Why more female CEOs in Australia are choosing a coach right now.

I have sat on both sides of this. As the CEO in the chair, carrying decisions nobody else in the building was allowed to see me carry. And, for the years since, as the coach sitting across from women who are living exactly that now.

Here is what nobody tells you on the way up. The higher you climb, the smaller the room of people you can be fully honest with becomes. By the time you are running the organisation, that room can shrink to almost nobody.

The numbers behind the loneliness

Start with the seat itself. Chief Executive Women's 2024 Senior Executive Census found women hold just 9% of ASX 300 CEO roles, 25 companies out of 300, down from 26 the year before. Only one in eight CEO appointments in the past year went to a woman, down from one in four the year before. And 82% of the roles that typically feed the CEO pipeline, the ones just below it, are still held by men. CEW president Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz called the trend "regression, not progress."

The pattern is not confined to the ASX. I see it across government, health and community organisations too, sectors where women often make up the majority of the workforce but a much smaller share of the leadership. The seat is harder to reach. It is also, I have found, harder to sit in once you're there.

Held to a different standard, by the board and by herself

Research out of ANU's Global Institute for Women's Leadership, led by Professor Michelle Ryan, has tracked what happens once women do get appointed. They are more likely to be handed the organisation mid-crisis, the so-called glass cliff, and more heavily scrutinised once they're in the role. Global data from Russell Reynolds puts the average tenure of a female chief executive at 5.2 years, against 8.1 years for men. Not because the work is weaker. Because the runway is shorter and the margin for error is smaller.

No one is coming to check whether you are okay. That is the job. Which is exactly why you need one room where someone is checking anyway.

And that is only the scrutiny coming from outside. The harder standard is usually the one she is holding herself to. Most of the women I work with are not short on competence. They are exhausted from a different source: the belief that the achievement has to keep proving something, that the seat has to be earned again every quarter. That is not a confidence problem. It is an identity pattern, and it is exactly the kind of thing that does not show up on a board paper, and rarely gets said out loud to anyone inside the building.

Then AI arrived and raised the bar again

Here is the layer that has changed in the last two years. The strategy deck, the financial model, the first draft of the board paper, AI now does a competent version of all of it, faster and cheaper than a team can. What it cannot do is walk into the room and hold it. It cannot build the trust that gets a wary board back on side, or steady an executive team the week before the funding decision.

That means the leadership edge that is left, the one that cannot be automated, is presence. And presence has a public dimension now that it did not have a decade ago. Boards, media and stakeholders expect a CEO with a visible, credible personal brand, on LinkedIn, in the press, in the room, on top of everything else on her plate. Skills-based hiring is up 81% as organisations chase exactly this kind of human capability. It is one more expectation stacked on a role that was already carrying more than its share.

Fifty percent, and the performance cost that comes with it

A survey by RHR International found that half of all CEOs report feeling lonely in the role, and 61% of that group say the loneliness is actively hurting their performance. I believe it. The board cannot be her confidant, she reports to them. Her direct reports cannot be, she manages their careers. Her family does not need the boardroom detail at 9pm on a Tuesday. Her peers are frequently also her competitors. That leaves, for most senior women I meet, a room of nobody.

Why a confidential coach, and why now

This is the part that gets undersold. A coaching relationship is not a nice-to-have or a sign that something is wrong. Done properly, it is simply the one room left where the whole truth can be spoken, not to vent, but to think. Industry research puts executive coaching's return on investment at up to seven times its cost, and 87% of leaders surveyed by FMI rate it highly effective. But the number I actually watch for in the women I work with is not ROI. It's the moment clarity comes back into her voice, and she stops needing to perform certainty she doesn't feel, because she finally has somewhere private to work out what she actually thinks.

That confidential space is what builds the resilience the role now demands, and the direction that gets lost when every decision is made in public, under scrutiny, with no room to think out loud first.

If you are the CEO carrying all of this without anywhere to put it down, that is not a personal failing. It is the structure of the seat. The question worth sitting with is a simple one: where is the one room, right now, where you can be fully honest about how it's actually going?