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McKinsey & Co.
Fostering Women Leaders: A Fitness
Test for Your Top Team
Posing Five Questions Can Help Start a Challenging Management Conversation
January 2015 - | By Lareina Yee
The challenges are well known: women in business continue
to face a formidable gender gap for senior-leadership positions.1 1.Women hold fewer than 15 percent of
executive-officer positions in Fortune 500 companies. For more, see
“Statistical overview of women in the workplace,” Catalyst, March 3, 2014,
catalyst.org. Moreover,
there are fewer and fewer women at each step along the path to the C-suite,
although they represent a majority of entry-level employees at Fortune 500
companies and outnumber men in college-graduation rates.2 2.See Joseph Chamie, “Women more educated
than men but still paid less,” YaleGlobal Online, March 6, 2014,
yaleglobal.yale.edu.
Increasingly, the barriers too are well known: a mix of cultural factors,
ingrained mind-sets, and stubborn forms of behavior, including a tendency to
tap a much narrower band of women leaders than is possible given the available
talent pool.
Much has been written about the nature of the challenges.3 3.For more on this topic from McKinsey
Quarterly, see Sandrine Devillard, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, and Charlotte
Werner, “Why gender diversity at the top remains a challenge,”
April 2014; Joanna Barsh, Sandra Nudelman, and Lareina Yee, “Lessons from the leading edge of gender diversity,”
April 2013; Joanna Barsh, Sandrine Devillard, and Jin Wang, “The global gender agenda,” November 2012; and
Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee, “Changing companies’ minds about women,”
September 2011. I want to
focus on what companies can do to take action. In this article, I’ve distilled
some forward-leaning practices into five questions that can serve as a fitness
test for your top team. In my experience, an organization that is making
progress on such issues tends to explore them in concert. At the very least,
these questions can help generate the kinds of challenging conversations that
executive teams around the world should be having. The stakes are too high not
to have them. As I heard the CEO of a US healthcare company say recently, “The
business case is simple: my company needs the best talent. Why would I handicap
that by 50 percent?”
1. Where are the women in our talent
pipeline?
Most senior executives know intuitively how many women do (or don’t) hold
top-leadership roles at their companies. But in the United States, surprisingly
few of them keep precise track of how women do (or don’t) move through their
talent pipelines—from entry all the way up to the top-executive ranks.
A clear picture is important. Because such pipelines tend to be unique,
“default” solutions, though well-intentioned, can miss the mark; for instance,
ramping up a recruitment drive for women won’t help an organization struggling
to retain female vice presidents. In the US healthcare industry, women make up
more than 75 percent of the entry labor force but hold fewer than one-third of
the most senior positions.4 4.See “Women in U.S. healthcare,” Catalyst,
April 9, 2014, catalyst.org. Other organizations struggle with recruitment. In US high-tech companies,
it is not unusual for women to make up just 30 percent of the entry ranks. One
likely factor: the decline in the number of female computer-science college
undergraduates. From 2000 to 2011, the proportion of women earning
computer-science degrees in the United States sank from 28 percent of the total
to 18 percent.5 5.See Science and Engineering Indicators
2014, National Science Foundation, 2014, nsf.gov.
How to gather pipeline information is no secret, and what to do with it
shouldn’t be either. Outcome metrics ought to be reviewed annually, and leading
indicators (such as employee sentiment and promotion trends) should be examined
during quarterly business reviews. All of these metrics must be considered
elements of an ongoing management conversation.
Once the pipeline is visible, a related conversation should happen about
the distribution of women’s roles—in part to get a better sense of the career
barriers they face. For example, in the United States, about two-thirds of
women in Fortune 500 companies begin their careers in line (as opposed to
support-staff) roles. Yet the figures at the top are reversed: roughly
two-thirds of the women in the C-suite occupy human resources, marketing, or
other support positions. Whether such patterns are a problem varies by
organization; awareness is the first step toward understanding if they are.
A major consumer-goods company, for example, identified 500 pivotal roles
across the organization. For each of them, it wants to have a succession plan
five candidates deep (a “hit by a bus” plan). The company encourages the
creation of diverse slates of candidates on these lists and tracks outcomes
over time to ensure that it is making progress on its diversity goals,
including the appointment of enough women to leadership roles. Interestingly, the
effort is considered a talent initiative, not a women’s initiative—a
distinction that models gender-neutral behavior in promotion decisions.
Finally, companies should consider the benefits of transparency: the act of
publicly sharing data on gender diversity sends staff and external parties
alike a clear message that the status quo is insufficient. In recent months,
several companies (including eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo!) have
taken this step. By doing so, they have initiated a pragmatic conversation
about what organizations can do to change.
2. What skills are we helping women build?
Many women’s programs focus on convening, creating, and broadening
networks. While these are important investments, they are insufficient.
Companies should also instill the capabilities women need to thrive. Some of
the most important are resilience, grit, and confidence.
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties—a form of
toughness. Grit is resolve, courage, and strength of character. Confidence is a
level of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of your own abilities or
qualities. In business settings, resilience allows us to get up after making a
mistake or encountering a challenge, grit allows us to push through walls and
rise above challenges, and confidence helps transform challenging experiences
into greater self-assurance, not self-doubt.
