Nina Zipkin* says a new report shows women are still not being offered management positions at equal rates to men.
Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company last week released their fourth annual Women in the Workplace study.
The report’s aim is to explore how employers are promoting and improving gender diversity.
This year the study surveyed 279 organisations that employ more than 13 million people about their leadership pipelines and HR practices.
In addition, 64,000 employees were polled about their experiences at work.
In a nutshell, things aren’t great.
“If organisations continue to hire and promote women to managers at current rates, the number of women in management will increase by a mere 1 percentage point over the next 10 years,” Sandberg wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“But if organisations start hiring and promoting women and men to manager at equal rates, we can nearly close the gender gap in management over the same 10 years.”
“That’s a huge opportunity.”
But as it stands now, the study found that one in five senior leaders is a woman, and one in 25 is a woman of colour.
One-quarter of women said they were the only woman in the room at work.
Just 7 per cent of men reported the same.
From the start, women are operating at a disadvantage when it comes to being promoted to leadership positions, despite more women entering the workforce with bachelor’s degrees than men.
According to the study, for every 100 men who become managers, 79 women are promoted to manager positions.
That means that men hold 62 per cent of manager positions, while women hold only 38 per cent.
Part of reaching the top tiers of an organisation is getting face time with the existing leadership.
The study found that while only 27 per cent of men reported that they “never have a substantive interaction with a senior leader about my work,” 33 per cent of all women across the board said the same.
Eight per cent of men and 24 per cent of women said that they believe gender has played a role in them missing out on a raise, promotion or chance to get ahead.
And while 45 per cent of men think women are well represented when one in 10 senior leaders in their company is a woman, only 28 per cent of women think this.
The study also found persistent instances of microaggression at work, with 64 per cent of women saying they had experienced this at the office.
Some 27 per cent of all men said that they had their judgment questioned in their area of expertise and 36 per cent of all women said the same; 16 per cent of men said that they had been asked to provide more evidence of their competence, while 31 per cent of women said the same.
Ten per cent of men said that they had been mistaken for having a much lower position within the organisation, while 20 per cent of women said the same; 16 per cent of men reported being addressed in a less than professional manner and 26 per cent of women said the same.
Meanwhile, 10 Ten per cent of men reported hearing demeaning comments about themselves or people like them while 16 per cent of women said the same.
When it comes to sexual harassment, the study found that 55 per cent of women in senior leadership positions, 48 per cent of lesbian women and 45 per cent of women working in technical fields reported that they had been sexually harassed at work.
While 98 per cent of the organisations surveyed said they have clear no-tolerance policies for sexual harassment, 62 per cent of employees polled said their employer has reaffirmed that policy or provided training on the issue.
Sixty per cent of employees think a sexual harassment claim would be investigated and addressed properly by their employer, but just 32 per cent said they believed it would be handled quickly.
Only 32 per cent of women think that disrespectful behaviour toward women is addressed in a timely fashion by their employer, while 50 per cent of men said the same.
The women surveyed by the study were twice as likely as their male counterparts to say that it would dangerous or pointless to report an instance of sexual harassment.
So, what can employers do to foster significant change by making equality a top priority?
The study lays out a checklist of how to hold an organisation’s leadership, particularly managers and directors, accountable, including tracking and setting representation targets for gender and race and sharing diversity metrics with employees.
When it comes to minimising bias in hiring and promotions, the study laid out steps employers can take, including using automated résumé screening tools, requiring a more inclusive slate of candidates, starting with a consistent evaluation criteria across the board, requiring unconscious bias training and tracking outcomes after the fact.
* Nina Zipkin is a staff writer for Entrepreneur. She tweets at @NinaZipkin.
This article first appeared at www.entrepreneur.com.
