WUNRN
McKinsey & Company
Gender diversity is gaining ground in
1. The online survey was in the field from February 19 to March 1, 2013,
and received responses from 547 executives (354 men and 193 women) in
Since our global survey three years ago, a
larger share of executives in
In 2010, 21 percent of
respondents in Latin America said gender diversity was a top priority; this
year, 37 percent say the same, and of those executives, 80 percent say their
CEOs and top-management teams are either fully or very committed to taking
action on this issue. That puts
In
As in the two previous surveys,2 2. See “Moving
women to the top: McKinsey Global Survey results,” October 2010, and
Josephine Chen, Claudia Süssmuth-Dyckerhoff, and Jin Wang, Women Matter: An Asian Perspective, June
2012, mckinseychina.com. Latin
American executives are most likely to cite flexible working conditions,
programs to encourage female networking and role modeling, and support services
to reconcile work and family life as the measures their companies have taken to
recruit, retain, promote, and develop women. There are some notable differences
by country, though: just 10 percent of executives in
The survey asked about 13
gender-diversity measures, yet 42 percent of respondents report that their
companies are implementing just one to three of them. The results suggest,
though, that the higher gender diversity is on the strategic agenda, the more
actions companies are likely to take. Executives agree that the hardest
measures for their companies to implement are flexible working conditions,
gender quotas, and gender-specific hiring goals and programs. Female
respondents most often cite flexible conditions as the hardest to execute and,
perhaps not surprisingly, they are more likely than male respondents to say
their companies struggle in implementing each of the 13 measures.
Fully 60 percent of executives say they believe that
companies with diverse leadership teams that include significant numbers of
women generate higher financial returns. Across countries, this belief is held
most strongly in
In this survey, we asked which of three key reasons best
explains the lack of gender diversity among their companies’ leaders and the
underlying causes for the reason they selected.4 4. When asked which of three reasons
best explains low female representation in their companies’ top-management
positions, 20 percent say they don’t know. We removed the “don’t know”
responses from our subsequent calculations and analysis. The results vary greatly by gender, with
female respondents most likely to attribute this imbalance to lower promotion
rates for women. The other two reasons considered were low female
representation in their companies overall (chosen most frequently by men, at 43
percent) and female attrition in mid- to senior-level positions.
Of the executives
citing low overall numbers of female employees, the largest share (35 percent)
attribute this to the notion that their industries are traditionally less
attractive to women than to men. Most executives in the region continue to
believe that when women leave voluntarily, it’s to spend more time with family:
52 percent say so, unchanged from 2010. In contrast, respondents to the global
2010 survey were, on average, much less likely to cite family reasons as the
explanation (37 percent), as were the respondents to the 2012 survey in
Male and female respondents
view the root causes of low promotion rates very differently. Men most often
cite a concentration of female employees in departments with comparatively
lower promotion rates and less upward mobility, while women most often cite a
lack of sponsorship. Female executives are also twice as likely as males to
attribute lower rates to leaders’ perceptions that women have less ambition
than men. But responses from female executives suggest they are as ambitious as
their male counterparts—or even more so: 79 percent of women say they would
choose to advance to C-level management, compared with 73 percent of men.
Overall, executives in
Women face persistent barriers to reaching
top management.
It’s not surprising, then, that most respondents say the
notion that women must take care of the family is strong enough in their
countries to influence career decisions: 70 percent say this influences at
least some women to leave their jobs.5 5. Only 57 percent of respondents in
To overcome these issues, both
male and female respondents agree that the biggest effect on increasing gender
diversity in top management would come from flexible working conditions,
visible monitoring by the CEO, and support services to help with work-life
balance.
The contributors to the development and
analysis of this survey include Manuela Artigas, a principal in McKinsey’s São Paulo
office; Heloisa
Callegaro, an
associate principal in the São Paulo office; and Maria Novales-Flamarique, a principal in the Mexico City office.