The issues facing young working women differ little from their older colleagues, according to the 2024 report, a joint effort between McKinsey and LeanIn.Org.
Highlighting survey findings from 15,000 employees and more than 280 HR leaders, the report finds that, in some ways, women have made strides toward workplace equality over the past decade. For example, women now make up 29 percent of C-suite positions in the United States and Canada, up from 17 percent in 2015. Research shows that companies with more women in leadership benefit from greater innovation, healthier cultures, and stronger performance. Meanwhile, more companies in our survey are offering bias training for people in hiring roles: 69 percent are doing so this year, up from 63 percent in 2021.
But only one in four companies has adopted all the practices required to make hiring and performance reviews fair. Further, companies are scaling back programs designed to support women’s advancement. And that’s translating to the workforce: at the manager level, women’s representation grew by only two percentage points since 2015. Women’s “experiences at work are the same or worse than they were a decade ago,” especially for women of color, write McKinsey senior partners Alexis Krivkovich, Lareina Yee, and coauthors.
What’s more, this year’s survey found that women remain less likely than men to be hired into entry-level roles (despite enrolling in and graduating from college at higher rates than men). And when they are hired, women are also far less likely than men to attain their first promotion in the same organization—tough news for Gen Z women looking to level up. This dynamic is called the “broken rung,” and it causes women to fall behind early in their careers—and stay behind.
One possibility for the continuing lack of advancement is the decline of career development and sponsorship programs for women (even when these programs exist, few companies track program outcomes, which contributes to their ineffectiveness). Another reason for the disparity in promotions between entry-level working women and men could be a one-two punch of ageism and sexism: half of women under 30 say their age has been a barrier to advancing, and younger women are twice as likely as younger men to cite their age as a source of unwanted attention from coworkers, the report finds.
Those stats may sound pretty bleak, but there are solutions at hand. The report includes a best practices checklist—organized into eight categories that range from commitment and engagement to visibility into key advancement metrics—that can help leaders evaluate their organization’s standing on supporting women in the workplace.
Manager training and accountability is one of the areas for improvement highlighted in this year’s report. While companies should continue to invest in manager training, which can encourage employee inclusion and well-being, the report finds that managers can do more to promote employee advancement. One way to create incentives for managers to support their teams more holistically is to evaluate and reward them for reaching people management and development goals.
Of course, it’s not only on managers to help improve gender parity at work. Companies must inspire and equip all employees to curb bias and practice allyship. To do so, organizational leaders can speak to what employees stand to gain personally from these efforts. For example, everyone has a better shot at a promotion when there are practices in place to make promotions fairer.
At the current pace of progress, it would take 22 years for White women to reach parity in workplace representation and more than twice as long for women of color to reach parity, the report shows. That means gender parity won’t be reached until most Gen Z women are nearing or at the end of their careers—a stunningly long time for women to have to wait. That’s all the more reason for the collective “we” to pick up the pace of progress, starting today. |
