Monday, December 22, 2025

What are your 2026 predictions about women, business, and the workplace?

As 2026 approaches, I’m thinking through what this upcoming year will look like for the themes of this newsletter—for women, for the workplace, for business, for the world we all live in.

Will women continue to rethink whether they want to climb the ladder of corporate America?

Will companies do anything about it?

What will the consequences of remote work and declining workplace flexibility be on gender equity?

Will women exit the workforce? (And will we have the right data to even know?)

Will we see any new female CEOs in the Fortune 500? Or will we remain stalled at around 10% or backslide even further?

Will a woman win any of the biggest open succession races, like at Disney or JPMorgan?

Will we see any major women-led IPOs? (Canva, anyone?)

How will women continue to influence the future of AI—from a new crop of OpenAI execs to Mira Murati and Fei Fei Li’s companies?

Send me your predictions on these or any other questions on your mind at my email below, we’ll round them up (with your first name, last initial) before we break for the holidays!

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

The Fortune 500 loses a notable CEO. Sue Nabi is leaving Coty, the beauty giant she's led since 2020. She was the first and only openly trans CEO in the Fortune 500. Reuters

The latest at CBS. "Has feminism failed women?"—that's the subject of a debate scheduled to air on CBS in 2026. It's one in a series of debates that are part of Bari Weiss's new strategy for the broadcaster. Plus, CBS is in the middle of some turmoil over Weiss's decision to pull a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration's deportations of Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador. Guardian

New York signs an AI safety bill into law. Gov. Kathy Hochul ignored President Trump's executive order declaring that only the federal government can regulate AI. The law requires companies with more than $500 million in revenue to write, publish, and follow safety plans. WSJ

A new lawsuit against Hinge and Tinder. The suit accuses owner Match Group of "accommodating rapists" through negligence and a defective product. The suit was filed by six women who were all drugged and sexually assaulted by the same man in Denver. Guardian

Meanwhile, at Uber... New reporting shows that Uber's background checks approve drivers who have been convicted of assault and stalking if the convictions are more than seven years old. Uber said in a statement that it believes a seven-year cutoff "strikes the right balance between public safety...and giving people a chance to rebuild their lives." NYT

PARTING WORDS

"You see these incredible scenes of love and generosity, kindness and selflessness—alongside brutality, of course. You get a sense of love that binds people in these horrific moments."

— Lynsey Addario on her experience as a Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer. Love+War, a new National Geographic documentary about her, is streaming on Hulu now.