Career advancement is tough for everyone—but for women, it can feel particularly elusive. There’s a reason for that, according to the new book The Broken Rung: For every 100 men promoted early in their careers, only 81 women experience that same opportunity. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, the book’s authors, McKinsey Senior Partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez, join McKinsey Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly to discuss the challenges that can limit professional women’s progress—as well as the approaches some have used to find their footing and continue to climb the career ladder successfully.
The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
What’s new on McKinsey.com
Roberta Fusaro: Most mobility start-ups fail before they even get rolling. McKinsey’s latest research on mobility growth is a must read if you want to buck the odds.
Lucia Rahilly: Keeping with the mobility topic, if you’re curious about the European automotive industry, read our latest research about what carmakers can do to stay competitive.
Roberta Fusaro: And now, let’s turn to The Broken Rung.
Why this book, and why now?
Lucia Rahilly: Kweilin, Lareina, and María, congratulations on the launch of The Broken Rung. Thank you for carrying the torch. You bring to this book your own experiences as women leaders in high-intensity professional careers, and you’ve made that elusive ascent up the ladder successfully. Before we get into the research, could you say a few words about what compelled you to write The Broken Rung?
Kweilin Ellingrud: As I was sharing some of the gender equality research we’ve done over the past decade, I was struck by how often it was new news to senior leaders who’ve been in this space for a long time. I wanted to set a clear, consistent fact base so that everybody had the same information at their fingertips and could make the best decisions for themselves. I also have three young daughters—ages 12, nine, and nine—and I hope they don’t encounter that same broken rung across their careers when they enter the workforce.
María del Mar Martínez: For me, it was this sense of needing to bring together all the experience we have accumulated over the years—we have published so much on different dimensions, what companies could do, what women could do, levels of ambition, and types of careers—as well as highlighting inspirational stories that not only feature facts but also are personalized.
Lucia Rahilly: Do you also have daughters?
María del Mar Martínez: I don’t. In fact, I have three boys, and I expect them to be champions for the next generation. I think some of the learnings in the book are also important for them as they develop their careers.
Lucia Rahilly: Lareina, you’ve got boys. Do you share María’s view that this is a book for men, too?
Lareina Yee: This is a book for women and men—because part of building education about how a family or a couple wins in the workplace is giving space to both men and women.
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Lucia Rahilly: That’s interesting, because most leaders are men, but most men are not senior executives. In fact, many men may also feel thwarted in their attempts to advance and secure financial stability. We hear a lot about that in the US right now. Acknowledging that women are your target audience, how could men benefit from reading this book?
Kweilin Ellingrud: About 70 percent of employees are at the entry level. The vast majority of men and women are looking up, looking at how to advance their careers and get promoted. Many of these chapters are about how women and men can take action, make the best decisions for themselves, and make those trade-offs.
The broken rung—and how it got that way
Lucia Rahilly: Now, let’s turn to the book itself. Lareina, talk to us about exactly what we mean when we use the phrase the “broken rung.”
Lareina Yee: When we visualize our career over time, we often imagine a ladder, and every promotion is a step up that ladder. Now imagine what it feels like if the first step is broken.
In 2015, when we were doing the Women in the Workplace research, my colleagues and I were very focused on the data at the top: that glass ceiling. How many women are in the C-suite? How many women are CEOs? Then, staring at the data, we said, “Wait a second. Something is happening at the beginning.”
And it goes like this: 48 percent of corporate America’s entry-level employees are women, but for every 100 men who get that well-earned opportunity to get a promotion, only 81 women will see that same opportunity.
Kweilin Ellingrud: And for women of color, that’s 65 Latinas and 54 Black women. So it gets worse and worse as you think about women of color.
Lareina Yee: The disparity starts early. We’ve been doing this research for ten years, and that number has stayed the same.
Lucia Rahilly: What are the factors that contribute to that rung being, and staying, broken?
Lareina Yee: Describing the first rung on a career ladder as broken can sound a bit depressing. It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be factual because if women know what they’re headed into, what the probabilities are, then they can employ tactics to avoid that broken rung.
