For women, workplace gains ‘fragile’

McKinsey & Company’s 10th Women in the Workplace study shows there’s still a lot of work to be done to achieve gender equality.

This year, McKinsey & Company celebrates the 10th anniversary of its Women in the Workplace report, the largest study of women’s work in corporate America and produced in partnership with Lean In, a global community dedicated to advancing women’s careers. Over the past decade, more than 1,000 companies and more than 480,000 women have participated in the study.

The report’s findings over the years have not always painted a rosy picture or a straightforward path to progress. in an article Harvard Business Review (Harvard Business Review), Ruchika T. Malhotra, inclusion strategist and author Inclusion with purpose: An intersectional approach to creating a culture of belonging at workrecalling the scene when the report was first received.

“In bold letters at the top it read: ‘Corporate America is not on a path to gender equality.’ I was both shocked and validated,” she wrote, citing the racism she experienced while working in corporate tech early in her career , sexual harassment and bias.

“Fortunately, things have improved a lot over the past decade. We have learned to more openly accept gender and racial inequality as structural problems rather than what I would call ‘women’s fix’ problems,” she wrote said, adding that leaders have increased their commitment to better serving marginalized groups in the workplace.

But progress remains fragile and disappointing, as do the promises made over the past few years — and DEI efforts have recently encountered pushback, with U.S. funding and support for diversity, equity, and inclusion declining. As McKinsey & Company noted in a report of its recent study of more than 15,000 individuals across 281 organizations, “Progress does not equal equality.”

The study noted that “the representation of women at all levels of corporate management has increased over the past decade”. The study noted that women held 29% of the most senior positions, up from 17% in 2015. Much slower,” McKinsey said in the early years of entry-level and management-level positions. Women have held 45-48% of entry-level positions over the past 10 years and have remained at 48% for the past four years. Likewise, women have held management positions Less than two-fifths (39%) of the population were registered, down 2% from 2021, when this statistic peaked at 41%.

“Simply put, men outnumber women at every level,” the study says. The imbalance isn’t being felt in the business events industry: Results conveneThe 2024 Annual Salary Survey again shows that the majority (87%) of event organizers are women. Respondents to the annual survey have historically been primarily in management positions, followed by the director level and, to a lesser extent, the executive or vice president level, at 36%, 32% and 13%, respectively, in the most recent survey. Their lack of representation in the C-suite may be contributing to the industry’s gender pay gap, which has widened to nearly 6% this year compared with nearly 5% last year. This year’s survey showed that women’s average earnings are more than $6,000 less than men’s.

Sheryl Sandberg

In corporate America, even the presence of women in senior leadership positions is not as big a deal as it sounds, the report says. There remains a huge gap between white women and women of color in the C-suite — 22 percent versus 7 percent — and the reasons for the progress being made are unsustainable. “The main driver of the increase in women’s representation at these levels is the reduction in the number of front-line positions, which disproportionately affects men” because men hold more roles, often related to profit and loss, McKinsey said. Responsibility, the report explains. Women’s advancement has less staying power in the C-suite because the main influence on female representation is the addition of staff roles to which women are often hired. “Since companies cannot add new staff positions indefinitely, this is not a viable path to equality,” the report states.

Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In Harvard Business Review She worries that the company’s commitment to diversity is “starting to backslide.” Companies have the power to drive significant change, and now is not the time to slow down. “

This sentiment is echoed in the report: “We would be cautiously optimistic about the future were it not for a clear finding in this year’s study: companies’ commitment to diversity is declining. As we look ahead to the next decade for women in the workplace, we The ask for companies is simple: keep going. Women have remained ambitious and committed to the work they have done over the past decade. Now we need businesses to stay ambitious and committed to the important work they have started.”

Casey Gale is the author of “ held.