A woman has a better chance of travelling the galaxy than moving up the corporate ladder, if history is any indication.
That’s the comparison LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company made when releasing results of Women in the Workplace 2015. Results from year one of the five-year project showed, based on the rate of progress over the last three years, it will take more than 100 years to reach gender equality in the workplace. Facebook CFO Sheryl Sandberg, founder of LeanIn.Org, has said that’s akin to the time it would take to travel to Pluto and return to Earth 10 times.
Marie-Claude Nadeau, a Partner with McKinsey & Company in San Francisco and co-author of the study, puts it another way.
“Sheryl (Sandberg) likes to talk about going to space and coming back,” she said. “I like to think about it as my great grandchildren – my great granddaughters – might have a chance of being in a C-Suite where there is an equal number of women and men. That’s a long time to wait.”
At an Ivey idea Forum in Toronto on March 24, Nadeau shared some sobering statistics and findings. They are based on a pipeline and policies survey of 118 companies across North America and an attitudinal survey of 29,000 employees from 34 companies in North America. Here are some of the challenges:
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1. There’s an uneven playing field from the start – and it only gets worse
While at entry level 45 per cent of the pipeline is women, only 17 per cent of the pipeline – or one in six C-Suite executives – is women. And that 17 per cent has moved less than one per cent in the last three years.
“The C-Suite number, obviously, is somewhat depressing. The 45 per cent at entry level is also not satisfying when you know that 52 per cent of college graduates today are women,” said Nadeau. “There’s still a gap. We’re still not capturing our fair share of women even at the entry level.”
2. The inequality is not only due to women leaving the workforce – they don’t advance at the same rate
From entry to senior level, women leave individual companies at the same or lower rates than men. But women are 15 per cent less likely than men to move on to the next role. This might be due in part to fewer women holding roles with profit-and-loss responsibilities – which might have a greater chance of leading to the C-Suite – and/or stress and work-life balance issues preventing women from aspiring to top leadership positions, said Nadeau. Women are more likely to take on staff roles (positions with no profit-and-loss responsibilities, often in areas such as Human Resources, Marketing, and Finance) or to later move into staff roles.
“There are more women in staff roles and some women report that they want a more welcoming environment so they move to staff roles because there is a larger community of women there. So that reinforces this effect,” she said. “Just focusing on attrition, which is what a lot of companies do, doesn’t address the problem.”
3. Women shy away from top jobs because they don’t have the support needed to advance
Women report they are responsible for the lion’s share of housework, chores, and child care, which may prevent them from aiming for top positions. At the senior level, 27 per cent of women say they do more child care than their spouses, compared with three per cent of men, and 37 per cent of women in senior management, versus 16 per cent of men, report an equal split in child care responsibilities. In addition, 37 per cent of men, compared with seven per cent of women at the senior level, have a stay-at-home spouse.
“The support level between the two genders is vastly different,” said Nadeau. “This could in part explain why women feel more stress and pressure at work. They don’t have as much time to dedicate to it or they don’t have as much time to decompress at home.”
Support can also come in the form of mentoring or sponsorship programs. And although men and women have similarly sized networks, their networks have different compositions. Women’s networks are made up mostly of women or an equal number of women and men, and men’s networks are made up mostly of men. Since women are relying on women to mentor them, there may not be enough senior women to mentor them. Or those senior women that do mentor are overburdened compared to their male counterparts.
“There is a capacity problem with mentorship and sponsorship,” said Nadeau.
4. Employee programs alone don’t help
There is no shortage of employee programs, such as reduced schedules or leaves of absence/sabbaticals, designed to help with work-life balance. But women won’t participate in them for fear it will hurt their careers. Ninety per cent of women surveyed said taking six months of parental leave will hurt their careers.
“It’s not surprising that participation rates are low if people see a penalty associated with them,” said Nadeau. “There can be an inverse effect where companies that have more programs had the worst pipeline. In talking to them, they are just trying everything possible to address the problem.”
5. Gender diversity is not widely believed to be a priority
Although 74 per cent of companies say gender diversity is a top priority, less than half of the employees at these companies believe it to be true. Even fewer said they felt their managers considered it to be a priority. Women are almost four times more likely than men to feel they have fewer opportunities to advance, said Nadeau.
“This gap needs to be addressed if we want these gender diversity policies to be implemented and to work,” she said. “It’s hard to have effective change happen if people don’t believe what you’re saying.”
Now that the study has pinpointed some of the key challenges, Nadeau said the next step is to look at solutions.
“Hopefully, as we go along, we’ll find out more about what works and what solutions need to be implemented,” she said.
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