A slew of recent studies suggests that after decades of progress, men and women are becoming less equal in the workplace. This raises big questions for all of us. If left unchecked this trend will have serious consequences; and not just for women.
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The figures are eye-catching and they undermine the assumption that the arc of history will always bends towards equality. Last year, just 38% of new S&P 500 board seats were awarded to women, down from 47% where it stood at its 2020 peak. McKinsey’s recent Women in the Workplace report found that while 86% of men want promotion, only 80% of women do. The gap is relatively small, but the 86% stayed constant for men, while it’s declining for women. It’s the first time in the report’s eleven-year history that women have expressed lower desire for promotion than men.
Before we submit to the trope that women are somehow less motivated than men, we should note that interviews with women participating in the research paint a quite different picture. Women are every bit as focused, committed and engaged. Where the gap emerges is specifically around the desirability of being promoted to the next level.
Why are we now seeing this small but significant reversal of the trend towards equality? There is no shortage of hypotheses. One is that the climate seems to be turning against DEI initiatives. Another explanation is that we are seeing the “end of easy gains.” Several decades of equal opportunities legislation on both sides of the Atlantic has helped to close the gap. But inevitably, scope for further gains through legislation diminishes. A third potential explanation is that because corporations have become flatter in structure, there are fewer opportunities for promotion and therefore competition intensifies. The nature of this competition – the hypothesis goes – tends to favour men rather than women.
Or perhaps it’s because women are having children later in the developed world. In many OECD countries the average age of the first child is now over 32; something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The suggestion is that childbirth is now more likely to clash with the age at which that big-step promotion opportunity tends to arise.
While many of these hypotheses may at least offer a partial explanation, all feel ultimately unsatisfactory. It seems unlikely that starting a family in one’s twenties would have caused career progression to accelerate for that generation of women. Similarly, the end-of-easy-gains argument may explain why progress is not as rapid, but it would not explain a reversal. While organisations may be investing less in DEI, it seems unlikely that this is enough to reverse a trend.
If we want to uncover the most meaningful explanation, we need to look at the more comprehensive picture beyond simple gender equality. There is another group in society who are voicing their reluctance to climb the conventional corporate ladder.
According to the 2025 Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which surveyed 24,000 young people across 44 countries, only 6% of Gen Z say their primary career goal is to reach a senior leadership position.
A study from Robert Walters – “Conscious Unbossing”, paints a similar picture among Gen Z professionals: 52% do not want to become middle managers; and 72% would rather progress as specialists than manage people. 69% describe middle management as “high stress, low reward”.
This doesn’t mean that women and young people don’t want success. Rather, it paints a picture of women and young people looking up the corporate ladder and finding what they see increasingly unappealing.
The story of Ana, a bright 40-something middle manager, who attended one of our workshops, illustrates the sort of situation in which many women find themselves. At her previous employer (an investment bank) during a performance review, Ana was informed that her failure to participate in a voluntary community program would likely count against her. Resisting the temptation to point out that the key word was “voluntary” in that sentence, Ana explained to her panel of young male colleagues, that there were few things that she would have preferred to do than to payback something to the community over the weekend. Indeed, before becoming a mum Ana had frequently been involved with volunteering. However, as a full-time working mother with two young children plus elder care responsibilities, the prospect of giving up weekends to voluntary work was simply out of scope for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, Ana suspected that it’s in these extra-curricular situations that the true networking and profile-raising happens. In a competitive marketplace for promotion slots, the culture of visibility and presenteeism really comes into play. And hard-working mothers like Ana are on a hiding to nothing.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the trend for hybrid working, rather than helping women, has exacerbated the situation. Both Ana and her husband took advantage of having the latitude to work from home more frequently. To over-stretched couples with young kids, this can often feel like a real boon. But while both parents are equally committed to their work, Ana tended to find herself being the one who took on those extra discretionary household tasks, while her husband scarcely looked up from his laptop. The scenario seemed to be consistent with most mixed-sex couples to whom we talked. While both partners are working from home, it tends to be the women who pick up on those small routine household tasks.
The world of work that emerges is one of increasingly intense competition for fewer promotion opportunities, where visibility, presenteeism, networking and politics will be what counts. The organisation’s social capital and sense of social cohesion suffer.
All this presages a world where there are fewer women, young people and minorities holding senior positions in organisations. Social scientists talk of the “seniorization” of work. Put simply, as AI does much of the lower-value cognitive work, the workforce becomes far smaller and more intensely concentrated into senior positions. The risk is that we go back to the future of corporations being run by small groups of middle-aged, middle-class white men, attempting to serve a diverse marketplace and a community that they can’t hope to understand.
What’s more, there’s a further price to pay for reduced diversity at the top of organisations. Where people are the same, they tend to think the same. Thinking styles become uniform and perspectives narrow. Diverse groups are more likely to think in diverse ways. And cognitive diversity has a strong tendency to outperform cognitive uniformity.
In a landmark 12-year longitudinal study published in the Harvard Business Review, researchers Alison Reynolds and David Lewis found that teams with high cognitive diversity completed complex, uncertain business challenges significantly faster than cognitively uniform teams.
A foundational mathematical framework published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Lu Hong and Scott Page may help to explain why cognitive diversity outpaces raw expertise.
Hong and Page were able to demonstrate that under complex uncertain conditions, a group of diverse problem-solvers consistently outperforms a group of high-ability, like-minded experts. Experts from similar backgrounds tend to bring similar problem-solving tools to the table. Once the first expert hits a wall, the remaining uniform experts get stuck on the exact same obstacle. Cognitive diversity introduces different ways of thinking and looking at a problem, bypassing those mental blocks.
So, what’s to be done?
There’s a vital clue amid the data from the ambition-gap research: provide effective sponsorship or mentorship to women and the gender ambition gap disappears entirely.
Since the pandemic, organizations have radically cut back investment in this sort of employee development and pastoral care. Perhaps this is inevitable as those organisations grapple with the perfect storm of a stagnant economy, anxiety and uncertainty over AI, alongside societal changes such as hybrid working. But the evidence increasingly indicates that this is the wrong cut at precisely the wrong time.
The future will belong to organizations that create a working culture into which everybody, including women, Gen Z and minorities, finds the prospect of being promoted appealing and worth striving for. This means investing in coaching, mentorship, sponsorship and the sort of in-person leadership development that creates genuine social bonds and above all, a sense of connection with their colleagues and with their organization.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
