Cover Women consistently outpace men in academic performance and graduation rates, but fall behind once they start to climb the corporate ladder. ‘The Broken Rung’, by McKinsey Global Institute’s Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez, helps women to combat that imbalance as they advance in their career. (Photo: Getty Images)
Women consistently outpace men in academic performance and graduation rates, but fall behind once they start to climb the corporate ladder. ‘The Broken Rung’, by McKinsey Global Institute’s Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez, helps women to combat that imbalance as they advance in their career. (Photo: Getty Images)
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The odds are stacked against women climbing the corporate ladder. Kweilin Ellingrud, senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute and author of ‘The Broken Rung’, speaks to us about why women are systemically set up for failure—and how they can overcome it
Kweilin Ellingrud, senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute, had spotted a pattern. Women were outpacing men at historic rates in academic performance and graduation rates across the world, but slowing down and stagnating in the corporate workplace.
For every 100 people that start at the base of the corporate ladder, 46 of them are women; at the next stage, less than 40 women of those original 100 employees make it to senior management; and then only 30 make up board seats in the top 100 public companies.
Read also: From CEOs to directors, meet the leading women of corporate Malaysia
Women were falling away at every stage of their corporate journey. Ellingrud set out on a journey to find out why this was happening, where exactly the biggest fallouts were occurring, and what could be done on an individual and collective level to correct the imbalance. With McKinsey colleagues Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez, Ellingrud delved into over a decade of data, spoke to women and leaders across the workforce and wrote The Broken Rung. The book is a deeply researched guide of actionable insights to help working women overcome the systemic challenges stacked against them and succeed on the terms they’ve set for themselves.
Tell us about the journey of writing this book.
I started writing the book three years ago; but really the journey started probably about a decade ago, when I started leading a lot of our globally focused gender equality research. I worked on it with two co-authors: Lareina is our first head of diversity and inclusion and is more US-focused, María is our second head of diversity and inclusion and European-focused, and I'm our third, and globally focused. The three of us have all been involved in gender equality research for the past decade or so. All three of us happen to have three children and we've been friends for 20 years.
When you first started your research, did the three of you find more differences or parallels across your geographic specialities?
There are so many differences. On one end of the spectrum for gender diversity in leadership teams, you have Norway and many of the European countries at the top and then US and Canada at the bottom end of that top quartile.
In the middle, you have countries like many here in Asia: Malaysia,Thailand, and at the bottom end of the distribution, you have Japan, India, even Germany.
What are some of the data points that you use to establish countries’ positions on that spectrum?
We look at gender diversity across the entire talent pipeline from entry level to the most senior level. What I was just describing is diversity at the most senior level, so the C-suite, direct reports to the CEO. Around the world on average one out of five people who report to a CEO is a woman.
Above From left: Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez of McKinsey Global Institute, and co-authors of ‘The Broken Rung’
From left: Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and María del Mar Martínez of McKinsey Global Institute, and co-authors of ‘The Broken Rung’
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Have you noticed many shifts across the years?
Generally, it is a glacial rate of improvement. I mean this is entire countries that we're talking about—it's the average across all companies in a country. One per cent improvement is a good year. We do see spikes of improvement with quota changes and legal changes. For example when Germany put in place the law change of, you know, 30 per cent of your board members have to be women. Things like that will shift things more quickly, but generally it’s a very, very slow rate of change across such large groups of companies.
In the course of your research, when did you realise that this broken rung was what you needed to focus on?
Because everybody has to get through that broken rung, it affects everybody. We said, it really has to start here. And that first broken rung is not the only broken rung—every other promotion level is also broken. It's just that this is the first and the biggest broken rung.
For example, I'll give you the US numbers. It starts at 48 per cent women at the entry level, then it drops down by 9 percentage points at that first promotion to manager. And after a 9 percentage point drop like that, it’s really hard to make that up over time.
Is it something that you had experienced personally as well?
Luckily, I did not experience it at that first promotion. The first time I started to feel, ‘Wow, where did all the women go?’I was a junior partner in financial services. I had started with almost 50-50 male and female peers. I looked around the rooms I was in and all of a sudden it was very rare for me to be on a team with another woman or have other women in the practice.
And it's not that they left, it's that they stagnated in their roles. If you look at two vice presidents, male and female, who have both just been promoted, the man is much more likely to have spent four years in the previous role, and the woman seven years. Because they're staying in the workforce, but they're stagnating in their roles and taking longer to get that promotion.
How would you advise companies that might not even be able to identify whether they have a broken rung or not?
I would start at the top, and if your leadership team is not equal, you have a broken rung. Pretty much every company—save for a few that I could probably count on one hand—have a broken rung. The question is where, how early and how broken is it?
