For women, the corporate ladder is a battle of attrition
Despite support from firms, the ranks of women in upper management have stagnated
More companies than ever are pledging support for women’s advancement, rolling out hiring goals and training and mentorship programs. And yet progress has continued to stall, with the ranks of women in upper management staying stagnant.
According to data from the LeanIn. Org and McKinsey & Co.’ s Women in the Workplace 2018 report, women make up 48% of entry- level workers, and there’s a corporate ladder of attrition that shows female representation plunging at manager and vice president levels. Moving just one rung up the ladder, to manager, the share of women has already dropped to 38%, while women’s representation falls to 23% by the senior vice president level.
It is a stark gender divide that is apparent across many sectors: In industries from asset management to energy to software, at the C- suite level there are more than four men for every woman.
The falloff is especially precipitous for industries like transportation and logistics, where women make up 57% of entrylevel workers, but just 14% of the C- suite.
Since “Lean In,” Sheryl Sandberg’s book on women and leadership, was published in 2013, there has been an “explosion of interest in gender” and related programs from companies, says Robin Ely, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. But one problem, she says, is that the programs are frequently designed to reward a small pool of already high performers. Others, she says, focus on raising consciousness, which is “fine but doesn’t change anything.”
At large companies, 89% of people polled say their employers have gender- diversity programs, according to a 2017 Boston Consulting Group survey. But only 27% of women surveyed say they have benefited.
“Part of the reason this is a struggle for most companies is because it’s actually really hard,” says Jen Hayes, an Atlantabased partner at consulting group Bain & Co. “Everyone has these programs now. But the level of quality is variable at best.”
Anna Beninger, senior director at Catalyst, which studies women in the workplace, says it’s crucial to change the mindset of men to make sure they’re on board with these efforts.
“Women have been talking to women about these issues for decades, and we still have just 5% of CEOs who are women,” she says, adding that men need to be sponsors of women and actively support their advancement. “From a cultural standpoint, that takes a lot more time.” Some women say they have definitely gotten a career boost from the programs meant to propel women into executivelevel careers. At Bristol- Myers Squibb, a new talent accelerator last year paired a dozen women and minorities with C- suite mentors, part of an effort to help them move more quickly into roles of significant authority.
Katrin Rupalla was a clinical research manager based in Shanghai when she received hours of coaching from her mentor as she sought a promotion.
He gave her guidance on how to sharpen her plan for what the first 90 days in the prospective role would entail and urged her to meet with key people in other business units.
The advice, she says, helped her win the job heading Bristol- Myers’s regulatory unit for oncology.
Anna Khanova says that during her 25- year career she has participated in many programs designed to boost women into executive ranks at Siemens AG, Royal Philips and her current employer in North Carolina, industrial manufacturer IngersollRand PLC. She credits that training and mentorship with helping her get to where she is today— global- services leader for a division specializing in compressed air and gas systems.
Since 2012 Ingersoll- Rand has asked female participants in its training to tackle projects solving real- life business challenges within the organization. The idea is to give them visibility with existing executive leaders so they can be better known and advocated for, says Lisa Gary, chief learning officer. The program has graduated 140 women, including Ms. Khanova, and a third of them received promotions. The program “helped me build visibility and exposure that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have happened,” says Ms. Khanova, who was paired with an Ingersoll- Rand mentor in 2014. She now mentors other women.
In most cases, research shows that mentors who just offer advice and help build confidence aren’t enough. Companies must ensure that women have sponsors who make it a personal goal to actively advocate for their female employee during key personnel decisions. Many programs tend to emphasize mentoring, because fostering sponsor relationships is harder and can take more time.
In an effort to forge those relationships, Bain has paired hundreds of women with sponsors since 2014, something the firm partly credits with doubling the number of women it has at the manager level or higher.
Experts say those efforts can take a good deal of work, because people have to be wellmatched and the sponsor must be invested and believe in the other person enough to publicly endorse them for greater opportunities.
Sponsors are especially important given that women can suffer from low visibility in organizations. According to the Lean In and McKinsey survey data, 49% of women say they never have informal interactions with senior leaders, compared with 40% of men.
Accountability is crucial, experts say. TD Bank this year started creating quarterly scorecards for all the chief executive’s direct reports to quantify their success in hiring and retaining women and minorities. Kelley Cornish, chief diversity officer for TD Bank, says interest in women’s- advancement programs is the highest she has ever seen.
“It started as a conversation, and now it’s a movement,” she says.
Intel, similarly, ties 7% of all employees’ annual performance bonuses to progress toward achieving the company’s goal of “full representation” of women and minorities by 2020. Given the market availability of workers it hires, full representation means a workforce that is 27% female, according to Intel, which says it is on track to achieve that goal by the end of the year.