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According to McKinsey & Company’s 10th “Women in the Workplace” study, women make up 29 percent of C-suite positions, up significantly from 17 percent in 2015.
This year, McKinsey & Company marked the tenth anniversary of its “Women in the Workplace” report, the largest study of the state of women working in corporate America, conducted 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 don’t always paint a rosy picture of — or straightforward path to — progress. In an article for Harvard Business Review (HBR), Ruchika T. Malhotra, inclusion strategist and author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work, recalled receiving the report for the first time.
“In bold letters at the top were the words, ‘Corporate America is not on a path to gender equality.’ I felt both stunned and validated,” she wrote, as she had experienced racism, sexual harassment, and bias while working in a corporate tech job early in her career.
“Fortunately, much has improved over the past decade. We’ve learned to more openly accept gender and racial inequalities as structural issues, not what I call ‘fix women’ ones,” she wrote, adding that leaders have increased commitments to serving marginalized groups in the workplace better.
But progress remains disappointingly fragile, as do the commitments that have been made in the past few years — DEI efforts have experienced pushback recently, with funding and support for diversity, equity, and inclusion declining in the U.S. And as McKinsey & Company notes in a writeup of its most recent study of more than 15,000 individuals across 281 organizations, “progress is not parity.”
“Over the past decade, women’s representation has increased at every level of corporate management,” according to the study, which notes that women make up 29 percent of C-suite positions, up significantly from 17 percent in 2015. “But progress has been much slower,” McKinsey said, earlier in the pipeline at entry- and managerial-level positions. Women have held between 45–48 percent of entry-level positions in the last decade, remaining at 48 percent for the last four years. Similarly, women hold fewer than two out of five managerial roles (39 percent) — down 2 percent from 2021, when this statistic peaked at 41 percent.
“Simply put,” the study said, “men outnumber women at every level.” This imbalance is not felt in the business events industry: The results of Convene’s Annual Salary Survey for 2024 once again reveal that the majority — 87 percent — of event organizers are women. The respondents to the annual survey have historically occupied primarily managerial roles, followed by the director level, with a smaller percentage at the executive or VP level — 36 percent, 32 percent, and 13 percent, respectively, in the most recent survey. Their lack of presence in the C-suite perhaps contributes to the industry’s gender wage gap, which widened this year to almost 6 percent vs. last year’s nearly 5 percent. Women in this year’s survey earn an average of $6,000-plus less than men.
Sheryl Sandberg
In corporate America, even women’s gains in senior leadership are not as big of a win as it sounds, according to the report. There is still a large disparity between white women and women of color in the C-suite — 22 percent versus 7 percent — and the reasons for the progress that has been made are not sustainable. “The main driver of the increase in women’s representation at these levels was a reduction in the number of line roles,” McKinsey said, “which disproportionately impacted men,” given that they hold more of these positions often associated with profit-and-loss responsibility, the report explained. In the C-suite, women’s progress had even less staying power, as the primary contributing factor for women’s representation was the addition of a staff role, for which women were frequently hired. “Since companies cannot add new staff roles indefinitely,” the report noted, “this is not a viable path to parity.”
Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In, told Malhotra in HBR that she is concerned that companies’ commitment to diversity “is starting to slide backward. Companies have the power to drive significant change, and now isn’t the time to slow down.”
It’s a sentiment echoed in the report: “We would be cautiously optimistic about the future, if it weren’t for one glaring finding in this year’s study: Company commitment to diversity is declining. As we look ahead to the next 10 years of women in the workplace, our ask of companies is simple: Keep going. Over the last decade, women have remained ambitious and committed to their jobs. Now, we need companies to stay ambitious and committed to the important work they’ve started.”
Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene.