McKinsey’s Laura Webanck: Women Make Gains in the Workplace, but Progress ‘Fragile’

(Laura Webanck, Image by Anneliese Mahoney)

DENVER–Laura Webanck, Partner at McKinsey & Co., took to the stage at the mPowering You Summit for Women in Real Estate Finance Oct. 26, to discuss data from the firm’s “Women in the Workplace 2024” report. While women have continued to make gains, those gains are “fragile” and “not guaranteed in perpetuity,” Webanck said.

It’s the tenth year of the report, conducted in collaboration with LeanIn.Org.

“Over the past decade, women’s representation has increased at every level of corporate management,” Webanck said, pointing out that some of the biggest gains have been seen in C-suite roles. In 2015, 17% of C-suite roles were filled by women; now that number stands at 29%.

She noted that much of that progress came from changing the composition of the C-suite, such as the inclusion of roles that women are more likely to hold. Unfortunately, that’s not repeatable, and early career barriers for women persist. The pipeline for entry and manager-level roles has only seen modest improvements, Webanck said.

“Women remain underrepresented across the pipeline, regardless of race or ethnicity. Simply put, at every level, men outnumber women, and it’s most acute at the top” Webanck said.

Webanck pointed to the “broken rung”–essentially that women are less likely to attain certain mid- and high-level positions that are vital to reaching the top of their companies.

For example, she said, for every 100 men that were promoted in the past year from an entry-level role to a manager, 81 women were promoted, down from 87 last year.

For Latinas that drops to 65, the worst rate since the research began in 2015. For Black women it falls to 54, regressing from progress made in the past few years.

While 99 Asian women are promoted for every 100 men at that level, they have the lowest promotion rates from director to VP-level.

“It will take us 22 years for white women to achieve parity in the C-suite. It will take us 48 years for women of color to achieve parity in the C-suite,” Webanck said.

She listed a number of things that companies need to do to maintain progress and even reach that parity many decades in the future, including fixing the broken rung, investing more resources in developing female leaders and holding themselves accountable.

One key factor affecting women in the workplace is flexibility. While there was more flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, those gains are being pulled back.

Moreover, companies have also scaled back some programs designed to advance women. Fewer companies are saying gender and racial diversity are priorities, Webanck said.

“Despite the increase in representation and company efforts, the workplace has not necessarily gotten better for women, and not for all women,” Webanck said. “Women continue to worry it will be harder for them to advance, and their day-to-day interactions don’t look that different than they did in 2015 when we started collecting data.”

Women are no more optimistic in 2024 than they were a decade ago about how their gender will impact their career, Webanck noted. And, women of color are more likely today to say their race plays a role in them missing out on opportunities, compared with 2018.

Microaggressions–defined in the report as comments and actions that undermine credibility and leadership skills–haven’t gotten better, and some women say they’ve actually gotten worse, Webanck said.

How do companies work to fix these problems? The report includes a best practices checklist, Webanck said. It features items in categories such as “commitment and engagement,” “visibility into key advancement metrics,” “investment in women’s career development,” “manager training and accountability,” “efforts to ensure hiring and performance reviews are fair,” “trainings to foster equity and inclusion,” “employee benefits” and “flexibility.”

“Companies benefit from diverse perspectives,” Webanck said. “Institutions that have diverse management teams, that have diverse boards, do better consistently.”

Webanck noted that it’s a problem for everyone to solve–including men, who also benefit from a more flexible and inclusive workplace–and managers, who need to be provided with training, incentives, resources and recognition.

“Every day you have an opportunity, […] to support, to mentor, to be in a meeting where someone gets talked over,” Webanck said. “You can make such a big difference with small things that you do.”