The numbers tell the story: Women achieved educational parity with men more than 40 years ago and today are outperforming men in formal educational settings. In 2021, for instance, women earned 59% of all bachelor’s degrees, 63% of all master’s degrees, and 57% of all doctorate degrees in the United States.

That’s the good news for women. But as soon as they cross the graduation threshold, something strange happens: They immediately lose their advantage. In the United States women represent only 48% of employees entering the corporate workforce—and when the first promotions to manager come around, only 81 women are promoted for every 100 men. This means that over the course of five years one million women will fall behind right at the start of their careers, held back by a broken rung at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Not only that, but women continue to lose ground throughout their careers: At the senior manager/director level, their representation falls to 37%; at the VP level, to 34%, and at the senior VP and C-suite level, to 29%. The numbers are even more extreme for women of color, who collectively make up only 7% of C-suite executives today. We see a similar drop-off for women at senior levels of leadership globally.

All of this raises some familiar questions: How is it possible, four decades after achieving parity in education, that women are still so far from achieving it in the workplace? If they’re beginning their careers just as qualified as or even more qualified than men, shouldn’t that translate into better representation all the way up the professional ladder? Why do these stubborn gender gaps exist in the workplace, especially at senior levels?

One of the big reasons is that education and entry-level skills get you only halfway to your full earning potential. The rest is based on knowledge, skills, and wisdom gained on the job. We call this experience capital.

To understand how men and women build experience capital differently, we analyzed about 86,000 professional profiles in the United States, using longitudinal data to trace actual career trajectories. Interestingly, our analysis shows that women move from role to role and learn new skills just as frequently as men do. However, men are more likely to move to growing occupations from shrinking ones. Their moves are also more likely to increase their pay than moves made by women, who often see a decrease in pay.

Experience capital can be gained through employer-provided learning and development programs, through job changes that challenge you to add new skills to your repertoire, and by observing how colleagues and bosses handle complex tasks or tricky situations. But building experience capital isn’t the only challenge; the other half of the equation is having it recognized in the form of new opportunities, promotions, and compensation increases.

Our research has shown that women aren’t earning the same amount of experience capital as men. There are multiple systemic issues at work here that need to be addressed if we want to solve this problem, including biases in hiring and promotion, but in the meantime there’s plenty that women can do to help themselves. That’s what this article is about: the actions that women can take. By distilling what we’ve learned in more than a decade of research and through interviews with successful female leaders, we’ve developed a set of strategies and practices for developing experience capital that can help women set themselves up for success—in a way that will benefit not just them but also the people and companies they work with.