In our 2012 interviews with 250 high-ranking women executives, we found
that they thought the top attributes of their own success were resilience and
grit, which ranked higher than more obvious factors, such as a “results
orientation.” We also heard moving stories about how perseverance through
challenging circumstances can shape a woman’s ability to lead. A former plant
manager, for example, described the aftermath of an accident and her effort (in
the middle of the night) to understand the circumstances in which it occurred,
to ensure the workers’ safety, and to communicate with the press. Years later,
this woman—now a senior executive at the company—cites the experience as a
turning point in her career because it gave her confidence at a moment of
failure and crisis.
Academic work highlights the importance of determination, as well. The
University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Lee Duckworth found that among
public-school students in Chicago, those with more grit were significantly more
likely to graduate.6 6.See Angela Lee Duckworth, “The key to
success? Grit,” TED, April 2013, ted.com. Similarly, research by Stanford’s Carol Dweck finds that students are more
successful when they are praised and recognized for their contributions, hard
work, practice, and effort—in short, for a mind-set of growth. Such a mind-set
is valuable in corporate environments too, for it suggests that women can shape
(and reshape) their own advancement and success. The good news is that these
capabilities are coachable and that educational innovation (online, video, and
experiential learning, for example) ought to help. Leaders should encourage experimentation
to accelerate progress.
3. Do we provide sponsors along with role
models?
Intuitively, we know that seeing female role models makes a huge difference
to younger women. Research confirms this intuition. For example, a 2012 study
found that young Indian girls living in villages with a stronger representation
of women in public leadership roles were significantly more likely to see
themselves as future leaders.7 7.Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande,
and Petia Topalova, “Female leadership raises aspirations and educational
attainment for girls: A policy experiment in India,” Science, 2012,
Volume 335, Number 6068, pp. 582– 86. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media also highlights the influence
that visible female role models (or the lack of them) can have on the way girls
perceive their future possibilities. (For more, see Geena Davis’s essay,
“Addressing unconscious bias,” forthcoming on mckinsey.com.)
To go further, companies should focus on sponsorship, including the
creation of opportunities. In leading companies, formal sponsorship programs
help fill the opportunity gap by encouraging women to set higher aspirations
and by finding ways to open doors for them.8 8.For more on sponsorship, see Sylvia Ann
Hewlett, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your
Career, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2013. In our survey of female leaders, nearly 60
percent of them said that if they could relive their careers, they would have
more sponsors.
Sponsorship is an area where men can play a huge role. In fact, it is one
of the most basic commitments male leaders can make to help increase the number
of talented women in their organizations. A simple question to ask men in
senior roles is this: How many of you sponsor at least one woman? At the same
time, of course, ask the women in leadership positions what they are doing to
share their stories and to make themselves more visible role models for women
throughout the ranks. Sponsorship programs with tangible goals can be highly
effective. At eBay, for example, senior vice presidents and vice presidents set
a goal of developing top-talent women by sponsoring five of them. Such efforts
have helped the company more than double the number of women in leadership
roles since 2010.9 9.For more about eBay’s experiences, see
Michelle Angier and Beth Axelrod, “Realizing the power of talented women,” McKinsey
Quarterly, September 2014.
4. Are we rooting out unconscious biases?
One of the biggest challenges exists squarely in the heads of employees:
the unconscious biases that shadow women throughout their careers and can set
them up for failure.10 10.For example, see Shelley Correll, Minimizing
the Motherhood Penalty: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why?, Harvard Business
School “Gender and work: Challenging conventional wisdom” symposium, Boston,
MA, March 1, 2013, hbs.edu. Held by men and women alike, these biases take many forms.
Smart companies work hard to make unconscious biases more conscious and
then to root them out so that they don’t affect the culture in wide-ranging and
unhelpful ways. Actions include training, surveys (to gain insights), and
policy remedies that create a more level playing field. For example:
5. How much are our policies helping?
Although the most stubborn barriers are inside the heads of employees, this
isn’t to say that companies have exhausted the potential of corporate policy to
effect change. Child-leave policies are one area ripe for improvement: some US
companies are raising the number of weeks for maternity leave, thus resembling
international norms more closely.13 13.Denmark and Venezuela, for example, call
for 18 weeks of paid maternity leave. The United States mandates up to 12 weeks
of unpaid leave. For more, see Naj Ghosheh, Working Conditions Laws
Report 2012: A global review, International Labour Office, 2013, ilo.org. Both Google and Yahoo! increased the
number of days they allow for child leave. Other companies are more publicly
encouraging men to take paternity leave—a move that helps chip away at
prevalent gender norms about caregiving. Indeed, in one women’s leadership
workshop I attended, the highest-rated recommendation was to make paternity
leave mandatory for men so that they could more fully take part in raising kids
and reduce the perception that child care is a “women’s issue.” Such ideas are
intriguing, as they suggest tangible ways a company’s policies can affect the
mind-sets of employees.
Part-time or other flexible work policies are a sore spot; they look great
on paper, but few employees take advantage of them: McKinsey research has found
that less than 1 percent of men or women did so at companies offering such
options at the executive level. Clearly, policies that aren’t much used are
great opportunities for management discussions, and while these conversations
can be uncomfortable, they can also lead to new ways of working. (For example,
see “Championing gender equality in Australia,” forthcoming on mckinsey.com.)
Uncomfortable conversations are often
necessary to identify the pragmatic actions that can improve a company’s odds
of developing women leaders. The good news is that the rewards—a stronger
workforce that fully taps the available talent across the economy—are well
worth it. The power to change and to keep moving forward lies in our hands.