Every year, International Women's Day is celebrated on March 8th. With it, a wave of posts, pledges, and panels. What tends to follow is silence. We think this is exactly the wrong time to stop talking.Now that the spotlight has moved on, we wanted to ask the question that matters more when nobody is watching: how far have we actually come in Asia?The CFO role remains one of the most powerful stepping stones in corporate leadership — a gateway to the boardroom, a route to the CEO chair, and a real measure of how seriously a company takes gender diversity at the very top.
The honest answer: We have come further than we were a decade ago, but not nearly far enough.
So, where do we stand?
Globally, women hold just 12% of CFO positions across G20 markets, according to the 2024 UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative report — only one in eight CFOs are women. For an industry that has been talking about gender diversity for well over a decade, that number should feel uncomfortable.
Within Asia, the picture is uneven in ways that often surprise people. The Stock Exchange of Thailand leads the region with 49% female CFOs — a remarkable figure built over decades of deliberate effort. But that number can obscure how far behind other markets remain. Female senior leadership representation across the region ranges from 14.6% in Japan to 48.6% in the Philippines, as per the WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2024. Asia is not one story. It's twenty different ones, and we'd do well to stop treating it as monolithic.
At the board level, women hold just 23.3% of seats globally, and at the current pace, gender parity won't arrive before 2038, according to Deloitte's Women in the Boardroom report. 2038 is only 12 years away. Most of the leaders reading this will still be in their careers when that deadline arrives. This is not a next-generation problem — it's ours.
The pipeline problem starts earlier than most companies realise
Women enter financial services in strong numbers. The problem has never really been the door, it's everything that happens after walking through it. According to Russell Reynolds Associates, financial services has one of the lowest C-suite-to-entry-level ratios for women at just 44%. The industry is genuinely capable of hiring women early. It is far less capable of keeping them moving upward.
And recent trends are heading in the wrong direction. LinkedIn's Economic Graph research shows that women's hiring into senior leadership declined from 37.5% in 2022 to 36.4% in early 2024, suggesting that economic headwinds disproportionately set back women's progress at the C-suite level. Progress, it turns out, is not linear,and it can reverse quietly, without anyone making a conscious decision to let it.
There are real bright spots worth acknowledging
This is not all bleak. Lin Tao made history as Sony's first female CFO in 2024, taking responsibility for finance, strategy, corporate planning, and investor relations. Closer to home, Temasek's CFO Png Chin Yee is set to expand her already significant remit as the institution undergoes major restructuring. A clear signal that some of Asia's most influential organisations are placing their best talent in the seat, regardless of gender.
These appointments matter beyond the headlines. Research from the Asian Development Bank points to a multiplier effect. Promoting one woman to a C-suite role could lead to a threefold increase in women across a firm's broader senior leadership. Representation isn't symbolic. It compounds.
What we see working — and what isn't
After years of working with finance leaders and organisations across the region, a pattern is clear to us. The companies making genuine progress share a few things in common: they track gender representation at every level of the finance function — not just at the top — because that's where you catch the leak early. They sponsor high-potential women actively, not just mentor them. And they build flexibility into senior roles by design rather than treating it as a special arrangement.
The companies that aren't moving? They tend to speak about the pipeline without ever actually looking at it.
Deloitte's research makes an important point here. Quotas and board-level targets help diversify governance structures, but they don't appear to have the same effect on chair and CEO roles. Structural interventions matter, but culture has to move alongside them. One without the other stalls out.
A simple ask for today
If you are involved in succession planning or leadership decisions at your organisation, we'd ask just one thing: pull up your CFO succession plan today and look honestly at who is on it. If it reflects only one gender, that is useful information. Not a reason for guilt, but a reason for action.
In our work placing senior finance leaders across Asia, the best CFOs we encounter come from a far wider talent pool than most companies are currently fishing in.
One day a year isn't enough. One month isn't either. Real celebration looks like better numbers, and we're committed to being part of making that happen.
References: UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative & IFC (2024); Deloitte Women in the Boardroom: A Global Perspective, 8th Edition (2024); WEF Global Gender Gap Report (2024); Fortune Most Powerful Women Asia (2025); Asian Development Bank; LinkedIn Economic Graph (2024).
