News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
Black professionals are being promoted at slower rates than they were in 2021, research from McKinsey found. As the Wall Street Journal reported, in 2022, on average, 66 Black men were promoted for every 100 men of all races who got promotions to initial management roles. In 2021, 72 Black men were promoted for every 100 men of all races.
The decline was even greater for Black women, only 54 of whom were promoted for every 100 men of all races to first management roles in 2022. In 2021, in contrast, 96 Black women were promoted for every 100 men in total.
The data comes from McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2023 study, conducted with LeanIn.org, which looked at 276 companies employing more than 10 million people. McKinsey examined the proportionof each ethnic group that was promoted, rather than the total number of promotions, dividing the number of promotions for a given population by the number of total employees of that population in the level below them.
Black staff may have been promoted at higher levels in 2021 due to the visibility of racial justice concerns that year following the George Floyd protests, the Wall Street Journal surmised. But companies’ attention may have shifted away from equity and inclusion in 2022, when other concerns came to the fore.
There’s one positive takeaway from the drop in promotions, Alexis Krivkovich, managing partner at McKinsey and co-founder of its Women in the Workplace research, told CFO Brew during an October interview. It provides “proof that when companies focus on this issue they can very quickly close the gap,” she said.
But “the second you take your eye off it, you can see how the structural bias creeps back in,” she added.
Those initial promotions are important because they set the stage for subsequent promotions. When fewer women or Black people are promoted to manager, companies have fewer candidates from these populations to choose from for promotions to higher leadership positions, a phenomenon McKinsey termed the “broken rung” of the career ladder.