Today, in 2023, only 28% of C-suite executives are women. But is the glass ceiling—a term coined in 1978—to blame? Research from McKinsey suggests that, instead, we should be focusing on the “broken rung.”
The term “broken rung” refers to the fact that fewer women are promoted to first-line manager positions than men are. This year, only 87 women received these promotions for every 100 men who did, McKinsey found in its Women in the Workplace 2023 survey. And that can cause issues further down the line, when companies have a smaller pool of women to promote from for subsequent leadership positions.
Alexis Krivovich, managing partner at McKinsey and co-founder of its Women in the Workplace research, spoke with CFO Brew about the causes of the “broken rung,” and what CFOs and other leaders can do to address it.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why does the broken rung matter so much?
We obsess about the glass ceiling. But, in fact, the biggest inequity is the broken rung.
That discrepancy alone sets off a whole chain reaction, where you end up with fewer managers in first [supervisory] positions. You go from almost 50-50 [men-women representation at entry level] to 60-40. By mid-senior manager, you’re talking [around] 70-30…So you lose the pool of equal talent right out of the gate. And companies never recover from that. They never regain that ground.
Is one reason for the “broken rung” that fewer women seek promotions than men do?
Women increasingly raise their hands equally to ask for raises, promotions, stretch assignments, and opportunities. So it’s not a lack of interest.
Women have incredibly high ambition—in fact the highest we've ever seen, and on par with men. But there are these really destructive myths that then underpin a lot of bias in the system, that distort the view and lead companies to dismiss differences in their data.
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What can leaders do to address the problem of the broken rung?
A lot of it is taking the playbook that companies have used to manage diverse talent pools—diversity slates, special training for interviewers, ensuring the criteria are balanced and unbiased—and applying that at the very beginning…Many times [companies] let the existing [promotion] process just run.
What companies are missing is getting into the data and saying, “Do I have this issue? Let me look at my first step up to manager. Let me look team by team.” Because it’s not enough to look in aggregate. You might look fine in aggregate, and then you get underneath and you say, “Oh my gosh, in product, in engineering, in data and analytics, in P&L roles, I’m actually much further behind. And it’s been masked by the fact that I’m doing a great job somewhere else in the company.”
You’ve been doing the Women in the Workplace research since 2015. What changes have you seen since then?
When we started this survey in 2015, there was no good data that existed in an aggregate way on equal advancement of talent. The fact that we now have an expectation of rigorous data [about] how talent rises through organizations is incredibly important.
And when we started, the C-suite was less than 1 in 6 women. And we’re now above 1 in 4, and that's incredible. It gives me faith that if we continue to put the focus here that is needed, real, sustained change can happen.
A lot of the elements we track—parental leave benefits, childcare subsidies, training on unconscious bias—are things that nine years ago, a smattering of companies were doing. They have become table stakes and an expectation of just good management, and good leadership of talent. And I think that’s incredibly exciting. And it’s part of what’s driven the improvements we’ve seen in the pipeline.