The Shortlist: Women in the Workplace: New research on the 'broken rung'

Our best ideas, quick and curated | October 18, 2019

In the fifth Women in the Workplace study, McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found a mixed bag: better news in the C-suite but entrenched problems that mean parity remains elusive. Plus, how Asia could shape globalization for decades to come, and reading picks from Alexis Krivkovich, a McKinsey senior partner in San Francisco.

Climbing the corporate ladder doesn’t work when there’s a broken rung. That’s the message behind McKinsey and Lean In’s fifth annual report, Women in the Workplace 2019. Despite signs of progress since the study began, women continue to face significant challenges as they rise through the ranks in their careers.

There are a few bright spots. There are now more women leaders overall, for example, particularly in the C-suite. According to our research, about 20 percent of upper-level managers—one in five—are female. In addition, more than 40 percent of companies have at least three female leaders at the top of the corporate hierarchy.

That’s a plus that also confers an economic benefit: studies have consistently shown a strong correlation between gender diversity and a company’s profitability, which also holds true for ethnic and cultural diversity in executive teams.

Yet even as more women reach senior management, too many are still getting stuck in entry-level jobs—"the broken rung” phenomenon. Top-level female execs may be cracking the glass ceiling, but overall women are less likely to be promoted to or hired for leadership roles. With 72 women promoted to management for every 100 men, and men holding 62 percent of manager-level jobs, women simply can’t catch up.

Fortunately, companies can take several steps to nurture and develop women leaders, starting with setting concrete goals for hiring or promoting more women into management. It’s crucial that women get the opportunities and experience they need to be ready for that first step up. Since women still perform the majority of unpaid care work and may feel the pull between work and home life more acutely, having a supportive manager can make all the difference.

OFF THE CHARTS

The Asian century is here

Patterns of globalization are shifting, and these changes are occurring faster in Asia than elsewhere. By 2040, Asia could account for more than half of global GDP and about 40 percent of global consumption. And the combined GDP of four groups of Asian economies may compare with those of individual continents by then.

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WHAT WE’RE READING

Alexis Krivkovich

Alexis Krivkovich,a senior partner, leads McKinsey’s San Francisco office and our financial-technology work in North America, helping companies align their organizations for growth and productivity. An avid reader of fiction, she is known for giving books to her teams at the close of long projects.

Given my Russian heritage, I am drawn to books that explore that country’s cultural and social context. The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra is a series of interlinked stories spanning nearly 100 years of Russian history, from Lenin to today. The characters, whose lives intersect in ways both captivating and heartbreaking, show the power of love, family, memory, and history.

Lily King’s Euphoria delves into the tumultuous lives of three young anthropologists in the 1930s. While Euphoria is a novel, it is based on the life of Margaret Mead, showing how women broke the societal norms of the time to make their careers in anthropology as it was establishing itself as a discipline in the West.

In Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, an opulent party whose guests include a revered soprano is in full swing in a South American country. When terrorists take the gathering hostage, what begins in fear becomes a moving story of how people in separate worlds collide to find a common language in music. When I was younger, I spent months volunteering in a remote village in Central America, and the way these characters come to life reminds me of how I slowly discovered the community around me.

When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir by Paul Kalanithi, a brilliant young neurosurgeon who finds himself confronting late-stage cancer. It hits you deep in the gut as a reminder of the importance of embracing the present and living with purpose.

As the mother of three young daughters, I found All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior a delightful read that flips the question of parenting on its head. Rather than exploring the effects of parenting on children (one more thing to stress about!), it delves into the effects of children on their parents—their marriages, friendships, and senses of themselves.

Finally, I highly recommend Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste. That’s quite a title, but it lives up to that promise by describing one woman’s attempt to break into the exclusive world of wine and crack the Master Sommelier test. I’ve got a lot of work to do!

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