The annual Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey, reveals that despite progress at the top since the survey began in 2015, women, and especially women of color, remain underrepresented across corporate America. Though women's representation in the C-suite has grown to 28%, from 24% last year and 17% in 2019, the report calls that progress "notable but fragile," because it comes without sustained improvements throughout the pipeline.
"The glass ceiling is a big problem. It is there. But numerically the biggest problem ... is the broken rungs," Lean In founder Sheryl Sandberg tells CNBC.
The key issue: for every 100 men promoted from entry-level to manager, 87 women, and only 73 women of color, are promoted. And it's the fact that more women are getting stuck at the entry level that has a long-term impact on the talent pipeline. Plus, there's what the report calls a "leaky pipeline" to senior leadership because women at the director level are leaving at a higher rate than in years past and more than their male peers.
For the report, Lean In and McKinsey surveyed more than 27,000 employees and 270 senior HR leaders from 276 participating organizations employing more than 10 million people.
The gender gaps remain the largest for women of color; they face the steepest drop-off in representation from entry-level to C-suite positions. As they move up the pipeline, their representation drops by 66%. And while the promotion rate for Black women to manager rose in 2020 and 2021, last year that rate fell back to 2019 levels.
"We're nine years into this and decades into the women's movement and things are not moving," says Sandberg. "So we're trying to get to the heart of why this is not changing and to debunk the myths that are holding women back."
The report debunks four key myths – including that the glass ceiling is the biggest factor holding women back, when it's really the broken rung.
The second myth: the idea that women are becoming less ambitious. "Our data is super, super clear that women are more ambitious, or as ambitious as men, more ambitious than they were before Covid," says Sandberg. The report found that roughly 80% of women want to be promoted to the next level this year, compared to 70% in 2019.
The report also finds the idea that microaggressions have a "micro" impact is simply untrue — they actually have a large and lasting impact. "Once someone else gets credit for your ideas, once you're rudely interrupted, you stop talking," Sandberg says.
And finally, the idea that it's mostly women who want and benefit from flexible work is not true — both men and women see flexibility as a key benefit.
To help address these myths and close gender gaps the report lays out specific recommendations for companies and managers.
The first step is setting explicit representation goals not just for senior levels, but at all levels. Then comes measuring employee outcomes around hiring and promotion — at all levels — and tracking hiring and promotions. Then, they recommend mining the data not just around promotion, but also around the likes of participation in career development programs, performance ratings, and job satisfaction, to adjust programs.
Sandberg says some companies are using the current economic uncertainty to lose focus on the importance of closing gender gaps.
"They take their eye off the ball because they think they're under economic pressure. And they forget that actually doing the right thing is going to help improve their economic performance, that economic pressure should make this more important, not less."
But Sandberg is optimistic that when companies want to make a change, if they focus on it, they can.
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