Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Lareina Ye for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Posing five questions can help start a challenging management conversation.

The challenges are well known: women in business continue to face a formidable gender gap for senior-leadership positions. Moreover, there are fewer and fewer women at each step along the path to the C-suite, although they represent a majority of entry-level employees at Fortune 500 companies and outnumber men in college-graduation rates. Increasingly, the barriers too are well known: a mix of cultural factors, ingrained mind-sets, and stubborn forms of behavior, including a tendency to tap a much narrower band of women leaders than is possible given the available talent pool.

Much has been written about the nature of the challenges. I want to focus on what companies can do to take action. In this article, I’ve distilled some forward-leaning practices into five questions that can serve as a fitness test for your top team. In my experience, an organization that is making progress on such issues tends to explore them in concert. At the very least, these questions can help generate the kinds of challenging conversations that executive teams around the world should be having. The stakes are too high not to have them. As I heard the CEO of a US healthcare company say recently, “The business case is simple: my company needs the best talent. Why would I handicap that by 50 percent?”

[Here is the first question.]

1. Where are the women in our talent pipeline?

Most senior executives know intuitively how many women do (or don’t) hold top-leadership roles at their companies. But in the United States, surprisingly few of them keep precise track of how women do (or don’t) move through their talent pipelines—from entry all the way up to the top-executive ranks.

A clear picture is important. Because such pipelines tend to be unique, “default” solutions, though well-intentioned, can miss the mark; for instance, ramping up a recruitment drive for women won’t help an organization struggling to retain female vice presidents. In the US healthcare industry, women make up more than 75 percent of the entry labor force but hold fewer than one-third of the most senior positions. Other organizations struggle with recruitment. In US high-tech companies, it is not unusual for women to make up just 30 percent of the entry ranks. One likely factor: the decline in the number of female computer-science college undergraduates. From 2000 to 2011, the proportion of women earning computer-science degrees in the United States sank from 28 percent of the total to 18 percent.

How to gather pipeline information is no secret, and what to do with it shouldn’t be either. Outcome metrics ought to be reviewed annually, and leading indicators (such as employee sentiment and promotion trends) should be examined during quarterly business reviews. All of these metrics must be considered elements of an ongoing management conversation.

Once the pipeline is visible, a related conversation should happen about the distribution of women’s roles—in part to get a better sense of the career barriers they face. For example, in the United States, about two-thirds of women in Fortune 500 companies begin their careers in line (as opposed to support-staff) roles. Yet the figures at the top are reversed: roughly two-thirds of the women in the C-suite occupy human resources, marketing, or other support positions. Whether such patterns are a problem varies by organization; awareness is the first step toward understanding if they are.

A major consumer-goods company, for example, identified 500 pivotal roles across the organization. For each of them, it wants to have a succession plan five candidates deep (a “hit by a bus” plan). The company encourages the creation of diverse slates of candidates on these lists and tracks outcomes over time to ensure that it is making progress on its diversity goals, including the appointment of enough women to leadership roles. Interestingly, the effort is considered a talent initiative, not a women’s initiative—a distinction that models gender-neutral behavior in promotion decisions.

Finally, companies should consider the benefits of transparency: the act of publicly sharing data on gender diversity sends staff and external parties alike a clear message that the status quo is insufficient. In recent months, several companies (including eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo!) have taken this step. By doing so, they have initiated a pragmatic conversation about what organizations can do to change.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Lareina Yee is a principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office.