Women continue to rise at work, despite the pandemic

This is Working Together, a weekly series on professional women and equity in the workplace. Below is the first in a three-part series examining how the pandemic has impacted the careers of women. Check out Part 2 and Part 3 .

You can see the pandemic’s devastating impact on working women across all parts of the U.S. economy. But COVID-19 did not fully erase the gains women have been making over the long term.?

Peel back a layer or two, and you begin to see women make a slow, steady climb up Corporate America’s career ladder, despite the formidable obstacles in their way.?

The share of women hired into leadership positions in the U.S. grew by almost 10% in relative terms between 2015 and 2021, according to a recent analysis of LinkedIn data. And despite a small dip in 2020, hiring of women into leadership roles — defined as director level or above — bounced back in 2021, accounting for 40.7% of such hires across industries.

“We wish it were bolder progress, but we should celebrate the progress we are seeing,” said LeanIn CEO and Co-Founder Rachel Schall Thomas . “We are seeing companies' commitment to gender equity and this is a strong example of that commitment.”

LinkedIn’s findings come at a time when leaders, policy makers and economists are just beginning to assess the potential long-term impact of the pandemic on women’s careers. In the first year of the COVID-19 recession, 2.4 million women left the labor force. As of January 2022, men have recovered all their workforce losses since the start of the pandemic. Women, meanwhile, are still 1 million short of their pre-pandemic workforce levels, according to the National Women’s Law Center.?

Women’s workforce departures are poised to exact a painful financial toll. The pandemic could cost the average American woman close to $600,000 in lifetime income , according to McKinsey & Company. And those lost earnings rise to an average of $1.2 million for women in leadership roles.

Female advancement into leadership roles stalled in 2020 across all industries in the U.S. But women’s progress was hit especially hard in sectors that suffered significant strain during the pandemic. Health care, for example, saw no growth in females hired into leadership positions at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, according to LinkedIn data. And in retail, women leadership hires declined after years of forward momentum.?

Despite the slow, steady progress over the past several years, women’s leadership share does not match their overall representation in any industry in the U.S. That’s especially the case in health care, which has the widest gap between its share of women in leadership and women’s overall representation in the industry. Women make up 65% of all workers in the field but only accounted for 48% of leadership roles in 2021.?

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Jasmine Tucker, research director at the National Women’s Law Center. “There are so many female-dominated positions in health care and they are not similarly positioned in leadership roles. It is a real gap and it is a real problem.”?

Health care’s yawning leadership gap throws into stark relief the persistent barriers women face across industries, from a stubborn lack of networking opportunities and mentorship, to bias in both the recruiting and promotion processes. But recent developments in health care also demonstrate the emergence of new opportunities for women to rise through the corporate ranks and follow their entrepreneurial ambitions.

‘It is not the women that are broken’?

Registered nurses, with over 2.4 million workers, represent the largest majority-female role in health care , followed by nursing, psychiatric and home health aides. While women are abundant in these critical roles, these positions tend to offer little room for advancement and suffer from high attrition rates .?

Part of the problem comes down to long-standing challenges for women in health care. In a 2014 survey by professional development organization Women In Healthcare, 70% of respondents said they had never had a mentor and didn’t know where to find one. Many said they felt siloed and that they hadn’t been exposed to crucial aspects of the health care system, said Ashley Schmidt , the president and founder of Women in Healthcare.

“One part of the equation is the exposure and the skills needed to advance,” Schmidt said. “The other part is the institutional barriers and bias that have existed in health care for many years,” she said.?

There are signs that these barriers are weakening. Nikki Jones has worked at the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) for nearly 13 years, and she now leads the organization’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She says that the pandemic — combined with the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 — has awakened many organizations to the importance of having women, particularly women of color, in leadership roles.?

You can see progress in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, with large employers like Genentech, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson committing to gender parity across the talent pipeline — via a public pact — in recent years. Between 2018 and 2020, companies that took part in HBA’s Gender Parity Collaborative project saw an average 27% increase of women at the VP level or above, even while the pharma sector overall saw a 9% decline among women in such roles during the same period, according to HBA data.?

“It is not the women that are broken, it is the systemic issues inside the companies,” said Jones. “We have been hearing the story of not finding qualified women for years, but we aren’t listening anymore. We are now focused on providing solutions, working alongside men as allies and advocates to accelerate progress in advancement for women into senior leadership positions in the healthcare industry."

Ditching the ‘good old boys network’

For some employees, the pandemic was an eye-opening moment that gave them the push they needed to leave jobs they had long found unsatisfying. Quit rates in the U.S. have been rising steadily since the spring of 2020. And women have been leading the charge in this wave of departures.?

