Middle Management is Missing Out on Something Important: Women Leaders

It’s been a few years since the ‘Great Resignation,’ when millions of workers quit due to burnout and demands for better working conditions. Combined with COVID, that workforce drop-off saw the US lose a staggering two million-plus women workers.

After some well-deserved panic and some much-needed changes in the ways we work, things seemed to be stabilizing. In fact, in 2022, NPR reported that women were headed back to work en masse. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the two million-woman drop in workers had fully recovered. And the labor market breathed a sigh of relief…

Except…let’s hold those horses...

Because that recovery isn’t quite true. Or at least isn’t the whole story.

And we should all pay attention.

Because women in the prime of their careers are once again absent from the US workforce—and the problem lies at middle management.

That’s right. According to McKinsey’s 9th annual Women in the Workplace study, while companies might be paying a lot of lip service to having women in leadership, the data tells us we’re actually losing women and everything they bring to the table…

The main system failure? A problem known as the broken rung.

What the heck is the broken rung?

Nine years in a row, in McKinsey’s research, the story has remained the same: For every 100 men promoted to middle management, just 87 women make it.

(And those numbers are even worse for women of color, and particularly Black women, whose promotion rate is just 54 women for every 100 men.)

This has—as you would expect—a ripple effect not only in middle management, but at every level of leadership.?

As McKinsey explains,“While companies are modestly increasing women’s representation at the top, doing so without addressing the broken rung o?ers only a temporary stopgap. Because of the gender disparity in early promotions, men end up holding 60 percent of manager-level positions in a typical company, while women occupy 40 percent. Since men signi?cantly outnumber women, there are fewer women to promote to senior managers, and the number of women decreases at every subsequent level.”

In other words: the less women promoted to middle management, the fewer women get promoted to upper management, with less opportunities at every rung up that ladder.?

Well damn, what can we do?

The answers are complex, to say the least. But we’re all about action here (and we’re a women-owned business, so we give a damn), so here are five actionable things you can do today:

1. Share the data! Nothing changes if senior leadership doesn’t understand the problem and take measures to change it. The louder we are about this problem, the less people can ignore it.

2. Give women credit. Be relentless about pointing out when women (and particularly BIPOC women) are the architects of a successful idea, campaign, etc. If you see a man taking undue credit, correct him.

(Hell, if you see women doing it to each other, same goes. There’s no room for woman-on-woman workplace crime here.)

It’s harder to do this when you’re not the one whose ideas are being taken, so make it a point to step in when you don’t have a dog in the fight, instead of putting the responsibility on the woman whose ideas or work is being claimed by someone else.

3. Support flexible and remote work. You might be asking, what does this have to do with supporting women specifically? The answer might not be what you think.

Women experience double or even triple the amount of microaggressions in the workplace as men do. Comments on our appearance. Having passion dismissed as emotion. Being asked to get coffee when that is so very much not our job and a more junior man is standing just over there. Etc. etc. etc.

Flexible business hours and remote work don’t just give us the freedom to design work and life together. They also often reduce microaggressions and increase psychological safety, allowing women to do our jobs well and stay in our jobs.

4. Suggest women for opportunities and promotions. Research tells us that when people suggest someone for a freelance gig or a promotion, it’s most likely to be someone from their own group. Men suggest men. White people suggest white people. And with power concentrated with white men, that means more promotions and opportunities for—you guessed it!—white men.

This isn’t always because people are purposefully being sexist or racist. It’s unconscious bias, which means we have to be intentional about changing our patterns. This means noticing when all the people suggested for that new internship are white men—and stopping the issue in its tracks when it’s still in the suggestion phase.

5. Support women-run and women-owned businesses. As a consumer, a client, a decision-maker—you can choose to prioritize women-owned businesses and support companies with a strong track record of good diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. The more those companies thrive, the more laggard companies will be forced to address their sexism problem.

Houston, we’ve got a problem—but it’s a solvable one!

Like Chicken Little, we’re always ready to point out when the sky is falling. But perhaps unlike him, we also believe we can fix the sky. These issues are not insurmountable. “Business as usual” is only usual until we change it up.

It’ll take people at every level to effectuate change. This includes women and male allies. Leadership and interns. Those at small and large businesses. We can each work within our own spheres of influence to push for greater change and support women at every level—especially at that crucial broken rung where the drop-off becomes so stark.

As a women-owned business, this issue is particularly dear to us. And if there’s a way we can support the women at your business? Hell yeah, let us at it! You can reach out anytime.