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Represent: A leader’s guide to women’s experiences at work

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Leading Off

Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities

As the sun sets on the month of March—also known as Women’s History Month—it’s an opportune time to reflect on women’s contributions at work. Women are an undeniable force in the modern workplace, as the business case for gender-diverse leadership teams grows ever stronger. After pandemic-fueled burnout prompted many working mothers to leave the labor force altogether, women’s participation is now hitting all-time highs. While we know that women are just as eager to advance in their careers as men, they remain vastly underrepresented at higher levels of the organization. This week, we upend misconceptions about women at work and suggest ways in which leaders can really move the needle.
An image linking to the web page “Busting myths about women in the workplace” on McKinsey.com.

For nearly a decade, McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research has shed light on the contradictions, challenges, and promise of being a woman in the corporate world. According to senior partners Alexis Krivkovich and Lareina Yee, the latest results help demystify four myths about women at work: that women feel less ambitious than they did before the pandemic (they aren’t), that only women care about flexible working conditions (men do, too), and that microaggressions don’t meaningfully affect women (they do). The fourth myth? Krivkovich and Yee point to the leadership pipeline. Rather than the glass ceiling, “the biggest inequity in advancement remains the broken rung—the very first step up into a manager position,” Krivkovich says. “The reason we only have 28 percent women in the C-suite is because we aren’t building that leadership path at the very beginning of [women’s] careers, to create a talent pool that would be available and ready for those opportunities when they open up.” To course correct, they recommend companies approach gender representation as they would any other business problem: dig into the data, run postmortems on who’s getting promoted, and ask tough questions about the structural biases that may be standing in women’s way.

That’s the average number of years a woman spends in poor health during her lifetime. According to McKinsey Health Institute research from senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud and Lucy Pérez and their colleagues, women are most likely to be affected by a sex-specific health condition in their working years. With the average person spending one-third of their life at work, improving employee health is critical to improving global health, both as a moral imperative and a precondition for economic prosperity. What’s at stake in addressing the health gap between women and men? Healthier women are more likely to participate in the workforce, thus more likely to improve outcomes for themselves, their families, and the economy, which stands to gain at least $1 trillion of global economic opportunity by 2040—the equivalent of 137 million women in full-time jobs—if the gap is closed.
An image linking to the web page “Author Talks: Grace Puma shares how working women can shatter the glass ceiling” on McKinsey.com.
An image linking to the web page “Happiness and work: An interview with Lord Richard Layard” on McKinsey.com.

Lead by fixing the broken rung.

– Edited by Daniella Seiler, executive editor, Washington, DC

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by "McKinsey Leading Off" <publishing@email.mckinsey.com> - 04:47 - 1 Apr 2024