In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Alexandra Mondalek chats with McKinsey senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez about their new book, The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It (Harvard Business Review, March 2025). The “broken rung” is the missing step on the career ladder that keeps women from reaching their first promotion—and it’s a problem that only compounds as women progress in their careers. Combining over a decade of research, conversations with more than 50 leaders, and their own experiences, the authors use rich data and storytelling to guide women on ways to reach that next step above the broken rung. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can watch the full video at the end of this page.
Alexandra Mondalek: What problem were you all trying to solve when you were writing this book?
Kweilin Ellingrud: We were trying to solve a couple of problems. First, women do well academically; they excel in school. In fact, in the US and the UK they represent 56 percent of college degrees. Then all of a sudden, women enter the work world, and they do not excel in the same ways.
About half of your lifetime earnings comes from the education and skills that you bring to your first job. But the other half is based on the skills that you build at that job or at multiple jobs.
They are certainly not seeing very many women at senior levels in organizations. We wanted to solve the problem of how can women around the world, who are excelling academically, get their fair share of experience capital, of the benefits of that education in the work world?
What we found in our research was that over your career, about half of your lifetime earnings comes from the education and skills that you bring to your first job. But the other half, on average, is based on the skills that you build at that job or at multiple jobs. Women were not getting that fair share of the second half of that “experience capital.” They weren’t building it as systematically, and they certainly weren’t getting paid for it as systematically, which is why we have a pay gap. So we were trying to solve the problem of how women get their fair share of the experience capital. How do they build more of it and get paid fairly for it across their careers?
Alexandra Mondalek: Why did you write this book now?
Lareina Yee: This book has been in the making for over a decade. It was just so inspiring to come together, to put all our research and ideas into one place. There will be a woman whom I do not know who will take something from the book, and it will change her career. It will help make her career more successful. That’s why we wrote the book.
Women are as ambitious as men to rise up. But they shouldn't feel limited by where they came from.
María del Mar Martínez: I would have liked having that book when I started my career, but it was not around then. We brought not only the facts, which are very instructive, but also the stories and the strategies for how to overcome those facts that go against you. Those were our motivations. That was the inception of the whole book.
Alexandra Mondalek: What is the meaning of the term “broken rung”?
Lareina Yee: Think of a career ladder as a literal ladder. You get to the first rung, the second rung, the third rung. You’re working your way up to the top. The challenge for women is that they will fall down at the very beginning. The odds are against you. The greatest barrier is not the glass ceiling, because your chances of reaching that ceiling to crack it are actually quite rare.
Kweilin Ellingrud: In North America—the US and Canada—we see women as 48 percent of entry-level employees, and we actually see 70 percent of employees at that first level across organizations. So most people are at that early level, and 48 percent of those are women. But then at that first promotion to manager, that drops by nine percentage points down to 39 percent. That’s the broken rung. Women are not getting that manager promotion. They are falling through the cracks and not able to take that first step, that next step up, toward promotion.
Alexandra Mondalek: The book opens with the concept of “experience capital.” What is that, and how is it relevant to women throughout their careers?
Kweilin Ellingrud: Experience capital refers to the skills, the experience, the wisdom that you build on the job over a career. We contrast that with what you have when you graduate from school. When you start that first job, you bring an education and some characteristics. That drives roughly half your career earnings, globally, on average. The other half, though, is this experience capital. What are the skills, the wisdom, the experience that you’re learning on the job? How do you get paid for that? More importantly, how do you stretch yourself to build that faster?
We talk about this concept of a “doubling point.” How quickly do you double your initial salary? That’s a very simple but practical measure to understand: How quickly is my salary rising compared with my peers? How do I assess if I’m falling behind or if I’m ahead? And if I am falling behind, what are some things to course correct, to get back on pace?
If you join a company that invests in you—in training, developing, and in giving you opportunities for mobility—you start developing that experience capital early.
María del Mar Martínez: There are dimensions that can impact the building up of experience capital, especially for women. It could be the company. It could be how many bold moves you make in your career. What are the skills that you acquire? Finally, how do you face some of the headwinds that will be a bit inevitable in your career?
