Well before the glass ceiling, women run into obstacles to advancement. Evening the odds early in their careers would have a huge impact.
By Vanessa Fuhrmans Updated Oct. 15, 2019 12:18 am ET The conventional narrative of the ambitious woman at work goes something like this: Woman joins the workforce with big dreams. Over the years, she advances in her career alongside male colleagues. Yet on the way to the top, she hits an invisible barrier to the highest corridors of power.
Earlier than believed Those are some of the key findings of the fifth annual Women in the Workplace study conducted by Lean In and McKinsey, one of the most comprehensive examinations to date of the experiences of working women and men. Data from 329 companies with a collective 13 million people on their payrolls suggest the barriers holding women back from equal power and influence in the workplace emerge much earlier than many corporate leaders believe.
Employers’ moves to diversify their most senior echelons could provide a road map, says Rachel Thomas, president of Lean In, the nonprofit founded by Facebook Inc. ’s Sheryl Sandberg to support women in their career ambitions. Over the five years of the study, women have made the biggest gains at the very top of the corporate ladder in the C-suite, as companies have trained their sights on grooming a select cadre of high-potential senior-level women for the biggest jobs in management.
Women want to be promoted and ask for promotions and raises at roughly the same rate as men. The percentage who said they:What women sayWomen have fewer sponsors at work championing them for advancement13%23%Women move up the career ladder in smaller numbers than men at every stage but lose the most ground early. Share of women at each level:Vice presidentMen and women leave employers in near-equal numbers at every career stage....
Some companies, such as BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc., are giving executive-level coaching to junior would-be leaders in the hopes of promoting them. The 3,000-person biotech firm in San Rafael, Calif., launched a pilot with Pluma, a web and mobile platform that provides video-session coaching, with 51 participants, 28 of them women. Since then, 35% of the women and 14% of the men have moved up into new jobs.
It isn’t for lack of ambition. Roughly equal numbers of men and women say they’ve recently sought a promotion—27% and 29% respectively—according to the Lean In and McKinsey data. Among women of color, the appetite for winning promotions is even greater. Nor are women abandoning their careers in larger numbers than men for family or other reasons, the data show.
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Over time, many women come to see a workplace stacked against them. Among the more than 68,500 employees whom McKinsey and Lean In also surveyed from the participating companies, a quarter of women said their gender had played a role in a missed promotion or raise. Even more expected it to make it harder for them to get ahead in the future.
Making the call At Synchrony Financial, where 46% of all managers are women, CEO Margaret Keane says she wanted to build a sturdier bridge from the entry-level jobs in the consumer bank and credit-card issuer’s call centers to the managerial track. Many of those jobs are held by women. “I feel I have as a woman CEO a responsibility in terms of driving the culture,” says Ms. Keane, who began her own career in a bank call center.
The sponsor’s role At Bank of America, where more than 40% of people in management are women, sponsorships play a critical role in helping women advance, says Cynthia Bowman, head of diversity and inclusion and talent acquisition at the bank. To secure a sponsor, “you’ve got to consistently perform, have a strong brand and deliver. That’s just table stakes,” she says. “But a lot of people do that and might still not move, because they don’t have the right support.
Procter & Gamble also takes a granular approach to evening the gender playing field. Women hold 47% of all management roles at P&G, up from 44% four years ago. The consumer-goods giant applies the same rigorous approach that it uses for market research to help employees map their career-development plans. When the company spotted a drop in the share of midlevel female managers, it started tracking their progression earlier and more closely.
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