Breaking down the
gender challenge
To make
meaningful progress on gender diversity, companies must move beyond the
averages and focus on the biggest pain points.
Corporate ambitions to achieve gender parity
often produce scattershot initiatives. It’s easy to see why: gender parity is a
huge undertaking, with many dimensions—a challenge akin to urban planning—in
which executives must reimagine their “city” and culture, put in place multiyear
building plans, add infrastructure, and improve services. Our latest research
suggests that leaders can cut through the complexity of the task by first
establishing priorities linked with their organizations’ most pervasive
talent-pipeline problems.
More specifically, data we
collected during 2015 (in collaboration with LeanIn.org), from 30,000 employees
at 118 North Americancompanies across nine industries, show that many
organizations are afflicted by one of three common pipeline pain points: women
are unable to enter, stuck at the middle, or locked out of the top (exhibit).
Our hope is that if companies can recognize themselves in one of these
patterns, they will be better able to target their gender initiatives.
Unable to enter
A number of sectors—especially
automotive and industrial manufacturing, energy and basic materials, and
technology—are unable to attract women for entry-level positions, so women are
poorly represented throughout the talent pipeline. This problem usually arises
from recruiting challenges or pre-pipeline problems, particularly the low
graduation rates of women in industry feeder programs such as engineering,
where they receive about 20 percent, 24 percent, and 23 percent of bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctor’s degrees, respectively.
The technology sector typifies
these challenges. Women hold 37 percent of entry-level roles, versus 45 percent
for our overall sample, and underrepresentation continues at each stage of the
pipeline. Not surprisingly, 38 percent of women in technology feel that their
gender will make it difficult for them to advance in the future. Sixty percent
of women in technology also cite stress and pressure as their primary reason
for not wanting to be a top executive. These figures are among the highest
across all sectors surveyed.
Companies confronting entry-level
hiring challenges can improve the health of their pipelines by making an
up-front investment in the ecosystem of qualified female candidates and by
focusing their efforts on achieving greater diversity in their recruitment
processes. To expose the root causes of gender disparity at the pipeline’s
start and to suggest solutions, companies should start by asking themselves
questions such as these:
·
What
would it take to improve pre-pipeline gender diversity, and how might we play a
constructive role in that effort?
·
What
quantitative targets could we track to improve the gender diversity of our
recruiting pipeline in a meaningful way?
·
How
can we maintain objective recruitment criteria while empowering hiring managers
to spot and interrupt unconscious bias? As we do so, how do we make sure our
lateral- and experienced-hiring programs are also gender balanced?
Leading companies today are
partnering with universities to cultivate talent early. Organizations such as
Girls Who Code2or initiatives such as TechPrep3(launched by Facebook) nurture
talent in early education, often at points where girls abandon paths leading to
STEM4degrees. One technology company
struggling with diversity in recruiting used advanced analytics in its
résumé-screening process to identify and remove gender bias. This resulted not
only in a more diverse pool of talent but also in higher-quality candidates
overall. Another company focused on bias training for all managers involved in
recruiting, and as a result a larger proportion of women received offers.
Stuck at the middle
Failing to advance women into
middle-management roles is a common problem. Many organizations focus
considerable time and energy on achieving greater diversity in the recruiting
process, perhaps starting at or close to parity for men and women in
entry-level positions. Such gains, however, are often quickly eroded within the
first few promotion cycles. The sectors experiencing these challenges most
frequently include logistics and transportation, healthcare and
pharmaceuticals, and hospitality.
Consider healthcare and
pharmaceutical companies, for example. They start out with more women in their
pipelines than companies in many other sectors do—59 percent versus 45 percent
for the average in entry-level jobs—but look quite similar at the
vice-presidential level. This drop-off reflects below-average middle-management
promotion rates. In our sample as a whole, women were 85 percent as likely as
their male counterparts to make the jump from senior manager or director to
vice president, while in healthcare and pharmaceuticals the odds were just 64
percent. Of note, just 37 percent of women in healthcare and pharmaceutical
companies feel they have fewer opportunities than their male coworkers do,
versus 49 percent for other industries. Clearly, the middle-management cliff
cannot be explained by simple causes—for instance, biased promotion practices.
