Why Are There So Few Women in Interim Management?
Across Europe, women hold around 35% of managerial positions (Eurostat). By comparison, only 16% of interim managers are women (INIMA) — showing that interim leadership lags well behind permanent executive careers in terms of gender balance. Interim management is falling behind the mainstream executive pipeline.
So, what is going on?
Interim Management: A Demanding Profession
Interim managers can be defined by three factors:
Competence: they must deliver expertise from day one.
Availability: they are expected to start quickly, often under excessive workload.
Mobility: they often need to relocate or travel extensively.
The Barriers Holding Women Back
Mobility and availability Interim assignments often demand rapid deployment to new locations, sometimes with little notice. Women still disproportionately carry family and care responsibilities — children, elderly parents — which makes such flexibility more difficult. The typical career shift from permanent to interim management happens around the age of 49, a stage of life when many women remain heavily involved in caregiving. This timing makes the transition to interim particularly challenging.
Perceptions of vulnerability Travel, relocations, or short-notice moves can be seen as riskier for women. Concerns about safety in public spaces and during travel are genuine, especially when assignments involve unfamiliar locations, extensive travel, or working outside standard hours.
The STEM pipeline Many interim mandates — turnarounds, operational restructuring, technology transformations — demand technical skills. Since fewer women study hard STEM subjects (only 1 in 3 graduates are female), or progress through technical roles, the pool is smaller.
Sectoral concentration Women are over-represented in sectors with fewer interim management projects (healthcare, education) and underrepresented in sectors with more interim opportunities (manufacturing, machinery, industrial, engineering).
Recruitment and promotion bias Companies and providers may (often unconsciously) favour male candidates. However, there is no objective evidence to support this. Interim mandates are often sourced through networks, and male-dominated networks can limit women’s visibility. Men are often more aggressive in self-marketing for interim roles, while women may underestimate their readiness.
As Marei Strack, President of DDIM, the German Interim Manager Association, observes:
“In interim management, both men and women still attribute more competence to male managers than to women. Even most men believe that a woman has to do much more to get the same recognition as a man. For female interim managers, this means that they have to actively ‘sell’ themselves even more than their male colleagues, which many women find difficult.”
Growth and Country Differences
Permanent executive roles have seen gradual increases in female participation, but interim management has remained stagnant. A lag effect exists: the supply of female interim managers depends on the pipeline of female executives.
Some countries, such as France and Poland, show higher proportions of female executives (29% and 36% respectively, INIMA Survey 2025). This is largely the result of policy interventions in permanent executive appointments.
Jean-Philippe Ménétret, Chairman of IFMT Alumni, the French Interim Manager Association, explains:
“In 2021, the French Rixian law requires a quota of 30% of women in 2027 in the management bodies of companies with more than 1,000 employees (representing one third of interim assignments). The ‘Gender Equality Index’ label is now a sign of recognition for companies that integrate professional equality into their CSR actions. The diversity of functions in interim management in France can also be another explanation. Indeed, missions in finance and human resources represent respectively 27% and 15% of the total missions (i.e. 42%) and are occupied by women in 60% and 64% of missions respectively.”
Stanislaw Wojnicki, Board Member of SIM, the Polish Interim Manager Association, adds:
“During the first decades following 1945 there was a government-led policy of encouraging women to pursue education and undertake hitherto masculine roles; this led to increasing the proportion of women in different strata of the workforce. Moreover, the percentage of women tends to vary depending on the profession – there is a notably higher female representation in financial and HR roles, which represent 16% of the interim workforce.”
What Should the “Ideal” Be?
Interim management places even greater demands on availability and mobility than permanent executive roles, which partially explains why female participation sits lower at 16%.
Parity may be the long-term aspiration, but in the short term it is unrealistic. A more practical benchmark would be to align interim managerial representation with the permanent managerial representation in each country.
Change will come slowly, and mainly as a knock-on effect: more women in executive careers today will gradually increase the pool of women available for interim assignments tomorrow — as already seen in France and Poland.
The Takeaway
The gender gap in interim management is not primarily about competence or discrimination, but about structural factors: mobility, availability, networks, and the size of the executive pipeline.
As the number of senior women in permanent roles grows, the challenge for the profession is to ensure that interim management becomes a realistic and attractive career path.
Women’s leadership styles are often more transformational and relationally focused (Eagly & Carli, 2003). In interim change assignments, this emphasis on care, communication, and vision is a distinct strength — one that companies and providers should recognize and value.
Closing the gap also depends on wider societal change: affordable childcare, eldercare solutions, incentives for shared parental leave, and the normalization of flexible family arrangements. Above all, it requires a cultural shift in which men and women share care equally, and the idea of a ‘stay-at-home husband’ is neither unusual nor stigmatized. These points are critical for female executives in general — but they are even more decisive for women in interim management, where availability and mobility are at the very core of the profession.
Until those shifts occur, interim management will continue to lag behind the progress seen in permanent executive roles.
Jonathan Selby is an International Interim Manager and Chairman of INIMA.