The biggest inequity in advancement remains the broken rung—the very first step up into a manager position. Proportionally, for every 100 men we see leap forward, only 87 women advance. And if you’re a woman of color, it’s 73. If you’re a Black woman, it’s only 54. And it starts at the very beginning of a career. The challenge with this is that it sets up a slower and harder pathway to progress forward. Companies just don’t recover from that, and it’s what we see in the pipeline. The reason we only have 28 percent women in the C-suite is because we aren’t building that leadership path at the very beginning of [women’s] careers, to create a pool of talent that would be available and ready for those opportunities when they open up.