The health care industry has been hit hard by this trend, with 18% of health workers saying they left the field during the pandemic, according to a survey from Morning Consult from October 2021. Nursing, in particular, has endured substantial losses. Two-thirds of critical care nurses are considering leaving the field, according to a recent survey .?

The pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on women in health care, and they have been quitting or losing jobs at far higher rates than men . Many of them have opted to start their own businesses.

“Women are getting frustrated with the good old boys network of health care,” Jones said.

Iman Abuzeid founded her startup, Incredible Health, prior to the pandemic, but she said she isn’t surprised that there has been a recent uptick of women in the field striking out as entrepreneurs. Incredible Health, a career marketplace for health care workers, has seen massive growth in the past few years, as many in the industry — nurses especially — reconsider their careers.?

At every phase of her career — from medical school to practicing as a physician to starting her own company — Abuzeid said she was always one of the few women of color in the room.

“There is definitely structural bias throughout the entire health care system,” she said. “I just had to focus on excelling and had to compartmentalize everything else.”?

Women’s shift to entrepreneurship is not exclusive to health care, though. You can see it in male-dominated industries like finance, the industry with the fastest growing founding rate among women in 2021, according to LinkedIn data.?

Cate Luzio , founder of women’s network Luminary and a former executive at HSBC, JP Morgan and Bank of America, said she has seen a marked increase in women leaving finance, out of frustration or necessity, since the start of the pandemic.?

Throughout her career, Luzio watched many women in finance reach the mid-level leadership rung, and remain there. She attributes the stagnation to bias in the promotion and recruiting process: While men tend to be elevated based on their perceived potential, women advance based on performance.?

“If your female talent pool is at a junior level and you are only looking at performance, you are not going to be able to push them to a senior level,” she said. “You need to invest early on in their careers, or you are going to lose them.”?

Debbie Mclean , the global head of diversity and inclusion for the CAIA Association on alternative investments, says women have been leaving finance before rising to the senior levels for some time. But — similar to Jones from the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association — she says she saw significant advancement in initiatives focused on both gender and racial equity since the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020.?

“It was a real wakeup call,” she said. “We know that in order to drive change, you need support at the top, prioritizing this not as an HR issue, but as a business imperative. If you are not focused on this, you are putting your business at risk.”?

The bill will come due

Some see a similar awakening happening in health care. Across both gender and race, studies have shown that patients believe their treatment is better and less biased when they are cared for by someone who looks like them.?

Toyin Ajayi launched Cityblock Health — a company that works with marginalized communities to improve access to care — to address this issue.?

Ajayi, who was a physician herself, saw firsthand how doctors and insurance providers would misdiagnose or ignore the needs of Black and brown patients. Her company aims to serve 10 million patients by 2030. And after raising more than $900 million in venture capital, the startup is now worth more than $5 billion.

“I want to believe … that clinicians are finally listening,” said Ajayi. “But you have to recognize that this is not about individuals making choices on a day-to-day basis to harm their patients on the basis of this skin color. That is rarely what's happening. What's happening is that our system is structurally set up to deliver the outcomes that we see today.“

If such inequity won’t convince health care to diversify its ranks, perhaps a talent crisis will. In the wake of the pandemic, talent shortages are pervasive across the industry, and employers are realizing that women — and women of color — are most likely to head for the exit.?

“People have learned they can pivot, work for themselves, work somewhere else or do something entirely different,” said Schmidt from Women in Healthcare. “In a labor force that is dwindling, organizations recognize by not addressing this today, they will pay for it later.”?

METHODOLOGY: The data mentioned in this article, which is part of a special report on the state of female professionals in the U.S., was gathered and analyzed by LinkedIn's Economic Graph Research and Insights team. The share of females hired into leadership positions represents the number of females in the U.S. who added a leadership (director or C-suite) position to their profiles in a particular year divided by the total number of males and females who added a leadership position in that particular year. The share of females in leadership in an industry represents the number of females in the U.S. with a current leadership (director or C-suite) position in that industry divided by the total number of males and females holding a current leadership position in that industry. The industry LinkedIn Founding Rate measures the number of LinkedIn members in an industry in the U.S. who added a new founder position to their profile in a year, divided by the number of members in that industry in the U.S. during that year. Gender identity isn’t binary and we recognize that some LinkedIn members identify beyond the traditional gender constructs of “male” and “female.” If not explicitly self-identified, we have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female or by pronouns used on their LinkedIn profiles. Members whose gender could not be inferred as either male or female were excluded from this analysis.