To revisit perceptions again in 2026, we (three academics including one of the original authors for the 2006 piece) have drawn upon the same questions, alongside some modifications and additions to reflect the changing workplace, including questions on promotion criteria and perceptions of meritocracy. Our work includes responses from 193 U.S. senior executives across industries alongside additional, qualitative interviews with a number of respondents. What the combined data reveal is not simply that bias persists, but rather specific and troubling new developments. While attitudes improved sharply between 1965 and 2006, the years since have produced a gap in how men and women experience evaluation, standards, and opportunity. The divergence indicates progress on the surface, but deterioration underneath.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Two findings in the most recent data are particularly striking: The first is experiential. Twenty years ago, men and women answered nearly identically when asked whether women are judged more critically in executive roles, with approximately 35% of each group agreeing. Today, men still answer at 35%, but women answer at 90%, revealing a significant judgment gap between male and female executives.

The second is structural. Our survey found that 83% of women believe they must be more exceptional than men to succeed, compared with 28% of men—a big leap from 2006, when 68% of women and 32% of men agreed with that sentiment. This second finding reflects what has been identified as “prove-it-again” bias, where the documented pattern in which women’s competence is presumed absent rather than present, requiring repeated demonstration that men are not asked to provide. Where men are evaluated on potential, women are evaluated on an established record of achievement, and where men’s mistakes are absorbed into an overall favorable impression, women’s are catalogued. Our data suggest this dynamic has not only persisted but intensified. The first gap captures how women experience being evaluated or judged. The second captures what standard they believe they must clear before a favorable evaluation becomes possible at all. Both have worsened since the last survey, but through different mechanisms.

Data collected from new items on this survey deepens the picture. Only 37% of women believe promotion criteria are applied equally across genders compared to 70% of men, and only 40% of women believe their company is a meritocracy compared to 76% of men. One senior executive we interviewed described the underlying mechanism not as a disagreement about facts but as a difference in how the same system is experienced. Men see a process consistently applied, while women encounter uneven access to the inputs that feed it. Visibility accrues unevenly.

Merit is interpreted rather than simply measured. Research shows that organizations that most loudly proclaim meritocratic values are often where that interpretation is most skewed against women. Managers in explicitly meritocratic organizations show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women precisely because their belief in the system’s fairness reduces their impulse to self-scrutinize. Informal sponsorship flows along lines that formal policy does not reach, and those lines tend to follow existing patterns of familiarity and visibility. Each dynamic compounds the others, which is why the perception gap between men and women has widened over the past twenty years rather than narrowed.