Kweilin Ellingrud: This notion of 50-50, one-half of your career earnings being due to experience capital, is true, globally, on average. But it differs a lot. It differs by country, by occupation. For example, in the US, more of your career earnings are attributable to the education that you bring to your first job.
In India, it’s the reverse. It’s much more about the experience, that capital you build over a career. In certain occupations that require a higher degree of education—doctors, nurses—more of your career earnings are due to the education. In contrast, if you have fewer years of education, more of your career earnings will be due to everything that you learn on the job and those skills, the experience capital that you build over time.
Lareina Yee: This concept of experience capital is an incredible ray of hope because, normally, people say, “How much education I was able to attain somehow predetermines my potential.” One of the things we know is that women are professionally ambitious. And this is a positive thing. They want to become leaders. And in all the work we’ve done over the past ten years, we see that women are as ambitious as men to rise up. But they shouldn’t feel limited by where they came from.
The book really focuses on that ray of hope.
Kweilin Ellingrud: There is a concept referred to as “skills distance,” which compares the percentage of skills in the new job that you take on compared with the skills that you’re using in your current job. The more that’s different, or not overlapping, the better off you’ll be in terms of truly building experience capital and getting paid for that over time. Yet that’s when we’re most uncomfortable. And that’s when we’re at our best, assuming we don’t fail. That’s when we’re stretching ourselves and really learning.
María del Mar Martínez: At the McKinsey Global Institute, we conducted significant research related to that, globally. One of the most important determinants of building experience capital is also related to the first company you join. That’s why we start the book with that: choose your company, not your job. We say that because if you join a company that invests in you—in training, developing, and in giving you opportunities for mobility—you start developing that experience capital early in your career so that you have more time to accumulate those learnings over the journey.
Alexandra Mondalek: How can women enhance their skill development?
María del Mar Martínez: We put a lot of emphasis on the soft skills, and everybody might not understand the value of those skills. A lot has been written about it. But the truth is that there’s a systematic way of building them. Getting along well with others and having empathy are not the only soft skills.
Entrepreneurship is a soft skill. Communication is a soft skill. There are several categories of skills that we give advice on in the book that could be built systematically. One large category that Lareina is fond of is technology skills.
Kweilin Ellingrud: There’s both the skill building—how you build skills in a job or across different roles—and the skill signaling. How do you talk about your skills and communicate them to a prospective or current employer? How do you share why you should be promoted?
Alexandra Mondalek: It seems that women are taking an active role in their careers and signaling on their resumes that they have these skills. Yet it’s also incumbent upon employers and human resources departments to put emphasis and value on those skills when they’re evaluating resumes.
Kweilin Ellingrud: Absolutely—we’re seeing this a lot more. Many more companies are thinking about the skills that are needed in a particular job and recruiting for those skills and testing for them in interview and group scenarios. Educational institutions could do better in emphasizing the skills that they’re building, as opposed to just giving the credentials or the diploma.
Lareina Yee: It is a partnership between what you do and what your company does. You need both. You can’t just raise your hand and try. You also need a company that will invest in you. That aligns with the first point about choosing companies, not just jobs.
Alexandra Mondalek: There was also the chapter on bias. Many of us already know that bias exists. Walk me through what it was like to write that chapter. What are some of the big concepts?
Lareina Yee: We think about it from the experience of the woman. In constructing the chapter, the first point was to acknowledge that it happens all the time and to add some data. In the vast majority of audiences, when we talk to women, there’s almost a sigh of relief. Women say, “It wasn’t just me.” That’s actually happening the vast majority of the time.
In fact, the vast majority of women, compared with men, in corporate America feel that they’ve been talked over, that somebody else has taken credit for their idea, that someone has mistaken them for someone much more junior. They have experienced someone showing surprise that they could speak English so clearly. There are so many types of biases.
The goal for the first part of the chapter was to use the data to say, “It’s not just me.” Then the goal for the second part of the chapter was to explain the different biases, such as the “likability bias,” which is a really tough one for women. Women are expected to be likable, yet strong, yet delivering on everything.
