This week the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company released a report on the barriers to women advancing in corporate America. One of the main reason was inadequate career development. It’s not that organizations are not making some effort, it’s that they are not making enough. According to the Wall Street Journal, for example, “only 11 chief executives of Fortune 500 companies are women, down from a peak of 15 in 2010. “ Well that’s certainly better than in 1995 where there was only one CEO among the ranks of the top Fortune 500 companies.
McKinsey also cited a report by the non-profit research group Catalyst Inc. that stated 37% of lower level and middle managers are female, while only 26% of vice presidents and other senior managers are women at Fortune 500 companies. In other words, women are great in low to middle management, beyond that well…leave it to the guys!
Being a bit partial because I am a woman, it’s curious why women are not advancing faster. "By increasing the number of women who make it from middle management to the vice presidential level, corporations could vastly improve the odds for building diversity in top management," the report added. Even a 25% increase in the ranks of middle-management women reaching the next level "would significantly alter the shape of the pipeline," it said.
Are we not promoting our female counterparts? And if we are, how much, how often and are we really looking for opportunities for women to advance? How many companies truly have programs devoted to the advancement of women. Seems as if women are sometimes lumped into the corporate diversity bank and then pray that promotions will come with hard work.
It’s up to organizations to put a careful spotlight on grooming and growing women. You may ask…why women? Why not men? Women are simply not viewed in the same way as men. When a pregnant belly walks into the room leading the way for the woman carrying the belly, how can a woman possibly be viewed on the same rung as a man? A woman does have children, requires taking leave to actually have the children, takes time off to take children home from school or the doctor, etc and some women don’t even come back to work after giving birth. Women have multiple roles at work and at home, piling on the workload more and more in some instances with little to no help.
Joanna Barsh, a McKinsey senior partner who co-wrote the report said, “companies need to spend more time coaching women and offering more leadership training and rotation through various management roles before their ambitions sour….companies are not systematically watching these women at the middle management level and putting in programs that would help them develop and get over the next [promotion] hurdle."
Barsh further explained that the rarity of such help partly explains why women’s ambitions decline over time and barriers become insurmountable especially for working mothers.
The McKinsey report advocates having strong programs specifically tailored to training, developing and coaching women. The report also suggests that companies work harder to shift the internal culture that limits opportunities for women and instead have the performance of top managers measured on their ability to groom, grow and promote female talent.
This is certainly a critical idea because if people are not incentivized, women will fall by the wayside. The future of our young girls is in jeopardy. For all of the girls who want to work hard to be just like their mothers we are giving them a dim view of their career potential. It’s time for us to foster a culture of inclusion not only for women, for everyone. We’ll see evidence of this when diversity sits at the executive levels and not simply white men in pinstripe suits.
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