A (2:43)

Lorena, what about you?

B (2:44)

I had been a recently elected partner and found myself noticing that I would double the population of women every time I walked into a client meeting. So there was the one woman from the client, and then there was me. And then we had double the number of women. And it occurred to me that we had all started with a much different ratio. It felt like 50, 50. So there was that observation on the one hand. On the second, I had an amazing sponsor, and I was recently elected, and he sat down with me and said, loren, I think you should consider how you can do more, how you can have more impact beyond what you're doing today. And if you were to dream about creating something at McKinsey, what would that be? So I diligently went and thought about that, and I came back and I said, I'd like to see how we could use McKinsey analytics to solve the lack of women at the top.

A (3:41)

Wow. Wow, that's a great story. Thank you for doing that as well. Okay, now I would like to hear a reciting of a clip. It's from one of the 15,000 employees interviewed for this study. This is a black woman manager.

D (3:56)

She says the biggest barrier is will.

A (4:00)

I don't know that we have the.

D (4:01)

Will to make overarching changes to the way we view the workplace because the status quo is working for a bunch of people.

A (4:09)

Alexis and Lorena, this year's report calls for leaders to recommit to change in order to scale and accelerate women's gains. What do we mean by recommitting to change? In practical terms, what we see this.

D (4:24)

Year, for the first time in the decade we've been following this data, is that companies are starting to step back in their commitment. And we see that in a couple of ways. The first is the number of companies that put diversity as a top priority on their agenda has fallen down for the first time. A set of companies have demoted that priority in this moment. And that's incredibly concerning because we're mid innings in this journey. We're certainly not there in having achieved parity. And to have companies pulling back already is a real warning signal. But beyond that, you see some other places where the prioritization of programs, the support that's being offered is on the margin, drifting backwards, not forward.

A (5:15)

What do you think is causing companies to deprioritize these initiatives?

D (5:21)

On the surface, I think most companies would tell you a combination of there's a lot of complexity in the market today. Supply chain shocks, inflation, unpredictable market demand, environment, talent, shifts and they need to focus their attention in the near term elsewhere. Underneath it. My worry is that we're facing fatigue before we've made nearly enough progress and that this issue of creating equal access for all great talent to rise of every type of women and men of every race, of every socioeconomic background has been reframed as a zero sum game. It is not a zero sum game done right. The companies that win on diversity are companies that also win on helping all talent get access to coaching, to development, to manager support, to the programs. They need sponsorship to thrive and to grow.

A (6:24)

Women are often seen not to put ourselves forward for promotion, which can actually lead folks to say that we're less ambitious or less amenable to hard work, for example, than men. What does the research tell us about women's interest and aspiration to advance at work?

B (6:45)

I don't think we should confuse being polite with being ambitious.

A (6:51)

Thank you.

B (6:53)

So women may pause a beat to let someone else express their view. They may pause a beat in politeness to let someone else raise their hand. That doesn't mean their hand isn't raised because actually you weren't looking. Their hand was up the whole time. Women, consistently over the 10 years we've been doing this research are incredibly, positively ambitious to be leaders in their organization to get to the next level. That is not the issue. The issue is not of ambition. The issue is the system and all the hurdles they face to try and fulfill that potential and talent.

A (7:29)

Alexis, you referred to us as being mid innings in the game of getting to parody. Let's talk about the gains that women have made over the past 10 years and what our research has revealed.

D (7:46)

The biggest gains we've seen have been at the very top. So the bright spot clearly over the last decade has been the movement in the C suite and that's going from 17% women's representation to 29%. That's a huge gain and it's something to absolutely celebrate. But there's a lot of fragility in that progress. And let me explain why. First, the way companies got there is not a playbook they can apply looking forward. On average, companies added a seat at the table in the C suite and they tried hard when they didn't have diversity to fill that seat with a woman where they could. Those roles were largely what we call staff roles. So this is often Chros finance leaders general counsel. But they don't tend to ladder to the CEO and they don't often have as much mobility across into owning and driving business outcomes directly and so companies can't repeat that play. And the second issue is when they went to fill that seat with more diverse talent, they looked outside their organization, not inside. And so when you look back down the pipeline where you should expect to see more and more talented women rising up, waiting for those next big jobs at the top, you in fact, don't you see this flattening out and a much slower progress curve, which suggests that something's broken inside of a lot of companies and their ability to grow that talent that they can keep taking forward.