How do men and women work through that likability bias in terms of how they treat or how they respond to women leaders? The second piece was to show the different biases. It’s overwhelming and makes you wonder how to get through the day.
With awareness and knowledge, you can bust bias where it happens. You can interrupt it by saying, for example: “Whoa, wait a second. I think we should go back a couple of minutes. María, didn’t you just introduce that idea? Harry, I know that you’ve got that idea too, but María introduced it.”
How do you redirect when something happens? What are the techniques you can use above and beyond policies around fairness to actually help other women make sure that those biases aren’t happening all day long?
Kweilin Ellingrud: There are a few different flavors of bias. There’s the conscious bias; you’re aware of it. There’s also unconscious bias of various types. As you described, there’s internal bias, where I may be biased and have some preconceived notions about myself, my gender, my age, and other things.
In these unconscious biases, we’ve completed the closest thing to a scientific experiment. It’s really powerful because we can give everyone identical resumes, down to the font size, the font type, the exact bullet points that they write. All that we change is the name on the top: “John Doe” versus “Jane Doe.” Yet when we give people these resumes, men and women ascribe greater leadership and higher future potential to John Doe, the person who doesn’t even exist.
Since we are so socialized to think of leadership as male, typically white and tall, we can’t imagine a different picture of that. Now if Jane Doe on this identical resume adds “active parent” or ”teacher association member,” or some other signal that she is an active parent, then she is about 87 percent less likely to get the interview and the job.
We know that both men and women have parental biases, such as: “Oh, if that woman is an active parent, she will prioritize her children, as opposed to being a great employee.” These systematic biases are dangerous.
Other biases are race based. Throughout the book, where we had the data, we explored not only gender but also racial biases and gaps. When we have two identical resumes and we have “John Doe” versus “Jamal Doe” or an African American name, that Black candidate is 50 percent less likely to obtain the interview. That’s the value of an eight-year experience penalty for that Black candidate.
We find the same challenge when we match “John Doe” versus “Mohamed Doe” or a Muslim American name. The Muslim candidate is four times less likely to get that job. So we see systematically significant bias with scientific evidence staring us in the face.
Yet many people say, “I wish I could find qualified diverse candidates for these jobs.” And they’re there. In fact, sometimes they are there with exactly identical resumes. And we can’t see that talent in front of us for our own bias.
Lareina Yee: One of the most important things is that as you are reading all of this data, this scientific data, you can start to feel a little depressed. One of the actions that we talk about, that we know works, is allyship. Allyship is speaking up, speaking out for someone who is different from you.
It is incredibly powerful. For example, we know that women of color who have experienced allyship in their workplace will trend much more closely to the responses of White men and White women. That aligns with feeling that they work in a fair environment, are included, are excited to stay where they work, and they would recommend this company to others.
The situation is significantly worse for Black women without allies. We do know that within these types of biases actions like allyship can make a huge difference. An action can be as simple as a verbal interrupter. It can involve seeing something happen and taking that person aside afterward and saying, “Did you feel OK about that meeting? Because it didn’t feel fair.”
Sometimes you may not even have a solution, but just acknowledging it goes such a long way. It’s a really big topic, and it’s really hard. But some of the day-to-day actions are incredibly simple.
Alexandra Mondalek: Are women often constrained by narrow definitions of leadership?
Kweilin Ellingrud: It’s really about broadening the definition of what can be successful at an organization, widening that, sharing different models, personalities, and examples of leadership that have different working styles and different personalities.
It’s not just the old, traditional, stoic, powerful, decisive male leader. It’s different genders; races; styles, such as introverts; and backgrounds.
As the three of us have served as head of diversity and inclusion at McKinsey—first Lareina, then María, then me—we have really felt the power of diversity. We have felt the power of not just bringing diverse people into our company but of making sure that they feel they are truly able to bring their full and authentic selves to their jobs.
Lareina Yee: One of the key things that Amy’s [Salesforce president and CEO Amy Weaver’s reference to changing the definition of leadership to avoid narrow constraints] quotation is speaking to is the courage to bring your authentic self. Your authentic self may be very boisterous and very assertive. That may be your authentic self. But what if your authentic self is a little more soft spoken?
