Career Advice for Female EAs and PAs: Progression, Challenges and What Comes Next

There’s a long history behind EA and PA roles. For decades, these positions have been closely tied to women, and to a particular idea of “support.” Work that is essential, skilled, and often high-pressure - but positioned as secondary.

And the skills the role relies on (organisation, emotional intelligence, intuition, adaptability) are the same skills women have (historically) been expected to have: to anticipate, to manage, to keep things running smoothly, often without being asked.

Which means that what makes a great EA or PA has, in many ways, been treated as something natural rather than something extremely skilled.

When a skill is seen as instinctive, it’s rarely valued in the same way. The ability to manage competing priorities, to read a room, to handle pressure without escalation - these aren’t small things, they’re what enable businesses to succeed. But because they don’t always present as measurable output, they can be overlooked.

And over time, that shapes perception. PA and EA roles are often seen as supportive, rather than influential. In close proximity to power, but not quite part of it.

So, for many female EAs and PAs, there are two things happening at once. There’s the broader set of challenges women still navigate in the workplace - things like balancing work with caring responsibilities, assumptions around availability, or stepping away and returning after time out.

And for EAs and PAs, layered on top of that, is the need to reframe the role itself. The need to continually demonstrate that what you do isn’t just helpful, it’s critical. That the judgement, discretion and awareness the role requires carry real weight.

And while that shift doesn’t happen overnight, there are ways to approach the role that make it easier to navigate over time.

One of the things that isn’t talked about enough is how far an EA or PA career can go. For some, progression happens within the role itself - supporting at board level, operating at a higher level of complexity, and becoming deeply embedded in how decisions are made. Over time, the scope and influence of the role expand significantly.

For others, that experience opens up different paths like Chief of Staff positions, operations, or broader leadership roles, where the same core skills are applied in a different context.

But an EA or PA role, doesn’t need to lead elsewhere to be valuable. It already carries real influence, and increasingly, the level of compensation to match. In London and other major markets, experienced EAs are commanding salaries well into six figures - £100k, £150k and beyond - reflecting the level at which they operate.

Being a female EA or PA isn’t a simple, one-dimensional role. It sits at the intersection of expectation, perception, and real capability. It asks for resilience, awareness, adaptability - the ability to hold multiple things at once and keep them moving.

And while that hasn’t always been recognised in the way it should be, it’s starting to shift. Because the best EAs and PAs - those who are calm under pressure, instinctive, quietly influential - are becoming harder to overlook. And slowly, but steadily, the narrative around the role is changing. And for the women in these roles, that shift won’t come as a surprise.