Women have faced many workplace challenges over the years, like getting paid less than men for doing the same work, balancing caregiving responsibilities, and having less representation in leadership, just to name a few examples.
Lareina Yee, Kweilin Ellingrud, and María del Mar Martínez have each faced their own challenges as working mothers, but have climbed the corporate ladder to become senior partners at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Because they’ve seen how hard it can be for women to succeed in male-dominated industries, they wanted to share the research and real-life stories of how women can succeed in their book, The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It.
HR Brew chatted with Lareina Yee about what people leaders can learn from the book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you and your co-authors decide to write this book?
We’re three parents. Across the three of us, we each have three kids…All of us started investing in research over a decade ago. I, personally, co-founded Women in the Workplace, which is…data on the experience of women and men in the workplace. So, we bring a lot of research insights and personal experience, and then we interviewed 50 remarkable women of different backgrounds, nationalities, tenures, different types of career paths, to really gather their stories. Some of them are CEOs or C-suite executives, and some of them are managers.
One person, for example, took a 14-year break. She was an associate general counsel. She raised three kids as the primary caretaker in her family, and then did a ramp back…So, we have all types of women’s stories to really breathe life to the data and experiences of how women succeed in the workplace.
Your title, The Broken Rung, is intriguing. Can you tell us what it means?
When we visualize your career over time, oftentimes people think of a ladder, and you think that every promotion is stepping one more rung up that ladder to getting to the top. The top could be being a CEO. The top could be being a manager…That concept of the ladder—people think about the glass ceiling as being what holds you back [from reaching] the top—but what we found…was actually one of the most damaging setbacks is the very first step on that ladder. And, that’s why we call it a broken rung.
We start, in the United States, for example, with 48% women in the corporate sector, and that’s actually pretty close to parity. But an interesting thing happens, which is, at that first promotion, that first rung on the ladder, for every 100 men who get that big opportunity, only 81 women have those same odds. And if you’re a woman of color, the odds are much lower. If you’re a Black woman, for example, that number is 54.
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If we just fix the top, it’s insufficient. We have to fix the whole talent pipeline…Every single step on the ladder. Every stage in the talent pipeline matters. We do a really good job recruiting women…But when you think of retention and promotion, it’s important to provide those opportunities for women. And, it’s hard for me to believe that two, three, [or] five years into being hired, there’s so much of a disparity between men and women. And if there is, from a merit perspective, then let’s think about the interventions to make sure that women have that first promotion opportunity, because it’s only up from there.
How can HR help repair the broken rung and fix these inequities?
This book is really about what women can do, understanding that they may face a broken rung…[and] we don’t want you to be surprised. This is the world you’re working in, and it’s good to know what you’re walking into, and it’s good to know how 50 women and many other women have succeeded in spite of some of the un-level playing field. So, this is a book about, how do women thrive? And how do they not be surprised? [...] Most women know that there’s bias in the workplace, but let’s just spell that all out, and then let’s think about the tactics.
Early in your career, networking is really important, and a lot of women, and this is not everyone, but there is an impression that a lot of women will stay really focused on achieving the literal goals of the job, and [keep] their noses down…[But,] you should also, early on, be building networks.
Why? Because we know over time, women have less sponsors, and sponsors are those who create and open doors and opportunities for you, and we also know statistically that women tend to have smaller, more narrow, more junior networks…So, starting early to build peer networks, maybe to start having mentors for some of those mentors to become sponsors. That’s a very tactical way that women can invest in themselves.