16/09/2026
The gender gap is also a visibility gap.
We measure inequality through pay, hiring, promotion and leadership. We should.
But we measure far less often another resource that increasingly has economic value:
attention.
Who gets seen?
Who gets quoted?
Who presents the project?
Who gets introduced?
Whose expertise becomes searchable?
Whose name comes to mind when an opportunity appears?
The World Economic Forum's 2026 Gender Gap Report gives this question urgency. Women represent 46% of entry-level positions, but only 23% of the C-suite. And across the economies tracked for leadership hiring, women's share of new top-level management hires has declined every year since 2022.
There is no single explanation for this. Pay, care responsibilities, career breaks, organizational culture, networks, hiring and promotion systems all matter.
But opportunity has an attention layer.
Visibility can create networks.
Networks can create opportunities.
Opportunities can create authority.
Authority can create more visibility.
That loop compounds.
And now AI adds another dimension. As people increasingly use AI, platforms and search engines to discover expertise, visibility is no longer distributed only by human networks.
This creates a responsibility for marketers too.
Who do we quote?
Who gets the conference stage?
Whose success becomes the case study?
Who receives the backlink?
Who becomes publicly associated with expertise and innovation?
Marketing doesn't cause the gender gap. But marketing does distribute attention.
Perhaps equality therefore needs another dimension: not equal fame or manufactured influence, but equality of discoverability — making genuine competence easier to find, recognize and connect with opportunity.
That's the idea I explore in my contribution to the conversation.
Visibility is infrastructure.
And if visibility has economic value, who gets seen is an economic question.
We have spent decades measuring the gender gap through salaries, employment, promotions, political representation and leadership. We should keep measuring all of them.
