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How can women take control of their careers and beat the broken rung?

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Five Fifty
Five Fifty
An illustration of a woman who has paused on her ascent up a ladder because the rung above her is broken. She looks up at the feet of two male colleagues, one to her left and the other to her right, who have passed her by and are ascending ladders with unbroken rungs. End of image description.

Today, the bigger barrier to women’s career advancement isn’t the glass ceiling. It’s the broken rung, the first step up the corporate ladder: being promoted to a manager role, say McKinsey’s Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez, authors of The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It. To learn more about the steps women can take to maximize their experience capital and take control of their careers, check out the latest edition of the Five Fifty.
A pair of waffle charts show that for every 100 men who are promoted to first-level manager roles, only 81 women are promoted. End of image description.

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by "McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 03:25 - 23 Apr 2025