While women account for a record 28% of top positions at U.S. companies, there’s trouble lower down the corporate ladder that jeopardizes women’s career trajectories—and companies’ abilities to build the diverse senior leadership they say they want, according to an annual report on women in the workplace by McKinsey and LeanIn.org released on Thursday.
As companies have paid more attention to gender and racial diversity, progress has been fastest in the most visible areas—like the board and the C-suite. But the pipeline to those posts hasn’t seen as much improvement.
In the nine years that McKinsey and LeanIn.org have looked at women in the workplace, the share of women in the C-suite has risen 11 percentage points, from 17% in 2015, to the current record of 28%, up from 26% in last year’s report. Progress at the board level, though, is slowing, with women accounting for 29% of board seats on
Russell 3000
companies, up just 1 percentage point from a year prior and representing the smallest gain in five years, according to a separate report from nonprofit 50/50 Women on Boards.
More worrying is the lack of progress at the manager and director levels, where the largest share of women reside within U.S. companies. That creates a weak middle in the pipeline for future leadership posts. Women, for example, are getting stuck on lower rungs of the ladder for longer than male peers, impacting their career trajectories in a way that means they never catch up, according to the report, which looked at more than 270 companies employing over 10 million. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 87 women—and only 54 Black women and 76 Latina women—are similarly promoted. Progress here is stalling on many fronts, with the number of women overall being promoted stuck at the same level as the prior year and barely moving since 2019.
“The broken rung is the single biggest barrier in advancement on the corporate path,” Alexis Krivkovich, senior partner at McKinsey & Company tells Barron’s. “It’s an incredibly fixable problem but doesn’t get the attention it deserves and as a result it lingers.”
Indeed, the last couple of years offered examples on how the needle can move quickly. Companies made a concerted effort toward improving diversity in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Krivkovich says. That showed up in the numbers: In 2020, 82 Black women were promoted to manager for every 100 men. The following year was even closer parity, with 96 Black women promoted for every 100 men—a marked improvement from just 58 per every 100 men in 2019.
However, those improvements have slipped away, with only 54 Black women promoted for every 100 men last year, according to the report. That leaves women of color losing even more ground than white women and Black men—and feeds into the low numbers in the C-suite, where they account for just 6% of the positions.
Companies can grab a generation of diverse talent and pull it forward, but will find themselves with a vacuum if they don’t bring in a constant flow of new recruits. “They make a one-time effort but haven’t created sustained progression underneath,” Krivkovich says. “Companies just need conviction to not make these programs a check-the-box, or once-and-done exercise.”
Further clouding the outlook is a trend that took root in the pandemic and has continued: the women who do get to director level are leaving their companies at a higher rate than they did before 2020—and at a much higher rate than their male counterparts. “That’s the farm team for senior leadership. We need to shore up middle of the pipeline if we want to see progress in two, five or 10 years,” says
Rachel Thomas, co-founder and chief executive of Lean In.
That includes addressing some of the factors leading to the departures, including burnout. Women who experience microaggressions—colleagues taking credit for their work, questioning their competence and abilities, commenting on their emotional state or interrupting them—and as a result, adjust the way they look or act to protect themselves are more than three and half times as likely to think about quitting their jobs or struggle with burnout, the report found.
One thing helping keep women on their career paths is the move toward flexibility, a top benefits priority for all employees, not just women. As more than half of companies formalize return to office policies, it will be important to ensure that those who work remotely aren’t disadvantaged when it comes to mentorship, sponsorship, and promotions, and that companies think about the daily experiences of employees.
These conversations come against a pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in some corners. The authors said they asked companies directly if they were pulling back on their efforts to advance women and got a resounding no.
“What I worry most about is that companies who are achieving progress and have seen gains over the last couple of years will take the foot off the gas and will feel either lack of courage or a sense their job now is done or they have done enough,” Krivkovich says.
Write to Reshma Kapadia at [email protected]
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