Lucia Rahilly: The phrase “experience capital” is a central conceit in the book—specifically that women are not building the same breadth or variety of practical experience as men. How does that affect women’s career trajectories?
Kweilin Ellingrud: Experience capital is the wisdom, knowledge, and experience that you build on the job. And because women are not building as much experience capital, and their experiences are not being recognized as fully, there is a gap on the experience side.
In the book, each chapter presents a different lens on how to build experience capital more systematically and strongly across a career. How do you peer around corners to understand potential pitfalls and make the right decisions for yourself?
Lucia Rahilly: What are examples of these pitfalls? What interruptions do women face when they’re trying to accumulate a greater range and richness of experience?
Lareina Yee: In the book, we talk about planning for the inevitable. On its face, that may sound dark, but it is incredibly sunlit. You will face bumps in the road, yet we have so many stories of women who have sped through those bumps. You will hit bias, and you shouldn’t be blindsided by it. You may want to have a family and may ask, “How can that be an accelerator, not a decelerator, for my career?” You may want to work past 65 years old. How do you think about the longevity of not only your financial health but also your career health? There are many things to consider over the course of a lifetime, and we want to ensure women aren’t surprised.
You will hit bias, and you shouldn’t be blindsided by it.
What to know starting out
Lucia Rahilly: Suppose I’m starting out in my career. How should I approach the broken rung?
Lareina Yee: It’s your first job, so first and foremost, you must deliver on your performance metrics. But also dedicate some time to building a network. We know that having sponsors opens up opportunities. Invest early in the skills that will help you build your portfolio to get promoted. A very concrete example is to invest in technology skills, or take a lateral move and get more P&L responsibility: what we call the “power alley,” or profit-and-loss experience. The book points out many strategies, and the women who somehow have made it against the odds have employed so many of them. Why should it be a secret? Let’s just make it explicit.
María del Mar Martínez: What we’re also trying to do in the book is identify the antidote to the broken rung. We see three big areas. One is building the experiences that matter. Those experiences come from the companies you join, the bold moves you make, and the type of networking you do. It is about looking for jobs that bring you faster to the executive level, and it’s also about making sure you bet on sectors that matter. Second, there are skills you’ll need to build and areas to try to avoid—or at least, you’ll need to prepare for what we see as inevitabilities. Finally, we’ve repeatedly seen that C-suite and CEO candidates often will come from P&L roles. The earlier you get exposure to them, the earlier you might be considered for one of the key leadership roles in a company.
Kweilin Ellingrud: One of the chapters is about networking, which applies to everyone. Women have narrower and more junior networks than men, but both men and women can really invest in their networks, activate them, and spend some real time creating relationships, asking for help, and asking for information as they explore other careers.
Another piece is around bias: unconscious bias, conscious bias, internal bias, and external bias. Active allies can be such a differentiator, and of course, male active allies are just as critical to this solution.
Managing motherhood
Lucia Rahilly: The book has a chapter about motherhood, which can sometimes present a speed bump. María, can you share some thoughts about how to manage motherhood while working or thinking about returning to work?
María del Mar Martínez: Be prepared for the possibility that motherhood could decelerate your career. But if you prepare for your return and address key questions, you might be much more ready to avoid the bump. It’s about leveraging the support your company might give you and communicating well with your sponsors about what you’re going to do, for how long, and how and if you want to stay connected. It’s about making this a natural evolution in your career, with a plan that normalizes a comeback and includes a sufficient support system to make the transition back successful.
The other big thing is that some of the skills you deploy and develop as a parent might also be useful in your profession.
Lucia Rahilly: Do you want to say more about those skills? You described them in the book as the motherhood bonus.
María del Mar Martínez: Project management and multitasking or empathy or resilience—they’re about anticipating and planning and figuring out alternative scenarios when things don’t work out. You develop many capabilities during motherhood that can be applied to your professional life.
You develop many capabilities during motherhood that can be applied to your professional life.
