For years, women have been fighting for faster career advancement and more equitable representation at work. On this week’s episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior partners Alexis Krivkovich and Lareina Yee talk with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about the 2023 Women in the Workplace report—and specifically, our newest research on where progress is happening, where it’s not, and what leaders need to do differently to accelerate the pace of change.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The McKinsey Podcast is hosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

Myth #1: Women are losing their ambition

Lucia Rahilly: Ambition has long been a charged construct for women, in part because it was used in an almost pejorative way. What did the research tell us about women and ambition?

Alexis Krivkovich: I think ambition is one of the most interesting insights from this year. What we clearly see from the data is that the pandemic didn’t dampen women’s ambition. In fact, it grew through that period. Eighty percent of women want to be promoted, which is exactly the same as what we see for men.

This is up ten percentage points from where we were prepandemic. Nearly every single woman that we surveyed—96 percent—said their career is important to them. That’s incredible. Women under 30 years of age are especially ambitious: nine in ten women want to be promoted to the next level, and three in four want to get all the way to the very top. And that ambition is highest among women of color.

Lucia Rahilly: Do we have a sense of why ambition was buoyed up during the pandemic, particularly among intersectional women?

Alexis Krivkovich: I think one aspect is the introduction of more flexibility in the working model. It’s something the pandemic sort of forced on us, and postpandemic, every employee wants to see flexibility as part of the permanent state.

That’s really unleashed and enabled more ambition for women in particular. Without flexibility, we believe women’s attrition could have been 30 percent higher through this period. So having a working model that capably functions with the same scope of work and expectation is allowing women to feel like they can do so much more.

Lucia Rahilly: Lareina, do you have anything to add?

Lareina Yee: Our research looks over the last nine years, and in every year that we’ve looked at women in the workplace, we’ve shown that women have that ambition and drive to be leaders in their organizations—something that Alexis and I call positive ambition.

As we have fully come out of the pandemic, we have both a different working model and a return to some of our norms. When we look at this year’s data, it’s no surprise to see women’s ambition pop back up because it’s always been at a high rate.

Lucia Rahilly: Do you think women are less inhibited about articulating that they’re ambitious? There was this period where women’s ambition was viewed as almost a criticism.

Lareina Yee: It may be more that your comment is a reflection of society and perhaps a misunderstanding or a misperception that ambition from women is something negative, whereas ambition from a man is something positive. In fact, men’s and women’s ambitions are the same. As Alexis said, the ambition to be a leader, to be promoted, is the same among men and women.

Lareina Yee: The power of that quote is that type of pressure, that type of feeling is the same for men and women. Flexibility helps everybody.

Alexis Krivkovich: The other thing I think is interesting about this debate around increasing flexibility in the working model is that 80 percent of men and women say they feel most productive when they have that focused time and can do some amount of that by working remotely.

That doesn’t mean they don’t see the value in working in person. In fact, Gen Z more than anyone says they recognize that you have to get into a space and interact with colleagues to get some of the biggest benefits of mentorship, sponsorship, and learning and observing how the job is done. It’s important to be part of, and to contribute to, building a work culture. But it’s worth recognizing that this idea, that there’s a loss by embracing this flexibility, is false.

Lareina Yee: It’s also helpful to say that flexibility doesn’t exclusively mean “work from home.” That’s one format of flexibility. Flexibility may be the ability to shift your hours. Flexibility may be having your Fridays in your apartment and your Mondays through Thursdays in the office. It may be that in the summers you’re in different cities.

The core of flexibility is that employees have more control and more agency in when they work and how they work. You’re focused on the output, not necessarily clocking in from 8 to 5 to prove that you’re actually being productive.

Lucia Rahilly: Many leaders are now pushing for employees to be in the office more frequently. Whether that takes hold or not remains TBD, but there seems to be a trend toward more in-office work.

You’ve said that 36 percent or more than a third of women say they would have had to have taken a step back had they not had the flexibility that they had.

Alexis Krivkovich: It’s a funny thing. I think for so many companies right now, we’re caught betwixt and between. For a lot of reasons, it makes sense to have some of that in-person collaboration. But as we start pushing for more return to the office, so many employees are feeling frustrated when they come in because they say, “I commute to the office to do the same work I can do remotely. We haven’t changed anything about what’s happening when I show up in person to make it feel that it clearly has some benefits.”

I think [where to work] will be one of the big questions for companies looking forward. And how do they do it in a way where it continues to be equitable? Because the reality is, the in-person workplace environment wasn’t equally enjoyable to men and women previous to the pandemic.

We see in our data that it’s still not equitable. Men still describe a better experience when they show up on-site than women do, in terms of getting connectivity, feeling in the know, building their network. And that’s something that needs to change.

Lucia Rahilly: Can you say more about what is driving that delta between men’s and women’s experiences in the office?

Alexis Krivkovich: A third of men say they feel like they get better and more useful feedback when they show up in person. But less than a quarter of women agree with that statement. And that’s an example of the type of differences we’ve long seen in the full nine years we’ve looked at this question.

Furthermore, it seems the feedback men receive is more actionable for them than for women. So we’re telling people to come back in to get more benefits, but then if we perpetuate not making good on that promise for everyone equally, it will just create a bifurcated path where men start to see a value in something that women don’t. And women ultimately lose out because of it.