What years of data, conversations, and missed signals tell us about retention
Women don’t leave organizations suddenly. They leave because patterns repeat.
This shows up year after year in research, including McKinsey and LeanIn’s Women in the Workplace reports, and it shows up just as clearly in Forté’s Career Outcomes data and in our conversations with women across industries, roles, and career stages.
The themes are consistent: unclear paths to advancement, uneven access to opportunity, lack of sponsorship, and cultural exhaustion.
None of this is new or surprising, which makes it fair to ask why the same issues keep resurfacing. If we already know what drives women out, why aren’t we getting better at keeping them?
The answer is not a lack of information.
Most organizations treat these patterns as narrative, not signal.
Treated as narrative, these patterns often lead to empathy, discussion, head nods, and even headlines, but they rarely change priorities or timelines. By then, the cost is already visible.
Where Signals Show Up Early
Long before women leave, they test whether it’s safe to name what’s happening.
They don’t always start with formal channels, because feedback tied to managers, evaluations, surveys or compensation doesn’t always feel safe. Instead, women look for places where they can sense-check their experience, ask questions out loud, and see whether what they’re noticing is shared.
Often, that happens in ERGs. Because they are built around community, the same concerns tend to surface across different conversations over time, making patterns visible before frustration turns into disengagement.
These signals aren’t new, they aren’t rare, and they aren’t unclear.
women look for places where they can sense-check their experience, ask questions out loud, and see whether what they’re noticing is shared."
So What’s Been Changing
Yep, we get it. The last few years have been tough. Formal DEI teams (whatever letters they currently go by) are shrinking, being restructured, or folded into broader people functions. At the same time, ERGs are increasingly expected to be broadly inclusive and to serve wider audiences.
It would be easy to assume that these shifts are why insight feels harder to act on. But the reality is more uncomfortable.
The same patterns are still being named. The same concerns still surface. What hasn’t changed enough is what happens next.
For years, ERGs and other listening spaces have surfaced consistent themes about opportunity, advancement, and culture. What’s been far less consistent is whether those insights are treated as inputs into decisions and organizational change, or simply as context.
The Real Risk Is Signal Without Action
The risk in this moment is not that insight disappears. It’s that it continues to circulate without consequence.
When patterns surface without clear ownership, response, or follow-through, they become familiar rather than actionable. They are acknowledged, discussed, and documented, but rarely weighted alongside other inputs when decisions are made.
In that environment, signals don’t fail. Systems do.
People learn that naming the pattern doesn’t change the outcome. Over time, what gets shared softens. Frustration turns into resignation. The signal doesn’t disappear, but it fades into background noise instead of triggering a response.
By the time organizations feel the impact, it shows up as disengagement, stalled pipelines, or attrition.
Organizations don’t lose women because they don’t know what the issues are. They lose women because they wait too long to decide what to do with what they already know.
When early patterns are treated as signal, organizations can intervene while women are still engaged and invested. Barriers can be addressed before they show up later as exits and expensive attempts to rebuild talent.
The difference is not intent. It’s integration.
Organizations don’t lose women because they don’t know what the issues are. They lose women because they wait too long to decide what to do with what they already know."
The Opportunity in Front of Organizations
ERGs are not meant to carry this work alone. But they are one of the places where organizations consistently hear what’s coming before it shows up in outcomes.
The work ahead is not about creating more listening spaces or collecting more feedback. It’s about deciding how insight moves once it surfaces, who owns it, and how it gets factored into real decisions.
That shift doesn’t require new awareness. It requires treating what organizations have been hearing for years as real insights, to be acted on.
For organizations that want to act earlier rather than relearn the same lessons later, the question becomes how to protect and use these signals before they turn into outcomes. That’s where intentional partnership with ERGs and clearer pathways for insight start to matter.
Download The Signal Indicator: An Action Sheet for turning ERG insight into organization action.
