Here is an excerpt from another outstanding article featured by The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee explain how and why leaders who are serious about getting more women into senior management need a hard-edged approach to overcome the invisible barriers holding them back.
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Source: Organization Practice
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Despite significant corporate commitment to the advancement of women’s careers, progress appears to have stalled. The percentage of women on boards and senior-executive teams remains stuck at around 15 percent in many countries, and just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
The last generation of workplace innovations—policies to support women with young children, networks to help women navigate their careers, formal sponsorship programs to ensure professional development—broke down structural barriers holding women back. The next frontier is toppling invisible barriers: mind-sets widely held by managers, men and women alike, that are rarely acknowledged but block the way.
When senior leaders commit themselves to gender diversity, they really mean it—but in the heat of the moment, deeply entrenched beliefs cause old forms of behavior to resurface. All too often in our experience, executives perceive women as a greater risk for senior positions, fail to give women tough feedback that would help them grow, or hesitate to offer working mothers opportunities that come with more travel and stress. Not surprisingly, a survey we conducted earlier this year indicated that although a majority of women who make it to senior roles have a real desire to lead, few think they have meaningful support to do so, and even fewer think they’re in line to move up.
Our ideas for breaking this cycle are directional, not definitive. They rest on our experience in the trenches with senior executives, on discussions with 30 diversity experts, and on the reflections of leaders we’ve interviewed at companies that have been on this journey for years. These companies include Pitney Bowes, 38 percent of whose vice presidents are women; Shell, where more than a quarter of all supervisors and professional staff worldwide are women; and Time Warner, where more than 40 percent of the senior executives in its operating divisions are women and where the share of women in senior roles has jumped 30 percent in the past six years. Great progress, but even these three companies are the first to admit how much further they have to go.
Their collective experience suggests to us that real progress requires systemwide change driven by a hard-edged approach, including targets ensuring that women are at least considered for advancement, the rigorous application of data in performance dialogues to overcome problematic mind-sets, and genuine sponsorship. Committed senior leaders are of course central to such efforts, which can take many years. We hope our suggestions, and the real-life examples that illustrate them, will stir up your thinking about how to confront the silent but potent beliefs that probably are undermining women in your organization right now.
For evidence of the problem, look no further than the blocked, leaky corporate-talent pipeline: women account for roughly 53 percent of entry-level professional employees in the largest US industrial corporations, our research shows. [Note: The entry-level figure is from our April 2011 report, Unlocking the full potential of women in the US economy. Read an executive summary or download the full report on the McKinsey & Company Web site.] But according to Catalyst, a leading advocacy group for women, they hold only 37 percent of middle-management positions, 28 percent of vice-president and senior-managerial roles, and 14 percent of seats on executive committees. McKinsey research shows similar numbers for women on executive committees outside the United States—from a high of 17 percent in Sweden to just 2 percent in Germany and India. [Note: The full report, Women at the top of corporations: Making it happen, part of McKinsey & Company’s Women Matter 2010 series, is available on the McKinsey & Company Web site. The differences among countries reflect significant variance in their starting points and cultural norms—which, for example, can make it difficult for a woman to outearn her husband.] Our analysis further reveals that at every step along the US pipeline, the odds of advancement for men are about twice those for women. And nearly four times as many men as women at large companies make the jump from the executive committee to CEO. [Note: Part of the reason is that almost twice as many executive-level women as men (60 percent versus 35 percent) occupy staff roles that are less likely to lead to the top job.]
To understand what’s going on, look to the words that appeared most frequently in open-ended responses to our recent survey as explanations for poor retention and promotion of women: “politics,” “management,” “the company,” “people,” and “the organization.” These forces manifest themselves in myriad ways. We’ve all heard endless variations on the mind-sets that set women up for failure:
“She’s too aggressive” (or “too passive”). Whether a woman is perceived as aggressive or passive, that’s different from the judgment a man would face, and she often doesn’t receive the coaching a man would to help her assimilate into the company’s culture.
“I don’t want to tell Bob he didn’t get that job.” There’s a limited pool of senior positions, and leaders are not comfortable telling protégés they have groomed for years that someone else is getting the spot.
“I don’t know how to talk to or mentor her.” Men tend to sponsor other men, find it harder to build relationships with people when they share fewer common interests, and sometimes are nervous about forging a close relationship that could seem inappropriate.
“If I put a woman in that role and she fails, it’ll set back all women.” Mind-sets like this one inadvertently treat men as individuals and women as representative of their whole gender.
“A woman isn’t right for that role.” Long-held stereotypes about the relative strengths of men and women survive, at least in vestigial form.
In the face of these silent but potent forces, it’s little wonder the careers of many promising women die on the vine. Slowly but surely—despite the best intentions of HR departments and individual executives—the experience of women starts to diverge from that of their male peers: Less opportunity for professional growth. Unintended performance bias and softer feedback. Fewer sponsors offering fewer opportunities and less advocacy. Lowered ambition. Greater satisfaction with staying put. Attrition and a fresh start at a different company. [Note: Our data show that like the men we surveyed, most women who leave a job move to another rather than exit the workforce.]
A word about the role women play in this vicious cycle: they start out ambitious. Most young women, like young men, hope to move to the next level, and women who reach more senior levels retain that ambition (exhibit). That said, women also turn down advancement opportunities for varied reasons, ranging from commitments outside work to risk aversion for positions that demand new skills to a desire to stay put in roles that provide personal meaning. In addition, mothers with more than one child are much more satisfied with staying put, our survey shows, though they remain highly confident about their performance and abilities.
Subtle changes in these attitudes toward advancement are another powerful benefit of changing how companies “think about women around here.” By addressing the mind-sets holding women back, corporate leaders can reshape the talent pipeline and its odds, increasing the number of women role models at the top and, in turn, making it likelier that more women will retain their ambition.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Joanna Barsh is a director in McKinsey’s New York office, and Lareina Yee is a principal in the San Francisco office
The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of Heather Sumner to the research behind this article.