In the News · Women in Leadership
For the First Time in Eleven Years, Women Say They Want Promotion Less Than Men Do. The Gap Closes Completely Under One Condition.
The Women in the Workplace study from Lean In and McKinsey is the largest of its kind, and in its eleventh year it recorded something it had never seen before. Eighty percent of women said they wanted to be promoted to the next level, against eighty-six percent of men, and the gap widened at both the entry and senior ends of the pipeline.
The finding underneath it is the one worth building a session around. Among women who reported receiving the same career support as their male peers, meaning sponsorship, manager advocacy and access to stretch assignments, the ambition gap disappeared entirely.
Ambition Is an Output, Not a Personality Trait
The easy reading of a six-point gap is that women want it less, and that reading will be repeated in a lot of rooms this year. The data does not support it. Women and men at every level reported being equally committed to their careers and equally motivated to do their best work. What differed was the support around them.
That reframes ambition from something a person either has or lacks into something an organization produces or fails to produce. If the gap vanishes wherever sponsorship is equal, then the gap is a measurement of sponsorship, not of desire.
The context makes it harder. Only about half of the companies studied said they were prioritizing women’s career advancement, part of a multi-year decline in stated commitment to gender diversity. The study drew on pipeline data from 124 organizations employing roughly three million people, surveys of more than 9,500 employees and interviews with 62 HR executives.
The twelfth edition of the study is due later this year, which makes the next few months a natural window for programming built on this question rather than a retrospective one.
Source: LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace, eleventh annual report.
What This Changes About a Women’s Conference Agenda
The default women’s event agenda is built around helping women advocate for themselves. Confidence, negotiation, executive presence, visibility. All of that still matters, and the speakers who do it well are worth the slot.
But if the decisive variable is sponsorship rather than self-advocacy, then the agenda has a missing audience. The people who control access to stretch assignments are mostly not in the room at a women’s conference. Organizations getting the most out of this data are pairing the women’s event with a manager-facing session on how sponsorship actually works, and treating the two as one program rather than two line items.
It also gives the closing keynote a sharper job than inspiration. The most useful version sends people out with a specific ask to make and a specific person to make it to, because the research says the ask is what moves the number.
Speakers on Advancement, Confidence and Sponsorship
Building a women’s event this year?
Tell us whether the room is women in the pipeline, the managers who sponsor them, or both. We will shape the shortlist around that.