Questions such as the following can help companies struggling with
middle-management promotions to understand why their pipeline abruptly narrows
and how to unclog it:
·
Which
of our gender programs, if any, specifically focus on support for early-tenure
women? What is the utilization rate for these programs?
·
How
do we ensure that we are drawing on the organization’s full range of talent
when making promotion decisions at the middle-management level?
·
How
can we avoid incorporating biases into promotion decisions and thereby ensure a
level playing field?
Innovative approaches are emerging
to address middle-management pipeline stoppages. With the aim of ensuring
greater gender balance in the slate of candidates put up for promotion, one
company we know has reworked its job descriptions and advertising approaches.
Another invited third-party experts into its reviews to observe how it made
promotion decisions. By cataloging readily identifiable biases, these experts
were able to work with HR and managers to make promotion processes more
inclusive. Simple things can make an enormous difference—for instance, ensuring
that women are considered for midlevel promotions, receive feedback if they
don’t get the jobs, and have sponsorship and action plans helping them to build
the skills needed to grow into leaders.
Locked out of the top
Companies in the third group are
adept at attracting women for entry-level roles and advancing them into middle
management but struggle to promote them to top-level executive positions.
Sectors that suffer from this challenge most seriously include retail and
consumer goods, media and telecom, and financial and professional services.
The retail and consumer-goods
sector, which has a higher percentage of women in all entry- and midlevel roles
than our overall sample does, is an interesting case in point. The proportion
of women at the top falls sharply—to 13 percent, as compared with 18 percent
for our overall sample. This drop-off reflects below-average top-level
promotion rates. In our sample as a whole, women were 92 percent as likely as
their male counterparts to make the jump from senior vice president to the
C-Suite, while in retail and consumer goods the odds were far lower, at 45
percent. Not surprisingly, only 23 percent of women in this sector feel that
gender is a priority for their CEOs, compared with 35 percent for the overall
sample. Questions for companies struggling to land more women in top jobs
include the following:
·
How
can we counteract trends causing women to move away disproportionately from
line roles and P&L responsibility?
·
How
do senior, external, and lateral hires affect our pipeline? Are they diluting
gender gains?
·
Which
executive men and women are using—and publicly supporting—work-flexibility
programs? If none have done so, which leaders would be the most effective
work-flexibility champions?
·
Who
is sponsoring and mentoring our senior high-potential women?
We’ve seen leaders grapple
successfully with these questions. When the top team at one company took a hard
look at the numbers, executives realized they were blocking their
high-potential senior women from advancing into top roles, by importing a high
percentage of lateral hires, almost always men, for leadership roles. A course
correction—simply applying the company’s core recruiting principles and targets
to external hires—helped clear the way for talented senior women.
In another recent case, a
business-unit head required his entire leadership team—men and women alike—to
role-model flexible-work programs visibly, even if that meant working from home
only periodically. He also helped women on his management team to craft flexible
work arrangements, going so far as to lure back a senior woman who had quit as
a result of family concerns. And to encourage accountability, he carefully
tracked and evaluated his team’s progress against gender-balance goals. Within
five years, the division had improved its performance in gender equality
significantly more than the rest of the company had.
Targeting pipeline blockages isn’t
a panacea but can be a valuable means of jump-starting progress. We hope the
patterns we’ve described here will help companies to focus their efforts, make
meaningful changes, and build momentum to deal with less visible barriers.
Tackling gender issues should not be a firefighting exercise—jumping, every
year, to the next thing. It takes a strategic eye to find the root causes of
gender inequality and build a new kind of organization.
About the Authors
Alexis Krivkovich and Lareina Yee are
principals in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, and Eric Kutcher is
a director in the Silicon Valley office.
The authors would like to thank
Parul Batra, Vikram Iyer, Marie-Claude Nadeau, and Jessica Zestar-Postrk for
their valuable contributions to this article.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/breaking-down-the-gender-challenge?cid=mckwomen-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1603
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