Fragile progress for women at work
Women’s outlook and day-to-day experiences are not much different, or are even worse, than they were nearly a decade ago. Progress is surprisingly fragile, especially for women of colour. At the current pace of progress, it would take 48 years for women in senior leadership to reflect their share of the US population, according to consultancy McKinsey’s tenth annual report Women in the workplace.
The report comprises 281 US-organizations that collectively employ more than ten million people.
Gender parity in senior leadership would take 22 years for White women and it would take more than twice as long for women of colour.
The report says that companies will need to maintain their current rate of progress, which means addressing weak spots in their pipelines: by finally fixing the broken rung, investing more resources in developing women leaders, and holding themselves accountable for more substantive progress in senior-leadership roles.
“Though there are bright spots that suggest many companies have momentum, we also see that company commitment to diversity is declining.”
The report says that over the past decade, women’s representation has increased at every level of corporate management. Most notably, women today make up 29% of C-suite positions, compared with 17% in 2015. But progress has been much slower earlier in the pipeline, at the entry and manager levels.
“Women remain underrepresented across the pipeline, a gender gap that persists regardless of race and ethnicity. Simply put, men outnumber women at every level.”
“For every 100 men who received their first promotion to manager in 2018, 79 women were promoted; this year, just 81 women were.”
“Because of this “broken rung” in the corporate ladder, men significantly outnumber women at the manager level, making it incredibly difficult for companies to support sustained progress at more senior levels.”
The report shows that women have made gains at the vice president and senior-vice-president levels since 2018, but their progress is more fragile than it appears. The main driver of women’s increased representation was a reduction in the number of line roles which disproportionately affected men given that they hold more of these positions.
“In the C-suite, women’s progress was even less sustainable. While the reduction of line roles was still a factor, the primary reason women’s representation increased was because companies, on average, added staff roles—that is, positions in support functions, such as human resources, legal, and IT—and hired women into these new positions. Since companies cannot add new staff roles indefinitely, this is not a viable path to parity.”
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