, in one clean sentence, "I am this person, and I am looking to land a board role."
She said women do not say it, so nobody knows to offer. "How do you think that men are doing it? They're doing it in conversation."
You cannot be considered for something nobody knows you want.
She also busted the biggest myth I hear, which is that you need a huge profit and loss background or a C-suite title to be considered. You do not. If you have presented to a corporate board, that counts. If you have built the deck that went to the board, that counts. If you sit on a nonprofit board, that counts. Her point was to identify the right board TYPE first, because aiming straight at a publicly traded board as your first one is how women decide they are not qualified and quit before they start.
5. Make the AI thing your advantage instead of your liability
Remember that AARP number, where a third of older workers say they are assumed to be less tech-savvy? Here is how you make that assumption expensive for the person making it.
A Harvard Business School working paper published in May 2026, reviewing adoption data across more than 100 countries, found that 47.8 percent of men report using generative AI compared with 39.3 percent of women. Men are roughly 22 percent more likely to be using it.
So the field is wide open in the exact spot where you are assumed to be weakest. Natalie put it this way on the episode, and she is right: what boards want now is an agile, curious learner, and knowing how to talk to the machine is a competitive advantage sitting right there for the taking.
Being the woman in the room who can say one real sentence about what this technology is doing to her industry, and who has put the tools on her own work, is enough. Technical is a different job and nobody is asking you to take it. Start a conversation about it. You do not have to know everything to ask a good question.
What I want you to take from this
The plateau is real and the numbers back you up. You are not imagining the fact that the rungs got further apart right when you got close to the top.
But the move is to stop treating a ladder as the only shape a career can have. Boards, advisory work, your own thing, a different role in a different lane, some of all of it. Natalie said doors close and windows open and it is up to us to fly through. I would add one thing: build the window while you still have the door.
Start with the love, like, capable list. Twenty minutes, a piece of paper, a cup of tea. That is the whole assignment.
The part where I tell you what to do next
If this is where you are, the ladder question and the AI question are the same question. Both of them come down to whether people can see what you are capable of doing next. That is what I wrote The AI Gap about: the four gaps that decide who gets seen as the future of their company and who gets treated as the safe pair of hands. You can get the book and the prompting framework that goes with it at https://www.ericaandersonrooney.com/the-ai-gap.
And if you want the room where women ask these questions out loud instead of at eleven at night, we saved you a seat inside HER Collective.
You are out of ladder. That is a solvable problem, and it starts with a piece of paper and twenty minutes. I am cheering you on.
Erica
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a career plateau look like for women specifically?
It usually shows up after the title, not before it. You are performing well, the work is fine, and the only visible next step is the same job somewhere bigger. For women it lands harder because most of the relationships that could open a different door are inside the company you are trying to leave, and the top of the pipeline is thin. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found women hold 29 percent of C-suite roles in their December 2025 report, so the one open seat has a line in front of it.
How do I get on a corporate board if I was never in the C-suite?
Identify the board type you are a real fit for before you aim, because there are many and a publicly traded board is rarely the first one. Advisory seats, observer seats and nonprofit boards all count as real board experience. Then say the sentence out loud to the twenty-five people closest to you: this is who I am, and I am looking for a board role. Natalie Benamou's point on the podcast was that men are doing this in conversation, and women are waiting to be asked.
Is it too late to change direction in the second half of my career?
No, and the evidence is in the room with you. Natalie told me Her C-Suite has had women land executive roles in their sixties and women start whole new careers in their late forties and fifties. What changes is the method. You plan it while you are still employed, you sort options by runway, and you build the outside network before you need it.
Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.
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