Shattering the glass screen

March 5, 2020

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Lucas Beard, Jonathan Dunn, Jess Huang, and Alexis Krivkovich for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Research suggests women remain locked out of top roles in media and entertainment. A more diverse cast is required.
There are many reasons to care about gender issues in the media and entertainment industry—not the least of which is the importance of moving beyond traditional stereotypes and having diverse storytellers share their unique perspectives in film, television, and other forms of print and broadcast media. Women are among the largest consumers of film and television, so they represent a key demographic for this industry and the advertisers that support it.  According to our recent research, women are well represented in media and entertainment companies. But even with corporate America’s increased focus on ensuring gender parity, women in this industry experience a more hostile workplace than men and face a glass ceiling that prevents them from reaching top leadership roles.
Using data from the 2019 Women in the Workplace study, one of the largest and most comprehensive data sets of women in corporate America, McKinsey created a one-year snapshot of how women are progressing in media and entertainment and how their workplace experiences differ from those of men. We supplemented that information with collected data from 15 companies, as well as workplace-experience-survey responses of 1,700 employees  — both male and female—from the media and entertainment industry in 2019.  We observed some positive trends. At early tenures, for instance, women in media and entertainment are at equal representation as men, which provides a stable foundation for the future. What’s more, at early tenures, promotion rates for women exceed those for men, and the share of women hired from outside the company is equal to or surpasses the share of men. The women in our research also reported high satisfaction with their career choices, as well as a strong desire to be promoted and otherwise advance in their organizations. HR respondents in this industry tended to say their companies were committed to achieving greater parity: 93 percent of them stated that gender diversity was a priority for their organizations.

But, as with women in all other industries, there are major challenges facing women in media and entertainment. When examining the three main drivers of women’s advancement in corporate America—promotion, attrition, and external hiring—we found that women in entry-level positions in this industry are leaving their companies at higher rates than their male counterparts. Yes, promotions at early tenures drive strong representation at the managerial level, but that progress slows to a crawl the closer you get to the top. We observed that external hiring skews male for C-suite positions, which contributes to a corporate environment in which women are well represented at early-tenure positions but remain a minority at more senior levels. Only 27 percent of C-suite positions in media and entertainment are held by women. We found similar patterns when we took a closer look at one segment of media and entertainment in particular: the news media (see sidebar, “Women in news organizations”).

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Lucas Beard is a consultant in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, Jonathan Dunn is a partner in the New York office, Jess Huang is a partner in the Silicon Valley office, and Alexis Krivkovich is a senior partner in the San Francisco office.

The authors wish to thank Press Forward for its help convening news-industry participation in the 2019 Women in the Workplace survey.

 

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