Lareina Yee: One great example is this story of a woman named Dina. She went to law school and became a high-powered lawyer at Yahoo. She had three boys and wanted to be a full-time mom, which is an amazing decision. But after 14 years, she wanted to go back to work. So she used all those skills María described: empathy, collaboration, leadership skills developed from her volunteer work, plus her resilience and grit, and her earlier academic education as a lawyer. She reboarded into a program at LinkedIn and is a thriving leader there right now. Whether you stay in the workplace or take a break, it takes hard work, but it’s absolutely feasible.
Lucia Rahilly: Kweilin, the book also talks about the motherhood penalty. Can you share some thoughts about that?
Kweilin Ellingrud: We do see what we call a motherhood penalty around the world. Women who have children are less likely to get the job or the promotion. And there’s a fatherhood bonus. Men who have children are perceived as more trustworthy, more capable, and they get promotions at higher rates and higher wages. So if we see that in the data, how do we use motherhood—the planning before, during, and after that kind of round-trip ticket—to make sure this isn’t as much of a speed bump as it has been in the past?
Strategizing about your skill set
Lareina Yee: This concept of a speed bump is very visual, but there are ways you can invest to maybe make it just a slight curve in the road. One is by thinking ahead about the skills that matter over time. We know from our research that 12 million occupations are likely to change fairly dramatically between now and 2030. As those occupations change, there are skills that set you up to do better as jobs move and transform.
Technology is one of those skills. In one of our chapters, we talk about how everyone can be a technologist. Irrespective of what you studied in school, you can use that concept Kweilin talked about—experience capital—to gain the technology skills to lead. For example, if you’re a nurse, how do you transform your job in patient care with AI and technology and greater contextual evidence and facts? If you’re in marketing, how do you use technology to stay ahead?
Lucia Rahilly: Do you recommend that women do that at their jobs or via taking courses? What is the prescription for women who are looking ahead to where jobs are moving and trying to gain those skills?
Lareina Yee: Ultimately, we would love for more women to study technology in school. In the United States, STEM majors among women hover under 26 percent, although it can vary globally.
That said, if it didn’t happen in school, you could learn it on the job by incorporating it into your work and through formal programs of education and awareness, signing up to be a fast adopter of new AI pilots, and the ability to be part of test beds.
Kweilin Ellingrud: As jobs evolve, we’ll gain and lose a number of them. On the gaining side, the number of jobs in healthcare and in STEM fields will grow, given demographics, aging, and consumption changes, as well as gen AI. Among the shrinking jobs is where, unfortunately, there is bad news for women, for people of color, and for those earning in the bottom quintile—below $38,000.
In the US, women are 50 percent more likely to be in a job that will likely be eliminated in the next five to ten years. That’s because women are disproportionately in the four top job categories that are going to be affected: customer service and sales; food service (for example, as waitstaff); office administration, as assistants and receptionists; and production or manufacturing. Those four categories represent 80 percent of the 12 million occupational switches likely to happen because of gen AI. So we need to be prepared.
In the US, women are 50 percent more likely to be in a job that will likely be eliminated in the next five to ten years.
In addition to technological skills, we’re also going to need a lot more social and emotional skills: the soft skills we talk about in one of the chapters. There’s a misconception that you’re either born with soft skills and you’re good with them or you’re not. But you can identify, prioritize, and build soft skills over time. It’s also the skills category that is most undersignaled in job applications, in our résumés, and in the leadership stories and descriptions we give. Soft skills include the ability to build strong relationships, inspire confidence, build trust, show empathy, and read human interactions and react accordingly.
Lucia Rahilly: What about entrepreneurial skills? Is there anything to be said about how entrepreneurial skills might help women accrue the breadth and variety of capital that men do?
María del Mar Martínez: We love that question because entrepreneurship is a skill, not a profession. This posture of being bolder, taking more risks, and trying to stretch yourself is important across any career. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or working for someone else’s company, you need to push yourself to aim higher. Innovation, optimism, and resilience are concepts that women need to learn to progress faster in their careers.
Getting noticed
Lucia Rahilly: What’s the best way for women to signal that they have developed certain skills?
