Five-Year McKinsey Study Finds Slow Improvement for Women in Workplace

Industry News

November 14, 2019

Five-Year McKinsey Study Finds Slow Improvement for Women in Workplace

Women have made progress in rising to senior positions in the workplace in recent years, but a “broken rung” in the promotion ladder needs to be fixed, according to McKinsey & Company’s recent report “Women in the Workplace 2019.”

Since 2015, the percentage of women in senior leadership in the nearly 600 companies tracked by the study rose from 17 percent to 21 percent.  Further, 44 percent of companies have three or more women in the C-suite, up from 29 percent in 2015.

“In the last five years, we’ve seen more women rise to the top levels of companies. An increasing number of companies are seeing the value of having more women in leadership, and they’re proving that they can make progress on gender diversity,” stated the report. “Still, women continue to be underrepresented…[because] the biggest obstacle that women face is much earlier in the pipeline, at the first step up to manager. Fixing this “broken rung” is the key to achieving parity.”

According to the report, for every 100 men promoted to management, only 72 women were promoted.

The report describes five steps that firms can take to get more women on the first rung to leadership:

• Set a goal for getting more women into first-level management
• Require diverse slates for hiring and promotions
• Put evaluators through unconscious bias training
• Establish clear evaluation criteria
• Put more women in line for the step up to manager

Click here to read the report.

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