A (9:29)

Let's talk about what specific practices companies have implemented to enable women's advancement. Because even if companies aren't promoting internally, there are women who are advancing elsewhere that they're bringing in. So that advancement is happening. What's conducing to help these women who do advance make it up the ladder?

B (9:53)

There are a lot of things in corporate America that are considerably better a decade later. Take for example benefits. When we think about our benefits, think about parental leave. It is incredibly commonplace for companies to offer parental leave to have actually increased the number of weeks related to that paid leave. Many companies have bereavement, they have elderly care. They have thought about an array of benefits that are incredibly meaningful to women and parents. And it is not an exception, it is more the norm. And we see that in the data. In fact, actually we ask fewer questions about all the types of benefits and policies because many of those are in place in a very sustained and secure way. When we think about recruiting, we've seen so much progress both in terms of many companies diversifying where they find talent, but also providing some of those bias busters and mechanisms in how they recruit, interview and look at talent to make sure that women are given a fair shake. And many companies are finding that their entry point is actually considerably higher than when they started 10 years ago. These are real gains. The other category which I think we've made real gains on is flexibility. Before COVID flexibility was the number one thing that women felt that they needed, that they weren't getting in the workplace, that you could flex your hours, your location, how you get things done, that your manager doesn't have to always see you doing the work. Those types of things have really evolved. But Lucia, I'm sure you and Alexis know that whilst these are meaningful pieces that materially affect the day to day experience of women, we are a far cry from an equal experience day to day.

A (11:48)

Lorena, that's a great segue to our next clip, which is from a Southeast Asian woman manager. And here's what she says.

B (11:57)

The best thing companies can do for.

A (11:59)

Mothers is have a very clear maternity.

B (12:02)

Leave benefit and support flexibility. It's just not fair for women to feel like they need to make a trade off between taking care of their kids and and going to work.

A (12:11)

There's a lot of talk now about younger women not wanting kids. Many women have begun at least to delay having children versus previous generations. But the reality is that more often than not, as you described, women are the primary caretaker of children and sometimes also aging parents. Some companies are now talking about return to office. How do we anticipate such a return might affect working mothers?

B (12:41)

I don't think we need to be afraid of Return to the Office A couple of things. First of all, return to the office has a lot of benefits and some of the things that we have learned is that it can support greater apprenticeship, improve your networks, access to sponsors, some of the informal interactions that help you build the equity to support your advancement over time. That said, being in the office five days a week may not fit everybody. So I know that it is a tough topic. But the first point is there are some benefits to being in the office. The second thing is that I think it's less about how often you're in the office, but more about the ability to architect your career with flexibility when you need it, and being in a work environment that provides many of the things, office policy being one of them, that allows for flexibility when it matters.

D (13:51)

I'd argue she's asking the question because in society we still haven't solved the responsibilities beyond the workplace. So we see clearly in our data, and this has not changed in the past decade, that women are far more likely, irrespective of their earning power in the workplace, to disproportionately hold the household childcare, elder care responsibilities at home. So the reason you feel that burning need for extra flex is because you're holding another half to full time job outside of the workplace that your peers in many cases are not. That has not changed generationally. It has not changed over time.

A (14:38)

That tees us up for the next clip. What has also been slow to change is the pipeline. This next clip comes from a Latina senior manager who says, I'm a young woman currently in a manager role.

D (14:52)

I think that speaks volumes to the way this industry has grown. But things have also gotten worse for women.