Then I would go to the other end of the talent pipeline to the very beginning and say, okay, is this first promotion equal? What are we seeing in terms of fallout? Who's falling out after how long?
Above Kweilin Ellingrud, senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute
Above ‘The Broken Rung’ aims to help women in the first 10 years of their careers build their experience capital, level the playing field, and reach their full potential
Kweilin Ellingrud, senior partner and director of the McKinsey Global Institute
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Women as a whole are also not predisposed to putting themselves forward for bigger opportunities—is that something that relates to gaining experience capital?
It's a combination of things—there's systemic factors, there's societal factors, there's internalised bias and different choices. So the book really addresses what can we individually control? What decisions can we make to build that experience capital?
In terms of decisions that we individually make, yes, how do you choose the right career? How do you choose the right company? How do you build the right skills? How do you find sponsors so that when you on ramp from maternity leave, you're building that momentum?
So how do you choose the right company?
Choosing the right company is actually the number one thing women and men can do to maximise your lifetime earnings. If you pick the right company, especially early on in your career, that's correlated with 50 per cent higher lifetime income.
These companies do three things: One, they invest deeply in your learning and development.
Second, they believe in rotational cultures and learning things from different roles and departments over time.
Third, they have a very clear strategy. Companies that are performing well relative to their competitors financially.
And you can figure out all three of those dimensions from the outside in; you don't have to take the job and then find it out. Those kinds of companies are going to be the number one thing for women and men to maximise experience capital.
You also mentioned activating a strong sponsorship network.
Women and minorities are often over-mentored: lots of free advice, but when it comes to sponsorship, really creating an opportunity that didn't exist before, that happens less for women. That's because our networks are more narrow, more junior, typically smaller and weaker.
Sponsors will advocate for you when you're not there, create an opportunity or a step up role or project for you to get that chance. And the way we measure sponsorship network strength is the openness: How many people are within your company, how many people are outside? If you change jobs, could your network sustain you in a new job?
Women are more reticent to mix our professional life and network with personal friendship. Men are much more comfortable doing that. And so it becomes a challenge to build, maintain, strengthen that network because we try to keep the two separate.
If women more systematically build our networks, then I think we'll equalise the huge advantages. What we see in some of the global data is that about 70 per cent of jobs are never even publicly posted—they're filled because somebody knew somebody or promoted from within. So if we're not having equal networks, we're not going to get the same opportunities.
Women may have been advancing in their career at a certain trajectory, and then had to take a career break for whatever reason—having children, caring for a family member—and when they rejoin the workforce, that earlier trajectory has slowed down considerably. Is it possible to get back on that same path, at that same pace, after taking a break?
It is absolutely possible. There are many pitfalls along the way but also there are moments when you can increase the speed of building what we’ve termed experience capital. What we see around the world is that mothers earn less money, but they're also less likely to get the job and less likely to get promoted. And this is just comparing women with children to women without children—I'm not comparing yet to men.
It comes down to: what do we do before having children, while we're out on maternity leave, and then most importantly, ensuring that on ramp to make sure that we're accelerating. Women need to be using our sponsors to get back on board, build the momentum back so that we're not losing ground.
What we see in the data on average is if you make that break early on in your career, you have more of your career to make up that ground. There are things that help you not lose as much ground, and recover more quickly: the multiplier effect of finding a strong sponsorship network will help you dramatically.
Building the right skills: Technologically oriented skills—not, you know, coding per se, but can you interact with technology to do your job more effectively and understand how it affects your industry? Also social and emotional skills, we all need to show more empathy, build negotiation skills. These soft skills that actually we all need more of because generative AI is doing a lot of the other stuff well. These will help you on ramp faster and make less of a gap in the slope of your experience capital building.
What is experience capital, and why is it so important?
Experience capital is the wisdom, the knowledge, everything that you learn on the job. In countries with higher average education levels, more of your lifetime earnings will be from education, less from experience capital.
In occupations where you need more education to get your first job, so doctor, lawyer, engineer, more of your lifetime earnings will be from education, less from experience capital. But basically in a nutshell, it's 50 per cent of your pay across the lifetime that's from everything you learn on the job.
Women are getting more than our fair share of the education part, that 50 per cent, we're outperforming men on average everywhere, in every country around the world that's developed. The other half though, we're falling behind and we fall behind very early.
Emma Chong is the Managing Editor of Tatler Malaysia, overseeing the editorial direction and vision for the print, digital and social media arms of the title. She has over 15 years experience in fashion and lifestyle publishing, and has led print and digital editorial teams at ELLE Malaysia, Time Out Kuala Lumpur, The Luxe Nomad and more.
Outside of work, Emma spends her time wrangling children (only her own) and boosting the Malaysian economy through her support of local fashion and homeware brands.
