Dismantling The 'Presence Penalty': Leaders Rethink Who Gets Access To Revenue Roles

Women make up 57% of the professional workforce, yet they are still frequently left out of key revenue pipelines and leadership tracks. The numbers expose a fundamental flaw in how companies operate, tending to reward visible busyness and constant availability over actual capability. Long-standing models for revenue roles penalize talent with arbitrary demands, like 24/7 client availability, which can actively sideline caregivers and reinforce a culture that equates constant presence with business value.

Working to tear down traditional methods for building and measuring revenue teams is Ginna Santy, the Executive Director of Women in Revenue. Her background ranges from directing global communications for Deloitte’s CEO of Consulting to co-founding Denver’s first women-focused coworking space. The unique mix gives her a close view of how technology and modern go-to-market models are changing what counts as valuable work. She sees GTM strategies being increasingly shaped by overlooked workforce dynamics, particularly the underrepresentation of women in revenue-driving roles.

"Women are the majority of the workforce, but not in revenue roles. Companies are actively leaving growth on the table," Santy says. She believes GTM success in 2026 and beyond belongs to people who can create, refine, and pressure-test ideas, not just execute more of them.

• The volume trap: When the primary goal of a sales organization is to simply increase the number of touchpoints, the human part of the job becomes a race toward exhaustion. In Santy's view, this fixation on volume creates a noisy environment where quality is sacrificed for a high-speed, low-yield game of numbers. "I see an almost across-the-board overinvestment in anything that can exponentially increase output," she says. "But output isn't the answer. We've always missed the boat when it comes to sales and go-to-market by thinking output is the end-all, be-all."

• The busyness mirage: In her view, AI compounds this skewed perception with promises to help us further increase output. "We tend to see the busiest person as the winningest person, taking so many meetings and doing so much." By bringing in AI simply to do more, she says, teams often double down on a mistaken emphasis on volume.

While there's plenty of talk about AI displacing jobs, Santy notes that fear can distract from the more practical question of how professionals can use the technology to open new paths to leadership. She'd prefer to redirect the conversation toward how professionals can use AI to generate revenue in new ways and decouple work from physical presence. "There are a lot of ways AI can help women disconnect from the idea of work being generated only while you're in one place," she explains. "Making that disconnect is huge, and it's going to change our understanding of what experience and skill mean."

• The flattening of revenue roles: As this trend accelerates, Santy expects to see revenue roles flatten across many parts of the enterprise. Dismantling these entrenched silos offers a tactical advantage for capable professionals, who can use the period of change to bypass rigid career paths. "It'll give some women a chance to navigate a flatter hierarchy in an organization or to leap-frog over what were traditional paths just a few years ago."

As sheer volume and physical presence lose their status as performance metrics, Santy sees a professional's role moving toward that of a skeptic in a highly iterative workflow. She predicts that the most successful integrations of human capital and artificial intelligence will rely on a distinctly human skill stack.

• Surviving the wringer: In Santy's perspective, productive human-AI integrations begin with great ideas and people with the discernment to refine them. "Maybe you have the spark of an idea, so you brainstorm a little bit more. Then you have to be able to put those ideas through the wringer in your own mind."

• Skipping the slog: Next, she says, comes the ability to articulate ideas to AI in a way that will let you bypass what she calls slog work. "The research, the competitive analysis, AI allows you to jump over all of that. Then you can ask questions like 'Is this worth investing in?' and 'What are the pitfalls?'"

• Stress-testing with intention: The final capability involves pressing AI to show you the weakness in your own idea, which Santy acknowledges can be uncomfortable. "It's a fascinating skill because none of us like it. None of us want to hear our weaknesses, but we have to double down on it because of how AI tends to interact with us."

Santy expects these specific human skills to grow in value as organizations adjust how they operate. It's a shift that prioritizes the quality of the final outcome over the specific origin of the labor, which she views as a step in the right direction. "We have to move away from the obsession over 'did they use AI or didn't they?' At the end of the day, who cares?" she says. "It's survival of the fittest, and the people who refine those capabilities will rise to the top."