The Broken Rung Is Still the Problem

A wooden ladder with a snapped rung, symbolizing career path disruptions and structural advancement challenges.

For more than a decade, the dominant narrative about women in leadership has focused on the top of the organization, on the visible scarcity of women in chief executive roles and on corporate boards. That focus is understandable because the absence is stark and easy to count. But the most rigorous longitudinal research on the subject has consistently pointed to a less visible and more consequential bottleneck much earlier in the pipeline, at the very first step into management. The data continues to suggest that the problem is not primarily a glass ceiling at the summit. It is a broken rung near the bottom of the ladder, and almost everything that follows downstream is shaped by it.

The Women in the Workplace 2025 study, produced by McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.org and now in its eleventh year, found that for every one hundred men promoted from entry level into a first management role, only ninety-three women were promoted alongside them. That gap may sound modest in a single year, but its effects compound relentlessly. Because fewer women make that first step, the pool of women eligible for the next promotion is already smaller, and the disadvantage accumulates at every subsequent level. By the time you reach senior leadership, the shortage of women is not mainly a story about the executive suite. It is the mathematical residue of a gap that opened years earlier and was never closed.

The Gap Widens for Women of Color

The aggregate figure also conceals a sharper disparity. The same research found that for every hundred men promoted to manager, only 82 Latina and Asian women and 60 Black women advanced at that first critical step. For these groups, the broken rung is not a hairline fracture but a substantial structural break, and it helps explain why representation thins so dramatically at each successive level of seniority. Any organization serious about leadership diversity at the top has to reckon with the arithmetic at the bottom, because the senior pipeline can only ever be as deep as the entry-level promotions that feed it.

Ambition Is Not the Missing Ingredient

One finding from the most recent report deserves particular attention because it cuts against a common and convenient explanation. For the first time in the study's history, women reported being somewhat less likely than men to want a promotion, 80 percent compared with 86 percent. It would be easy to read that as evidence that the pipeline problem is one of preference rather than structure. The researchers found the opposite. When women received equal career support, the ambition gap disappeared entirely. The difference in stated ambition was a downstream effect of unequal sponsorship and uneven encouragement, not an independent cause. Women calibrate their stated ambition to the support they actually experience, which means the apparent preference gap is itself a symptom of the structural one.

Data from McKinsey & Company's Women in the Workplace 2025 report comparing ambition trends and promotion interest between demographics.

For senior leaders, the implication is both clarifying and demanding. The most effective place to intervene is not the high-profile diversity initiative aimed at the executive level, where the numbers are smallest, and the pipeline is already constrained. It is the unglamorous, consequential work of ensuring that the first promotion into management is awarded with genuine equity, supported by sponsorship that is distributed deliberately rather than left to the informal networks that tend to advantage those who already resemble the people in power. Fix the rung, and the ladder above it begins, slowly, to repair itself. The question worth examining with candor is whether your own first-level promotions would survive that kind of scrutiny.