| This week, how a year of crisis and uncertainty has taken its toll on working women. Plus Finland experiments with a universal basic income, and reading picks from Jess Huang, a partner in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office. |
|
|
|
| The sixth annual Women in the Workplace report has dropped, and its most notable conclusion is stunning: more than one in four women are contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely. That would have been unthinkable just six months ago. |
| A clear and present danger. This year’s report, conducted by McKinsey, in partnership with LeanIn.Org, states the consequences in plain language: “This is an emergency for corporate America. Companies risk losing women in leadership—and future women leaders—and unwinding years of painstaking progress toward gender diversity.” |
| The pandemic exposes underlying vulnerabilities. The workplace challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic are sadly familiar by now, including blurred boundaries between work and home, worries about a family’s health and finances, and burnout. Women, especially women of color, are more likely to have been laid off or furloughed during the crisis, stalling their careers and jeopardizing their financial security. |
| Progress toward gender parity remains slow. At the beginning of 2020, women’s representation in management was trending in the right direction. This was most pronounced in senior management: between January 2015 and January 2020, the proportion of women in senior-vice-president positions grew from 23 to 28 percent, and their C-suite numbers grew from 17 to 21 percent. Women remained dramatically underrepresented, but the numbers were slowly improving. |
| The ‘broken rung’ is still broken. Women also remained significantly outnumbered in entry-level management—they held just 38 percent of manager-level positions, while men held 62 percent. The numbers were worse for Black and Latina women, who also face long-standing issues of racial bias. Now, if women leaders leave the workforce, women at all levels could lose their most powerful allies and champions. |
| The financial consequences could be significant. Research shows that company profits and share performance can be close to 50 percent higher when women are well represented at the top. Beyond that, senior-level women have a vast and meaningful impact on a company’s culture. They are more likely than senior-level men to embrace employee-friendly policies and programs, and to champion racial and gender diversity: more than 50 percent of senior-level women say they consistently take a public stand for gender and racial equity at work, compared with about 40 percent of senior-level men. And they’re more likely to mentor and sponsor other women. |
| Crisis as opportunity. So where do we go from here? The report breaks out six areas where companies can focus or expand their efforts to retain women. If companies make significant investments in building a more flexible and empathetic workplace—and there are signs that this is starting to happen—they can retain the employees most affected by today’s crisis and nurture a culture in which women have equal opportunity to achieve their potential over the long term. The choices companies make could shape the workplace for women for decades to come—for better or for worse. |
|
|
|
| OFF THE CHARTS |
| Finland tests a universal basic income |
| The results of a two-year Finnish study of 2,000 unemployed people who were given a basic income showed a big increase in life satisfaction versus the control group of all other unemployed people. People on the basic income reported larger and significant improvements in key drivers of well-being: fewer mental-health issues, better physical health, slightly higher employment levels, and more trust in their future. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| PODCAST |
| A faster journey to agile |
| Agility was a hot topic before the pandemic. But the agile model—characterized by rapid learning and decision-making cycles—is more important than ever in our turmoil-filled time. A recent McKinsey survey across industries showed that 70 percent of companies are piloting agile now. That’s a great number, but McKinsey experts caution that companies have to broaden beyond pilots. “It’s not, ‘I’ve done my architecture; now I can sit back and breathe,’“ says Shail Thaker, a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office. “It’s having the ambition to say, ‘I’m not just doing it in IT. I’m not just doing it in these shiny, new digital areas. I’m not just doing it in these particular business units.’” |
|
|
|
|
| MORE ON MCKINSEY.COM |
| And the McKinsey Global Survey says … | Executives are more hopeful about the economy—and their own companies’ performance—than they have been since the COVID-19 crisis began. Yet operational and employment challenges remain. |
| How great supply-chain organizations work | When redesigning a supply-chain organization, it makes sense to look at successful companies’ choices. But our research into more than 50 companies finds that other factors correlate better to bottom-line performance. |
| Zero-based budgeting for health plans | The COVID-19 crisis has been linked to dramatic shifts in demand and extreme uncertainty within payer functions. Executives seeking to right-size their budgets may want to consider zero-based budgeting, a tried-and-true formula that has not gained traction in the healthcare world. |
|
|
|
|
|
| At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, I decided that I would take the opportunity to catch up on my reading list. As I was reflecting on what I would pick, it occurred to me that I’ve unintentionally highlighted a list of books written by women authors who are telling stories of fascinating female characters. |
| The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeynab Joukhadar tells two parallel journeys—one of a young Syrian refugee fleeing across the Middle East and North Africa, and one of a young girl disguised as a boy to apprentice under a mapmaker. The first is a heartbreaking yet hopeful story in contemporary times. The second is a fantastical story taking place 800 years earlier. The two tales are weaved together masterfully as Joukhadar’s rich and vibrant prose brings the resilience of both protagonists to life. |
| Pachinko by Min Jin Lee follows four generations of a Korean family, from the early 1900s onward. It begins in Korea as the country falls under Japanese annexation, continues as the family relocates to Osaka, Japan, and follows family members as immigrants through World War II and beyond. Throughout, it’s a poignant story of identity challenged by ambition, sacrifice, and loyalty. |
| Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a mystery novel that doubles as a coming-of-age story. It revolves around the existence of a so-called “Marsh Girl” and suspicions about whether she played a part in the death of a popular local man. The Marsh Girl is a complex protagonist, having survived alone in a richly painted world of nature along the North Carolina coast. Her tale is one of loneliness, love, and survival. |
| The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a young-adult novel about a high-school girl who witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend by a police officer. This book had been on my list for a while, and I read it in early May. Several weeks later, the murder of George Floyd and the attention on racial injustice rocked our communities. The book is powerfully and honestly written—it was a very difficult and uncomfortable read for me personally, but it will continue to have a lasting impact. |
| Although most of my reading over the past six months has been in fiction, I made an exception for Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Jia and I were friends in college—and go all the way back to our first visit to the University of Virginia as high-school seniors. It’s been so much fun to read her pieces in the New Yorker, and it was just as enlightening to read her thought-provoking essays about whether we can see ourselves clearly in a culture that increasingly wants us to live onstage. Jia’s sense of humor and sharp intellect shine throughout the book. |
|
|
|
| — Edited by Barbara Tierney |
|
|
| BACKTALK |
| Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2021 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007
|
|
|
|
