Women CFOs take, on average, three years longer than men to reach the top job, according to research from OneStream. At first glance, that gap can look like slower progression. But from where I sit – both as a finance leader and someone who’s spent years watching talent evolve across the industry – it tells a more nuanced story. It reflects the reality that many women are gaining broader, deeper experience before stepping into the CFO seat.
Our recent Women in Finance study, The Glass Chair, found that women take around 18 years to reach the CFO role in Global Fortune 500 companies, rising to 20 years in the FTSE 100. More than a third of those women have followed non-linear career paths, moving between functions, organisations, and even sectors. And, importantly, our findings suggest that this is setting them up for success.
Why breadth, not speed, builds exceptional CFOs
The CFO role isn’t what it used to be, and that’s no bad thing. Today’s finance leaders are juggling everything from digital transformation to geopolitical uncertainty to activist investors and rising reporting requirements. The job has moved far beyond back-office stewardship. CFOs are expected to be enterprise strategists, transformation champions and commercially minded partners to the CEO.
Leaders increasingly want CFOs who can weigh in on decisions that traditionally sat miles outside the finance remit: go-to-market strategy, customer acquisition, product investment, even marketing. And to make the most of this influence, CFOs need an enterprise-wide perspective.
Taking “the long way to the top” is proving to be a stronger preparation model for modern finance leadership, building the qualities needed from today’s CFOs:
Cross-functional fluency: Finance can no longer operate as an island. To effectively shape strategy, CFOs must collaborate across the entire value chain, from IT and operations to sales and HR. That’s almost impossible to do well if you’ve only ever sat in finance. Spending time in different teams gives aspiring CFOs a completely different vantage point. Just as importantly, it builds your brand – showing people who you are and what you can bring to the table – which is ultimately what drives credibility and influence.
Digital competence: As AI reshapes every part of the business, CFOs have a crucial role to play in shaping strategy. They don’t need to be technologists, but they do need a solid grasp of how AI models work, the assumptions behind them and the risk they introduce. Modern CFOs should feel confident interpreting and challenging AI-driven insights, and making sure decisions stay transparent, secure and grounded in strong governance.
Adaptive leadership: Moving across functions or organisations automatically exposes you to different cultures and ways of working. Learning to adapt, to read a room and flex your style, soon becomes second nature. This kind of adaptability is becoming non-negotiable as boards increasingly seek CFOs with the potential to step into the CEO role. They’re looking for leaders with the confidence and versatility to steady teams in times of volatility.
Change orientation: Non-linear careers often come with stretch moments, such as turnaround projects, system implementations, acquisitions, divestments, new market entries or product reinventions. These roles can feel messy at the time, but they’re perfect training for the realities modern CFOs face. Being comfortable with complexity is crucial for modern finance leaders steering organisations through constant transformation.
How women are pioneering a new CFO model
If breadth, adaptability and cross-functional fluency now define what it means to be CFO-ready, then it’s no coincidence that women are excelling within this model.
A big part of this comes down to participation and progression. At the entry level, the finance playing field often looks level, with many graduate schemes starting close to a 50/50 gender split. But look again two years later, and the picture is very different. Women begin to drop out of the linear pipeline faster, despite starting from the same point.
So if two people start on equal footing, why do their trajectories diverge so quickly? In my experience, it’s rarely about capability. More often, it comes down to access: who gets informal mentoring, who receives early sponsorship, who is coached on what the right next move looks like. These small moments of advocacy and information-sharing add up.
Because of this, many women end up seeking roles outside the traditional finance route because they see them as a stepping stone. These moves help them build experience and check the boxes that more linear paths didn’t always offer. And by the time they reach senior finance positions, they often arrive with a more multi-dimensional CV than the traditional finance fast-trackers.
What started as a workaround has become a competitive advantage. And the outcomes reflect this. Our research findings show that across publicly listed companies in Europe, the UK and the US, those led by women CFOs are outperforming industry benchmarks – delivering an average annualised total shareholder return of 4.5%.
While correlation isn’t causation, it does highlight a meaningful pattern. Through both necessity and intent, women in finance have pioneered a more future-fit route to finance leadership – one that many organisations are now realising should be the blueprint, not the exception.
What this means for traditional talent systems
This isn’t just a gender conversation; it’s a strategic opportunity for boards and CEOs. If the data is already telling us that broader, more varied career paths produce stronger CFOs, then our talent systems need to catch up.
Until now, succession planning in finance has been built around a narrow definition of readiness: technical mastery plus time served in a linear progression of roles. But that model simply doesn’t reflect what a modern finance leader is expected to deliver. It’s time to revisit the competency frameworks and rethink what CFO readiness actually means, centring cross-functional fluency, commercial intuition and transformation experience as core requirements.
This shift also means redesigning development pathways. If we want future CFOs to think like strategic growth drivers, we need to give them enterprise visibility early. Exposure to operations, strategy, commercial teams and transformation programmes shouldn’t be something people fall into; it should be intentionally built into development plans.
Crucially, companies must take a hard look at how opportunities are allocated. Sponsorship, stretch assignments and access to high-impact projects often move careers forward faster than any formal process. If those chances circulate within the same small group, organisations unintentionally reinforce the very linearity they’re trying to move away from.
Our research shows that AI and automation are helping to open the door not just to more women, but to leaders of different backgrounds, experiences and styles. With 83% of women CFOs saying that increased automation within finance is enabling different types of expertise to enter the role, it’s clear that the technical barriers that once defined the CFO path are being broken down.
A changing blueprint for CFO excellence
As journalist Patti Sellars once wrote: “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.” And nowhere is this truer than in finance today. The leaders who will define the next decade won’t be the ones who followed the cleanest, most predictable path, but the ones who gathered the richest set of experiences along the way. The organisations that embrace this will elevate people who bring perspective as well as technical strength, commercial vision alongside financial control, and the resilience to lead through change.
The blueprint has changed. Non-linear development shouldn’t be treated as unusual or risky. It should be normalised as the most effective way to build future-ready finance leaders.
Aisling Harney is senior director of international finance at OneStream Software.
Women CFOs take, on average, three years longer than men to reach the top job, according to research from OneStream. At first glance, that gap can look like slower progression. But from where I sit – both as a finance leader and someone who’s spent years watching talent evolve across the industry – it tells a more nuanced story. It reflects the reality that many women are gaining broader, deeper experience before stepping into the CFO seat.
Our recent Women in Finance study, The Glass Chair, found that women take around 18 years to reach the CFO role in Global Fortune 500 companies, rising to 20 years in the FTSE 100. More than a third of those women have followed non-linear career paths, moving between functions, organisations, and even sectors. And, importantly, our findings suggest that this is setting them up for success.