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 for National Statistics tells a similar story.

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 without the title and pay.

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 exactly the same level, managers tend to prioritize kindness more when giving feedback to women than when giving the same feedback to men.

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 just seen it this morning with Jacinda Ardern…” said Arancha Gonzalez Laya, Dean, The Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA), Sciences Po, during the session at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting.

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 workplace conversation about Inclusive Culture.

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 far less power and influence, highlighting the limitations of gender diversity and the perceived value of women in these organizations.

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.

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).

We work with professional women all the time on their career negotiations: training them, advising their employers, and studying their successes and pitfalls.