WUNRN
McKinsey & Company
WHY GENDER DIVERSITY IN TOP
MANAGEMENT REMAINS A CHALLENGE
McKinsey’s
survey of global executives finds that corporate culture and a lack of
convinced engagement by male executives are critical problems for women.
April
2014 | bySandrine
Devillard, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, and Charlotte Werner
In a 1976 McKinsey
Quarterly article, the firm’s Jim Bennett noted that companies taking an
honest look at how they handled the advancement of women were likely to uncover
a number of “thorny attitude-based problems” that “will take much longer and
prove much more difficult to solve” than “sex-based differences in benefits
plans and obviously biased employment literature.”1
Our latest gender-diversity
research—a survey of 1,421 global executives—suggests that cultural factors
continue to play a central role in achieving (or missing) diversity goals. That
underscores just how long lived and challenging the issues flagged by Bennett
are.2
Women Matter 2013–Gender diversity in top management: Moving
corporate culture, moving boundaries
Women executives are ambitious
and, like men, say they are ready to make some sacrifices in their personal
lives if that’s what it takes to occupy a top-management job. Many, however,
are not sure that the corporate culture will support their rise, apparently
with some justification. Although a majority of organizations we studied have
tried to implement measures aimed at increasing gender diversity among senior
executives,3
few
have achieved notable improvements.
Among the elements factoring into failure or success, we
found that corporate culture was the key. In particular, our 2013 survey
strongly suggests that prevailing leadership styles among top managers and
performance models stressing that executives make themselves available 24/7 can
be important barriers to women’s advancement. Another issue is the divergence
of views between men and women executives, from middle management to the
C-suite, on the difficulties women face in advancing. That problem is paired
with lingering doubts among men about the value of diversity programs,
particularly among men who are less familiar with the range of forces
influencing women’s career trajectories. CEOs seeking to design diversity
programs that truly bring about change must take account of these factors.
Women
respondents say that they aim just as high as their male peers do. Seventy-nine
percent of all mid- or senior-level women want to reach top management, compared
with 81 percent of men. Senior women executives just one step away from the
C-suite are more likely to agree strongly that they have top-management
ambitions.
Yet our
survey also shows that many are less certain they will reach the top: 69
percent of senior women say they are confident they’ll reach the C-suite, as
opposed to 86 percent of their male peers. We compared women who feel confident
that they can rise with those who are less confident and analyzed their answers
about personal and collective factors that can support or inhibit career
success. We found that a favorable environment and cultural factors weighed
twice as heavily as individual factors in determining how confident women felt
about reaching top management.
Women who
are more confident of their ability to rise tend to say that the leadership
styles of their companies are compatible with women’s leadership and
communication styles, and that women are just as likely as men to reach the top
there. Consistently, the absence of diversity in leadership styles was a
challenge for many women: almost 40 percent of female respondents said that
women’s leadership and communication styles don’t fit with the prevailing model
of top management in their companies.
Performance
models for work–life balance issues also tilt against women. Most men and women
agree that a top-level career implies “anytime, anywhere” availability to work
and that this imposes a particularly severe penalty on female managers. When
asked whether having children is compatible with a top-level career for women,
62 percent of all respondents agree—but a much larger share (80 percent) think
that’s true for men.
A
significant cultural factor affecting women’s ability to reach top management
is the engagement and support of men. While about three-quarters of men believe
that teams with significant numbers of women perform more successfully, fewer
recognize the challenges women face. Only 19 percent strongly agree that
reaching top management is harder for women, and men are much more likely to
reject the idea that the climb is steeper for women (exhibit). We also found
that men are less likely than women to see value in diversity initiatives and
more likely to believe that too many measures supporting women are unfair to
men. Finally, while nearly all male and female executives express some level of
agreement that women can lead as effectively as men do, male respondents are
not as strongly convinced.
Fewer men acknowledge the challenges female employees face at work.
These are among the reasons that year after year,
and again in 2013, women remain underrepresented at the top of corporations,
across all industries and countries. Those disappointing results persist
despite a body of research suggesting that companies with more women in top
management tend to perform better, both organizationally and financially, and
despite decades of effort by many companies.4
4. See Women Matter: Gender diversity, a corporate performance driver, October 2007; and Women Matter 2: Female leadership, a competitive edge for the future, October 2008, on our Women Matter page, on
mckinsey.com. The upshot is that there’s still
room for firmer engagement among male executives, for more inclusivity, and for
a more comprehensive ecosystem of measures—which will benefit from a strong,
visible commitment by the CEO and the executive committee.