You’ve probably heard of the glass ceiling. It’s that well-worn metaphor describing the unseen barriers women—particularly women of color—tend to run up against when attempting to climb the corporate ladder.
But according to McKinsey’s new Women in the Workplace 2023 report, perhaps a different term—the “broken rung”—is more accurate, because the real trouble begins long before women are gunning for a C-level role.
Early-career women are significantly more likely than their male peers to fall behind, mostly because they miss out on critical early-stage promotions, finds the 27,000-worker survey conducted in partnership with Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s women’s leadership nonprofit.
Even more dispiritingly, the broken rung has been a nagging issue for years. “So much attention has really gone to the glass ceiling, but the largest number of women affected are women at the beginning of their careers,” Alexis Krivkovich, a senior McKinsey partner, told ABC back in 2019. Many companies don’t even realize the issue, she went on, and “you can’t solve the problem until you first recognize that it is one.”
Evidently, that recognition has yet to come. In 2023, for every 100 men to rise from entry-level to manager, just 87 women rose the ranks alongside them, the report finds in its assessment of 276 companies. Unsurprisingly, women of color have it worst of all—only 73 of them make that leap against the 100 men. In fact, McKinsey finds, along the ascent from entry-level and C-suite positions, women of color representation drops by two-thirds. Those figures mirror the sorry state of the pay gap, which is set to cost women $90,000 in lifetime earnings and is costing the global economy $7 trillion.
Despite what TikTok chatter about trends like “lazy girl” or “snail girl” jobs might have you think, the inequality can’t be chalked up to a simple lack of gumption or perseverance, despite what TikTok chatter about things like “lazy girl” or “snail girl” job trends might have you think. At every career stage, women and men share the same goals for advancement, though only women struggle with bias and systemic barriers, per the report. (Their career is important to 96% of women, and 81% want to be promoted this year, per the report.)
That’s the rub: While early-career men are often promoted owing to their sparkling potential, women are assessed on their track record, which is likely to be scant if they’re new to the job or to the workforce. “Social science would tell you that gender bias, and bias around what a leader looks like, all of that is much more likely to creep in when employees have shorter track records,” Rachel Thomas, Lean In’s CEO told CBS MoneyWatch.
The fact that women occupy fewer than one-third of C-suite roles is less a factor of the glass ceiling and more of the broken rung, the study authors argue. Also impossible to ignore is the impact of the pandemic. Those initial lockdowns laid bare the galling lack of social safety net, and they led to a cratering of women’s workforce participation—one in four left work citing caregiving needs. “We don’t face a constraint on ambition,” Lareina Yee, a senior McKinsey partner, told CBS. “We face a constraint on opportunity.”
On a national scale, companies have modestly increased women’s C-suite representation—53 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women—but as McKinsey notes, those figures are a largely hollow “temporary stopgap” if the broken rung is left unmended.
Owing to the unequal share of men getting promoted early in their careers, men end up with 60% of manager-level positions at the average U.S. company. Add that to the fact that with fewer women around to be promoted to senior manager, at every subsequent level of the hierarchy, their representation decreases further.
That leaves women in the same unenviable position, playing a hapless game of catch-up as the status quo remains. As the McKinsey report puts it, “after nine years of very little progress, there is no excuse for companies failing to take action.”