A (14:58)

The latest research points again to the fragility of a couple of pipelines, entry level and managerial level for women. Give us some examples of the kinds of barriers women experience that prevent them from making it even to entry level and also to manager.

D (15:17)

Even at the start, we don't see our fair share of diverse talent coming into the corporate pipeline. So women have graduated with more than 50% of the college degrees for each of the past 30 years, but they only make up 48% of the entry pipe. And this year actually a little bit less. You may say 48%. That feels pretty close to 50. But this is the law of very large numbers. It makes a huge difference to access. And then when you look for women of color, that number becomes more challenged very quickly. So let's take the story for Latinas. Latinas this year face the most challenging broken rung. So the least equity in their attempt to advance into manager seats that we've ever seen. For every 100 men, 65 Latina women get that first step up to manager. That's the moment when companies bet on you for your pipeline and your pathway to the top. And far fewer Latina women are getting that first shot up. And then when you fast forward all the way to the top of the C suite, latinas make up 9.6% of the population. They make up 1.4% of the C Suite. Where we should see where 1 out of 10 companies having a Latina sitting at their table, it's more like one in a hundred.

A (16:46)

And what accounts for that, such an acute imbalance that you're describing there, Alexis?

D (16:52)

Well, let's start with the structural barriers. What we see when we dig in on the broken rung is that very often the criteria we use to evaluate potential is incredibly biased. And if you are an excellent leader, but you don't look like the prototype of the leaders who have come before you. And by definition, most women of color disproportionately don't look like the leaders who came before them, you often get overlooked or undercounted relative to your potential. The second thing we see is the day to day experience for women, particularly women of color, is simply different. The degree to which you're challenged on your competency, the number of times someone taps you on the shoulder to offer you a stretch assignment, the amount of individual coaching and support you get from a manager to advance, it does not happen as frequently and with as much support as it does for men.

B (17:51)

It's death by a thousand cuts. And that is the felt experience in the exasperation and the tone that you hear when we do these interviews.

A (18:01)

So let's turn to what all of us collectively can do to speed up the pace of Change on this challenge so that the three of us aren't here in 2034 having this same conversation. And we talked a little bit about advancement to manager. Let's talk about hiring. Any thoughts about what's working and not vis a vis de biasing the hiring process?

D (18:24)

One of the areas of progress we see is that companies have made more efforts to formalize their hiring and advancement processes. They're looking for bias, they're trying to track and disrupt it. I'm hopeful actually technology can help us here because technology could identify talent where the we're using stale human bias based pattern recognition to tell us what we think good looks like or ready now succession looks like when in fact if you were able to look across all of the patterns of performance in your company, you might see other places, other opportunities and other individuals. I think the second thing that technology can do is it can even the playing field can we create sort of access for people, accelerated capability building a chance to onboard in a different way that allows companies to get more creative about where they go for talent and how they seek out diverse talent.

B (19:25)

Lucia it's probably worth noting that technology is changing under our feet so quickly. With generative AI we have all these new capabilities that would allow the things that Alexis just mentioned to be done at a scale, a speed and actually a cost that's very reasonable for companies. But also women can use technology as a tool to advance their own expertise and their own ability to succeed at work. I think another source of optimism is also access to capital and entrepreneurship. Today women are something around 2% of the venture capital funding and you don't see as many women as founders. But that's a sort of a deceptive statistic because that's where we have been historically. Imagine if we actually changed that. You could see a very different future. So part of this is we have to imagine that the terms of the game change that access to capital change that a computer science degree isn't a barrier to having a job with technology that we can use new technologies like AI to actually debias in a more systematic way improve recruiting and improve the ability of women to have different types of skills and capabilities that allow them to rise.

A (20:46)

Any practical suggestions for folks who are looking just on that same day to practice allyship or examples from your own experience of allyship that helped you along at earlier stages in your career?

