The pace at which women are being promoted into senior executive roles is slowing, and experts caution that a shaky labor climate and a dearth of professional infrastructure are compounding an already obstruction-filled pipeline for women aspiring to become CEOs.

Speaking Monday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif.—Fortune’s annual gathering of women leaders in business—Kelly Baker, executive vice president and chief human resource officer at financial services firm Thrivent, said organizations have pulled back from developing and recruiting women for executive leadership. The slowdown, she argued, is a byproduct of a frenetic environment that has deprioritized cultivating these leaders.

“I don’t think we can ignore the fact that there is a climate where organizations aren’t quite as focused,” Baker told Fortune Leadership Editor Claire Zillman. “If you take your foot off the pedal at all, you will start to stall.”

The data reflects that cooling commitment. The Fortune 500, Fortune’s annual ranking of the largest U.S. companies by revenue, currently counts 56 companies led by women, or about 11.2% of the list, up from 7.4% six years ago. Yet women’s share of roles in both the C-suite and at the board level has stalled at roughly 30%, marking the first decline in women’s board representation in more than a decade. That plateau carries particular weight because C-suite and board seats are where chief executives are traditionally developed and chosen—the same pipeline the summit’s speakers said is now getting less organizational support.

Toni Townes-Whitley, a former Fortune 500 CEO and Nasdaq corporate board member, suggested that fewer conversations about workplace diversity have dimmed the spotlight on promoting and developing women leaders—and contributed to a shift in attitudes toward women’s capabilities.

“We can’t take away an environment where there is a question, almost a recalibration of women in the world, where unfortunately negative rhetoric from lots of different dimensions have women being challenged externally, internally, by the boards,” Townes-Whitley said at the summit. “That’s a concern, underlined, that’s just not talked about.”

Obstacles in the “last mile” before taking the helm of a company—the final handoff from the senior executive ranks to the corner office—also persist—and are, in part, a result of women not viewing themselves as leaders, despite possessing the skillsets and experience that would qualify them for the role.

Only 36% of women in the workplace have considered becoming a CEO or said they wanted to be one, according to Jenna Fisher, managing director of global leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates. “We can’t 3D print our candidates,” she said.

Hayden Brown, president and CEO of freelance marketplace platform Upwork, was once among those women who never pictured herself in the top job, despite her mother running the women’s empowerment program at her workplace.

“I grew up in like the most pro-women household, and yet it took our board chair, probably 10 years ago, to say to me, ‘You should be a CEO,’” Brown told Zillman. “And I was like, ‘Really?’”

Brown has since worked to change how women view themselves in relation to leadership, starting in her own home: she edits the books she reads with her children to be more gender-inclusive, swapping adjectives like “smart” for “hard-working” to guide them toward the traits she wants them to embody.

Driving larger changes in the workplace, Baker said, will also require the awareness and backing of men. Those in influential senior positions—particularly men—will need to serve as both mentors, who support women through their careers, and sponsors, who advocate for high-potential women leaders in front of coworkers and other executives.

Still, there is some good news, according to Fisher: AI has created pressure for leaders who are adaptable and fluent in emerging technologies—a shift toward capability that lands just as the formal development efforts Baker described lose momentum. Russell Reynolds Associates research indicates women are ahead of men in AI adoption and implementation, perhaps because of a willingness to adapt.

The pullback Baker and Townes-Whitley described—fewer corporate conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—has not, in Fisher’s view, erased demand: “Even though DEI is not being talked about as much as it used to be,” Fisher said, “there is still so much demand for women in executive roles and board roles.”

How that demand—and women’s reported lead in AI adoption—translates in a quieter DEI climate is the question now hanging over a pipeline that, by the summit speakers’ own account, has begun to stall.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.