The ambition gap is growing
Women are finding that their employers are less committed to their success at a time when their support is most needed
A NEW study looking at the state of female white-collar workers confirms something many women have been feeling in their bones lately: The corporate ladder is not designed for them.
The survey, conducted annually by consultancy McKinsey & Company and the women’s advocacy non-profit LeanIn.org, found that while women’s ambitions have increased over the last year, the ambition gap between women and men was the largest in its 11-year history.
Let’s be clear: Women are still just as motivated and committed to their work as their male counterparts. But their desire to rise through the ranks is falling behind, with 80 per cent of female workers saying they want to be promoted to the next level, compared to 86 per cent of male workers.
It’s hard to blame them. In the last year, the workplace has become a more hostile place for women – not that it ever particularly embraced them. As some of the hard-fought progress of the last decade is backsliding, they are asking why they should aspire for something that feels increasingly out of reach.
Women are finding that their employers are less committed to their success at a time when their support is most needed.
The survey reported that about half of companies say women’s career advancement is a high priority. A full 20 per cent admitted they place little or no priority on women’s career advancement – a figure that rises to around 30 per cent when asked about the advancement of women of colour.
The survey does not have a direct historical comparison, but the trend in how companies are valuing women’s success is clear: In 2017, 88 per cent of companies said gender diversity was a priority; last year, 78 per cent agreed.
The reversal is a betrayal, and one that is further fuelling the ambition gap. The survey showed that when women get the same backing and sponsorship from their managers as men do, the ambition gap is eliminated.
“It doesn’t take long for women at the bottom of the career ladder to pick up on the disparities in a workplace. Inside their companies, they’re less likely to have sponsors, to be put up for promotion or to get stretch assignments.”
“It’s logical that you would start to see ambition drop as women lose faith that corporate America is there for them,” McKinsey senior partner Alexis Krivkovich, who co-authored the report, told me. “They feel it viscerally in their day-to-day experiences.”
The ambition gap is most yawning at the top and bottom of the corporate ladder: The spread between entry-level women and their male counterparts who report wanting a promotion is 11 percentage points, and eight for senior-level women and men.
It doesn’t take long for women at the bottom of the career ladder to pick up on the disparities in a workplace.
Inside their companies, they’re less likely to have sponsors, to be put up for promotion or to get stretch assignments. They’re watching as their companies eliminate flexible work arrangements with little regard for how it impacts working women, who have most benefited from them.
They’ve absorbed the recent calls for more “masculine energy” and aggression in corporate America. They’ve heard the chief executive officers who say diversity, equity and inclusion went too far, even as the gender pay gap widened for the second year in a row.
More senior women have first-hand experience with how hard it is to claw their way up the ladder. They’re more likely to have been passed over for a promotion or to look in front of them and “see a steeper path and a less attractive landing spot”, said the report’s co-author Rachel Thomas, LeanIn’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
They’re turned off by the higher percentage of female CEOs who have left their jobs this year compared with their male counterparts – and by watching most of those women be replaced by men.
They’re noticing as the share of newly elected female directors declines, and more than 40 per cent of California-based artificial-intelligence startups fail to appoint a single woman to their boards.
They see the women who do make it to the top being held to a higher standard. Female CEOs are more likely to be targeted by activist investors, and their tenures are shorter than their male colleagues. Often the only CEO job a woman can get is an impossible one, which sets them up for failure.
The barrage of news in the last month or so has not helped shake the sense that being a woman in the workforce is getting harder.
In November, Goldman Sachs promoted the smallest proportion of women to managing director since 2018, when CEO David Solomon took over.
Last month, US President Donald Trump called a female Bloomberg News reporter “piggy” and over the weekend labelled CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “stupid and nasty”. The Financial Times reported that the president agreed to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos only after organisers said they would not prominently feature “woke” topics, including female empowerment.
Newly released e-mails between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and former Harvard president and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers gave us a glimpse into what some members of the elite really think about women. The New York Times posted a headline that asked whether “women had ruined the workplace”.
It’s relentless and crazy-making, and I wish there was more of a positive spin to put on all of it. I’ve written before that progress for women has long been called the “stalled gender revolution” for a reason, and right now we are clearly in one of those moments of stasis.
The best we can do is acknowledge that the hurdles have gotten higher, and hope that despite it all, women can still find ways to clear at least some of them. BLOOMBERG
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