New research suggests that the biggest obstacle to closing the gender gap in senior management isn't a glass ceiling, it's a broken rung.
"Unless we close the disparities in hiring and promotions that make up the broken rung, we are many decades away from reaching parity, if we reach it at all," the authors wrote.The biggest obstacle to closing the gender gap in senior management isn't a glass ceiling, it's a broken rung. "The number of women decreases at every subsequent level. So even as hiring and promotion rates improve for women at senior levels, women as a whole can never catch up. There are simply too few women to advance," LeanIn.Org cofounder and CEO Rachel Thomas and her coauthors wrote.
HR leaders and employees also lack awareness of the issue: more than half of them expect their company to achieve gender parity in leadership over the next decade. Only 19% of HR bosses flagged promotion to first-level manager roles as the biggest challenge to reaching gender parity in management, compared to 47% who pointed to women's poorer access to sponsorship and 45% who highlighted a lack of qualified women in the pipeline.
JoshMankiewicz Yes Early in my career my agency created a job title for a man, but you couldn't reach it b/c there were no middle titles (GS-3, GS-5, GS-11) You either had to have GS-11 experience or GS-7 & 9 experience--which didn't exist. Middle rungs missing