You’re just as sharp in your thinking, but your style is a little bit different. Maybe you lead with kindness. There are different styles, and there’s the courage to live in your style and just accept that as excellent leadership. That’s something that women have to grow comfortable with over time.
Alexandra Mondalek: How does the women’s and men’s health gap affect women’s careers?
Kweilin Ellingrud: Both health and finances could help you accelerate not just your career earnings but help you make the most of them. They could also really derail you. That’s why we wanted to share concrete tips, not just the fact base on women’s and men’s health.
What we found is that women spend 25 percent more years in a state of debilitating health than men, which was counterintuitive because everybody thinks, “Oh, women live longer than men. What health gap are you really talking about?” But we actually spend more years, 25 percent more time, in poor health.
There’s also the “pink tax” that we talk about, where women’s products are sometimes more expensive. You add to that usually fewer years working, fewer years actually paying into retirement or saving for retirement, and more years post-retirement to actually pay for.
Women are systematically less ready for retirement and are more at risk of being in poverty during retirement. So this health gap is also an important part of financial savings, retirement planning, and just getting the facts so that we’re all aware. We actually have more time, both in poor health and in good health, to plan for and save for over a career.
In fact, most of the health gap is during women’s working years. It affects our productivity. It affects our careers. On a country level, it affects GDP. That’s because if we have a significant share of women who aren’t working and aren’t fully productive, that will affect standards of living around the world. Consider reproductive health and also menopause. Globally, menopause occurs right at the peak of women’s careers, right at the moment when they should be taking SVP [senior vice president] or C-suite roles.
Alexandra Mondalek: Why was it important to include a chapter on motherhood in the book?
María del Mar Martínez: There are a lot of things that will change in your life [as a result of motherhood]. The reality is that the odds are against you. You will face a pay gap, or perhaps you won’t return to work. You will have to juggle many things. You may or may not have help during or after maternity leave from your company. It’s a wonderful stage personally, but it’s also a difficult one professionally. So we wanted to raise awareness of what can happen when women have children. But we also wanted to highlight the opportunity that comes with that. If anything, that’s one of the jobs that stretches you the most in your career.
There are skills that you learn during motherhood that you can apply to your job. There are also ways to approach motherhood in a more systematic way to try to counter some of the gaps that can happen. If you plan before, if you work during the leave, and then if you really make a purposeful comeback, motherhood is a rewarding personal and professional experience.
We wanted to raise awareness of what can happen when women have children. But we also wanted to highlight the opportunity that comes with that.
Lareina Yee: One of the things I say when companies ask me about this is that they should create “round-trip tickets.” It’s not just thinking about what you do before women go on leave. It’s not just about how much time you give them. What are you doing to make sure they have networks, sponsors, and wonderful projects to work on when they return? That’s where we’re seeing a lot of companies miss a step.
Kweilin Ellingrud: As you look globally, there is a “motherhood penalty,” where for every additional child, mothers typically earn less and less, versus a “fatherhood bonus.” And as men’s families grow, they actually have an increase in their salary on average. Globally, women do about three times as much unpaid care work around the world.
Lareina Yee: One of the interesting things that we see in the data is that, as Kweilin is saying, the vast majority of women take on more of the unpaid work. The next question is, if women are in a dual-working household, and if they’re the prime breadwinner, do they also take on more unpaid work?
Every time we conduct a survey, we find that they are. When we say that there’s a double shift, there literally is a double shift between your [professional] work and your at-home work. That is an enormous burden, and it does not ease up whether you’re the primary breadwinner or whether you are in a dual-income household. We don’t see economics change that.
One of the roles that men can play is actually having to take that round trip themselves and having to reconfigure their work around the idea of a gap. That means actually having to come back and juggle a different load.
Kweilin Ellingrud: Actually, when companies start to increase their paternity leaves as part of their parental leave, everybody gets better at on-ramps and off-ramps because everybody’s going in and out [of work]. The muscle there gets stronger.
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