D (21:02)

Let's talk about allyship by the numbers because the vast majority of people say they intend to be an ally to others in the workplace and companies are trying to promote and encourage this as well. So it's not a matter of good intention, it's an issue of activation and I'd argue maybe a little bit of skill building. It's great to say I want to be an ally and just let me know if there's anything you need that doesn't work. What we need is allies. To say, what have I done lately? What have I done today? What's one more incremental action I could take with frequency that might help change the game for a woman? Like the day to day experience. One way everyone can be an ally is to actually do that on the behalf of someone else. Oh, wait, hold on one second. I think Lorena wasn't finished speaking. That's a good point. But I think that's the point she just made. Right? You actually help rebalance the power back and you don't tell the individual every time you need to advocate for yourself. Sure you do, but you're already doing that every day. That's why you're exhausted.

B (22:19)

Alexis gave some terrific examples. There are other things. There is, if questioned, defending the work of a woman colleague. There is also asking questions, what are your professional ambitions? How can I help you? I think women who are incredibly ambitious know exactly how you can help. It would be things like saying, gosh, there's a really great project. It's would it's going to have a lot of visibility to the CEO. Let's get you on that. And the thing is, you don't need to wait for some big policy for some big edict that comes from the top. This is something that everyone, both men and women, can do tomorrow.

D (23:03)

Let me give you one example every single leader can do. Get out a piece of paper, write down the list of the people you think you're sponsoring and mentoring, and then grade yourself on how diverse that list is. And many leaders will find that list is not balanced. It's more reflective of their own journey and people they think they can most naturally coach and support. And the Challenge is when 2/3 of your leaders are men, but 2/3 of your sponsors and mentors are women. And that's what we see in the data. You are asking your women to disproportionately carry a whole pipeline of talent along in a level that they simply don't have enough time or capacity to do.

A (23:50)

Any final thoughts or recommendations on what can and should be done in order to help women advance more quickly?

B (24:02)

So the data right now shows us that to get to parity, we won't see it in 2035. Lucia, as you suggested earlier, in fact, it's two generations ahead. Conservatively, it's 50 years. These are numbers that are not good. We will not get there with incremental steps forward. We need discontinuous thinking. How do we think different about entrepreneurship and giving women founders access to capital? How do we think different about the role that technical skills and capabilities can do to build experience capital, I. E. What you learned on the job, not what you came in the door with your resume to be qualified? How do we bet on women's potential, not just their performance? How do we think about the manager layer, not just the very top. It's a frozen middle. What are going to be the actions that defrost that? How do we think about our cooperation and collaboration with public center energies, particularly educational institutions? Because a lot of the challenge if I'm working in the office is what do I do about child care? So are we waiting for companies to pay for on site childcare or could we partner in the public arena in our state and local governments to actually think of something else? These are just open questions. These are ideas. I think, gosh, we've got a lot of smart men and women in the world. If we put our heads together, we could probably come up with a list much better than mine.

D (25:32)

I said at the beginning, we're mid innings. I think you don't walk off the baseball field halfway through just because you're down or you're tired. And we have seen progress and the progress has helped. We just have to keep going. And it will take a combination of some plays we know work and some new things we haven't come to yet. But there is a playbook that we have seen helps companies break out and get in front. And if I sum it all up, it's a combination of rigor and persistence. It's rigor to keep looking through every committee, every promotion process to say, where do I see Bryce and where can I root it out? And it's the persistence to keep going, to innovate, to fund things, to encourage managers to incent challenge when you don't see the change so that you don't stop midway across the field.

A (26:33)

Alexis and Lorena, thanks so much for joining us today.

D (26:37)

Thank you.

B (26:38)

Thank you.

A (26:40)

Thanks so much for listening to the McKinsey Podcast. I'm Lucia Rahild.

C (26:45)

And I'm Roberta Fassaro.

A (26:46)

Find us on McKinsey.com we'll have a transcript of this episode up shortly.

C (26:51)

And download the McKinsey Insights app where you can find this podcast and other helpful content updated daily.

A (26:58)

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C (27:02)

We'll see you in two weeks.