Lareina Yee: Signaling is hard because two things have to happen at the same time: one in your control and one not in your control. On the one hand, you need to practice talking about your accomplishments in the right way. I personally have always struggled with that. I don’t want to sound too excited about myself, but I also want to advocate for myself. It’s a style thing. You need to figure out how to feel comfortable talking about your achievements.
On the other hand, that’s not enough. You also need people around you—peers, managers, leaders, and people outside of your company—saying, “Did you hear that podcast that Lucia just did? That was remarkable.” It’s not one thing; it’s a couple of things that must happen together. The first couple of times you are advocating for yourself or sharing, you might mess it up. Don’t worry. It’s OK. Try again.
Lucia Rahilly: We know from our Women in the Workplace research that it’s a myth that women are not as ambitious as their male peers. What can we do to correct this misconception?
Lareina Yee: The first thing to do is debunk the myth that women are not interested in getting promoted. That’s just not true. Second, bet on your own potential. And I say potential, not performance, because one of the clichés is that women look to have their full performance qualifications ready before they raise their hand. It’s important to know that the majority of people will have a mix of performance and potential.
However, I can only raise my hand so many times if nobody is opening a door or window. We often find that women are overmentored and undersponsored. Maybe someone took them to coffee or showed an interest in them. That’s wonderful. But the next level, which is so valuable, is sponsorship: opening those windows and doors. There are several microactions that open opportunities for people, such as letting someone present, redirecting the conversation to them, giving them a high-stakes and high-visibility project, and giving them a sense of what’s around the corner.
What the best companies—and leaders—do right
Lucia Rahilly: It occurs to me that McKinsey, like many talent academy organizations, is very purposeful about giving employees a range of exposure and experiences—functionally, in different sectors, even in different geographies—through the rotational model. What should folks look for in a company that will help them advance and grow?
Kweilin Ellingrud: Companies that invest in cross-functional rotation—different roles and experiences that stretch their employees across different groups—are what we call “People + Performance Winners.” They help their people develop at higher rates.
Another characteristic of companies that help employees grow across a career is that they invest in employee learning and development, whether a certain amount of time every week, an expectation of mutual feedback, or just continuing learning that is a high priority in the company.
The third characteristic is that these companies have a clear strategy and they execute it. You can see that relative to competitors or in some of their financial performance. If you are picking a company at the very beginning of your career, oftentimes you think, “Oh, I want to make sure I have the right boss. I want to make sure I have the right role.”
We’re finding the company is more important. Is there room and space to grow? Is it investing deeply in its employees? That statistically has a stronger impact on your lifetime earnings and career trajectory than your immediate boss. A boss can have a great impact for a year or two but, typically, not for five, ten, or 15 years, which a company, if chosen well, can hopefully have.
Lucia Rahilly: Now suppose I’m a leader or even a manager looking to enable career development for women in my function or on my team. What steps might I take, practically speaking?
Kweilin Ellingrud: Some of the insights we’ve gleaned over the years from the Women in the Workplace research is that women tend to get less tough feedback, as do people of color. So giving clear and direct feedback is critical. Then, advocating for them to get on a project where they might get exposure to new leaders is more of a cross-functional view. Also, helping them navigate more broadly, build their network, and offer warm introductions to other people inside and outside the company whom they might want to get to know. Being an advocate more broadly can be critical for a leader of a group.
Will this always be so hard?
Lucia Rahilly: How optimistic are you that the generation coming up now will be able to climb the career ladder more successfully than in previous decades?
Kweilin Ellingrud: It took us a long time to get here, and it’s a long path of progress ahead. Arming ourselves with the right information so we can each make the best decisions for ourselves is a huge part of the solution, but it might take a couple of generations to get there.
María del Mar Martínez: Women have never been as prepared as they are today. They’re even more prepared than men, on average, especially if you look at the number of college degrees they earn or if you look at their grades.
Lareina Yee: This book tries to decode some of the strategies and tactics that will help women succeed and help leaders create more equal workforces. It’s not a linear journey, but I am optimistic that we’ll get there. Some of the stories we have in the book give me even more optimism because women have figured out a way to succeed despite the struggle.
