Men receive more career promotions than women – 10/05/2023 – Market

Women want to be leaders in the workplace, but employers still sideline them in favor of their male colleagues.

For every 100 men promoted to management positions in 2022, only 87 women received the same advancement, according to LeanIn.Org’s “Women in the Workplace” report by Sheryl Sandberg and McKinsey & Co. The number of women promoted increased slightly — there were 86 in 2021 —, but they are still being ignored, despite asking for promotions at the same rate as men, the survey found.

One of the reasons for this disparity is the way men and women usually receive their promotions. “We promote men based on their potential, while women need to have proven it before,” Sandberg said in an interview. “You can’t prove you can be a manager until you become a manager.”

The numbers are even worse for black women, who are being promoted at the lowest rate in at least five years compared to men. Just 54 Black women were promoted last year for every 100 men, compared with 96 in 2021, according to the report, which began collecting racial data from respondents in 2018. The number is now closer to the 58 seen in 2018 and 2019, before the Black Lives Matter protests led most companies to promise to hire more non-white people.

The report, based on research from 276 companies in the US and Canada and including a survey of more than 27,000 employees at 33 companies, found that men also benefit disproportionately from in-person work compared to women. “Men report that when they are in the workplace, they receive more mentoring and sponsorship than women. They feel more ‘in the know,'” said Rachel Thomas, co-founder and CEO of LeanIn.Org.

If this is already happening when everyone is in the office, the challenge will be to ensure this doesn’t happen on an even larger scale in a hybrid work environment. Thomas suggested that companies need to better train managers to evaluate workers on flexible schedules and that performance reviews need to be redesigned to emphasize results, not when and where work is performed.

“The perception that it’s women who are lazy, that it’s women who are dissatisfied, that it’s women who demand flexibility rather than how that flexibility can drive ambition is really unfortunate,” said Sandberg, Meta’s former chief operating officer.

The report found that women are more ambitious than before the pandemic, with around 80% saying they would like a promotion, compared to 70% in 2019.