In 1978, a human resources executive named Marilyn Loden participated in a panel discussion at the Women’s Exposition in New York City about women’s career ambitions. While much of the conversation revolved around the behavioral changes that women should make in order to succeed, Marilyn argued instead that the real issue was the structural barriers keeping them from the top. She stated that there was an “invisible glass ceiling” standing in the way of their aspirations and opportunities. Since then, that image of a glass ceiling sitting at the top of the corporate ladder has become a pervasive symbol of the obstacles that women face when reaching for the top rungs of leadership.
Fast-forward from Marilyn Loden’s era to the 1990s, when more women were joining the workforce than ever before. The U.S. Congress responded by forming the Glass Ceiling Commission to study issues in their advancement, with the group reporting that women represented only 3% to 5% of senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies. This finding led many organizations to begin focusing on increasing the number of women in these high-level positions.
Progress has been slow but steady. In the roughly 30 years since the Glass Ceiling Commission released its report, women have gone from representing 3 to 5% to 29% of the C-suite. This is still hardly equitable, but women have made some gains. In the United States in the decade between 2012 and 2022, women’s representation in the C-suite increased by 10 percentage points, which is roughly one additional direct report to a CEO out of a 10-person team. The true top is still stubborn, though: In 2023 women made up just over 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 9% of the FTSE CEOs, and 5.4% of CEOs of the S&P Global Broad Market Index.
One important and often overlooked step in helping more women get ahead is addressing the obstacle that affects them—not as they approach the glass ceiling, but actually at the beginning of their careers: the broken rung. The glass ceiling does persist, despite a few small cracks in its surface, but many women begin to fall behind their male counterparts long before they are anywhere near that level.
In our research, we found that women who are just starting out have significantly lower odds of reaching that first manager role than their male peers. And when they typically do reach that first manager role, it is later on in the careers. In the United States, for every 100 men who get that very first push up the corporate ladder to manager, eight-seven women will receive the same opportunity. The gap has been stubbornly persistent for the last decade, as we have seen a paltry improvement.
The broken rung phenomenon often persists through the manager and director levels and shows that too often women are never able to catch up. Across over 1,000 U.S. companies surveyed over the last five years, women averaged 48% of entry-level positions but only 37% at the director level, at a middle level of seniority. That is a lot of women getting stalled or falling out of the corporate workforce. At the senior levels, women hover just under 30%, a far cry from the parity they experienced in college or on their first day on the job. Between the entry level and the C-suite, women’s representation is cut in half.
We see similar trends globally. On the top end of the range are Norway, Australia, and Sweden, with 24% to 27% of their senior leadership teams made up of women. In the middle we have the United Kingdom at 18% and France at 13%. On the bottom end of the range are Brazil, Germany, and Mexico with 8% women (although Germany is increasing quickly after implementing quotas), and then India at 5% and Japan at 3%.
Every rung on the ladder is broken, as women, particularly women of color, try to move up the corporate pipeline. But it’s that first rung that has the greatest impact, both on individual women and on organizations. After an eight-percentage-point drop so early in the talent pipeline, it is nearly impossible to close that gap. The impact compounds all the way up the ladder.
Missing the first promotion to manager affects someone’s entire career trajectory, especially when it comes to gaining valuable skills and experiences. And with a decrease in female representation at every rung, there are fewer and fewer women to promote at each subsequent level. This leaves very few women with a chance of getting close enough to even tap the glass ceiling.
Making matters worse, the broken rung is often a leadership blind spot. Many CEOs, managers, and human resources executives have positive intentions about supporting women, but gaps remain in execution. More than half of HR leaders believe that their organization will reach gender parity within the next 10 years. But according to the United Nations, at the current rate of improvement, it will be 140 years until we achieve equal representation in leadership around the world.
To take an optimistic view, however, the problem and solution are opposite sides of the same coin. If we began promoting women and men to management at the same rates, it would create a powerful domino effect, leading to an increase in representation across the entire pipeline. There would be more women to promote and hire at each subsequent rung.
It would still take time to achieve equality, but if we fixed that first broken rung, women could reach near parity all the way up the ladder within a generation. This shift would also help companies retain ambitious, talented women and create mentors and leaders at all levels for young women to learn from, look up to, and follow.
In other words, we must tackle parity in leadership from the bottom up, rather than only from the top down.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from THE BROKEN RUNG: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women–and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It by Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez. Copyright 2025 McKinsey & Company, Inc. United States. All rights reserved.
The post Even Before the Glass Ceiling, the Broken Rung Is Holding Women Back at Work appeared first on TIME.
