Initiative Category: WiS

How Can Employers Prevent the Outpouring of Female Talent?

For women in the workplace, it’s becoming clear that the post-pandemic era offers good news and bad news. After suffering disproportionately high job losses at the height of Covid, data from the US’s National Women’s Law Center shows that female employment is on the rise – and the UK’s Office…

‘Very rarely is it as good as it seems’: Black Women in Leadership Are Finding Themselves on the ‘Glass Cliff’

Kyra Kyles recalls the time early in her career when an abrupt staffing change at her communications job caused managers to look to her to fill a leadership role. Kyles said she knew she could handle the promotion. In fact, Kyles had already been performing some of the job responsibilities…

Women Get “Nicer” Feedback — & It Holds Them Back

Constructive feedback is essential for anyone’s growth. But as a manager, it can be challenging to strike a fair, consistent balance between being candid and considerate when giving that feedback to different team members. Specifically, in our recent research, we found that even if their male and female employees perform at…

Davos 2023: This Is How To Get More Women Into Positions of Power

On the same day the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, stepped down saying she “no longer had enough in the tank to do the job justice”, women leaders met in Davos to discuss how to reach gender parity in leadership. “Power is very hostile to women, we have…

You Should Smile More: How to Dismantle Gender Bias in the Workplace

Dawn Hudson, Angelique Bellmer Krembs, Katie Lacey, Lori Tauber Marcus, Cie Nicholson and Mitzi Short call themselves The Band of Sisters. They are six C-suite women that met over a few decades at PepsiCo and now have a collective resume that spans 29 industries. They want to start a new…

Gender Diversity in the C-Suite

In Russell Reynolds Associates’ analysis of the top 100 companies in the S&P500 (referred to as the S&P100 in this report), we found that men are 2.5x more likely than women to be executives in the top leadership teams. The roles in which women are well-represented are those that hold…

50 Women CEOs Now… and Counting?

50 Women CEOs Now... and Counting? Back in 1972, Katharine Graham became the first female CEO at a Fortune 500 firm when she took over The Washington Post. As recently as 2017, there were only 32 women running the nation’s biggest firms. On January 1, five more women became CEOs, bringing…

Author Talks: Dismantling double standards in business with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC, about her new book When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them (Simon & Schuster, October 2022). Boorstin spent the pandemic lockdown examining the management styles of more than 60 female CEOs who helm leading companies in healthcare, beauty, biotech, and more.

3 Negotiation Myths Still Harming Women’s Careers

We work with professional women all the time on their career negotiations: training them, advising their employers, and studying their successes and pitfalls. One of us (Kathryn) is a negotiation coach and trainer and the other (Hannah) is a scholar and educator.

‘It’s a disastrous situation’: Women leaders are leaving companies at the highest rate ever

For women in management, there’s never been a better time to quit. Women leaders are leaving their companies at the highest rate ever, and the gap between women and men in senior roles quitting their jobs is the largest it’s ever been, according to new data from LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company, which started tracking these numbers in 2015.