Why Women In Leadership Roles Are More Likely Than Ever To Quit
When it comes to getting promoted into management, men still have the advantage.
And women who do ascend to leadership roles are more likely than their male counterparts to have their authority undermined and have some of their efforts go unrecognized.
They are now, in the wake of the pandemic, also more likely than ever to quit as a result of dissatisfactions at work.
That’s according to the 2022 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Company in partnership with LeanIn.Org, a large annual study of women employees and talent data across hundreds of participating companies.
Among the employers studied, the report found that for every 100 men promoted from an entry-level job to manager, only 87 women are moved up the ladder. And overall, 60% of the managers in the data analyzed were men.
“For the eighth consecutive year, a ‘broken rung’ at the first step up to manager is holding women back,” wrote the authors. “As a result, men significantly outnumber women at the manager level, and women can never catch up. There are simply too few women to promote into senior leadership positions.”
The C-suite also remains predominantly male and White, according to the report. Only one in four C-suite leaders was a woman, and just 1 in 20 was a woman of color.
“Despite modest gains in representation in senior leadership over the last eight years, women — and especially women of color — are still dramatically underrepresented in corporate America,” authors of the study noted.
Obstacles women leaders still face
While women are just as likely as men to seek higher roles, once they’re in them, they tend to face more microaggressions that undermine their authority and send signals that it will be hard for them to advance, the McKinsey/LeanIn.Org study asserted.
It found that 37% of women leaders (defined as manager or higher) surveyed reported having had a coworker who took credit for their idea versus 27% of men leaders. And they were twice as likely as their male counterparts to be mistaken for someone more junior.
For Black women leaders, the undermining is worse. The study found, for example, that they were 1.5 times as likely as women leaders overall to have colleagues say or imply they’re not qualified for their jobs.