McKinsey and Company, in partnership with LeanIn.org, publishes its "Women in the Workplace" report annually. The 2019 edition — the fifth in the series — drew on the largest dataset assembled to that point on the topic and introduced the "broken rung" framing that has since become a standard reference point in the corporate gender-equity literature. Its findings on the technology sector in particular attracted substantial attention: women were under-represented at every level of corporate hierarchies, with the gap widening at each successive level, and the report argued that the specific bottleneck at the first promotion step from individual contributor to manager was more consequential than the glass ceiling at the top.
The McKinsey report is worth reading carefully. It is rigorous by the standards of large-scale corporate survey research, and its sample size allows for some segmentation by race, industry, and career level that smaller studies cannot support. It has genuine things to say about the conditions facing women in technology companies, and the "broken rung" finding has held up well against subsequent research. The appropriate response to it is not dismissal but critique — identifying what it measures and what it does not, and being clear about the population whose experience it actually describes.
Who Is in the McKinsey Sample
The most fundamental limitation of the McKinsey Women in the Workplace report is its sample frame: large corporations. The 279 companies surveyed were not randomly selected from all US employers but were organisations that chose to participate, skewing toward companies with HR departments of sufficient sophistication to engage with a structured survey of this kind. The population of employees described by the report is disproportionately large-company, predominantly US, and corporate rather than academic or government.
Women in STEM who work in the corporate technology sector are represented. Women in STEM who work in universities, government laboratories, national laboratories, non-profit research institutes, and international research organisations — which is to say, a large fraction of the world's actual scientists and engineers — are not represented at all. The report's findings about the first step to manager, about sponsorship, about microaggressions in the workplace, all pertain to a corporate employment context that is structurally different from academic science in ways that matter for the mechanisms generating gender inequity.
Academic Science: A Different Structure
The structure of academic science careers is not well captured by the corporate hierarchical model that underpins the McKinsey analysis. In corporate employment, there is a progression from individual contributor through management levels to executive roles, and the gender gap at each transition is measurable in a way that the McKinsey methodology can handle. In academic science, the career structure is different: postdoctoral researcher to assistant professor to associate professor to full professor is a progression, but the mechanisms governing each transition are different from corporate promotions. Tenure decisions are made by committees applying academic criteria that have their own gender-equity literature. Grant decisions are made by review panels. Invitations to speak at conferences are extended through informal networks. None of these are captured in the McKinsey survey.
The research literature on gender equity specifically in academic science — which includes decades of work on peer review bias, hiring committee decision processes, grant allocation, and citation patterns — tells a story that is consistent with the McKinsey findings in some respects (informal networks favour men, evaluation criteria encode male career patterns) but that has its own mechanisms and dynamics. The McKinsey report is not a guide to those mechanisms; the AAUW's "Solving the Equation," the NSF ADVANCE programme's research outputs, and the National Academies' recent work on sexual harassment in academia are closer to the relevant literature.
The Technology Sector Data: What the Report Does Show
Within its own scope — corporate technology companies — the McKinsey 2018 report had specific findings worth noting. The technology industry's representation numbers were worse than the corporate average for several diversity dimensions, not only gender. Women held approximately 20 percent of C-suite positions at technology companies in the sample, below the cross-industry average. The "broken rung" finding was particularly acute in technology: women were being promoted from individual contributor to first-level manager at lower rates than men in tech, and this gap at the first promotion step explained more of the senior-level gender gap than any single subsequent transition.
The report also documented the experience of women of colour in technology companies specifically, showing that the combination of race and gender produced experiences of exclusion and marginalisation that differed from those of white women and were not captured by gender-disaggregated data alone. This intersectional dimension was one of the stronger features of the 2018 edition relative to earlier iterations of the report.
The International Absence
Perhaps the most significant limitation of the McKinsey Women in the Workplace report from WIGSAT's perspective is its almost exclusive US focus. The international dimensions of women's workplace experience in science and technology — the very different conditions facing women researchers in India, Brazil, Germany, Kenya, or Japan — are entirely absent from the McKinsey analysis. The report's findings may or may not generalise across national contexts, but the report makes no attempt to assess whether they do.
For international policymakers, development organisations, and advocacy groups working on women in STEM globally, the McKinsey report is a data source about US corporate employment — no more, no less. Treating it as a global benchmark, as some international discussions of women in tech do, imports a set of US-specific corporate-context assumptions that may not apply.
What Should Be Cited Instead
For those working on women in academic STEM, the more relevant data sources are institution-specific. NSF's biennial Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering report covers the US research workforce, disaggregated by field and career stage, with methodological transparency about what it does and does not measure. The OECD's Education at a Glance and Main Science and Technology Indicators provide international comparative data. The CRA Taulbee Survey covers academic computer science specifically. The European Commission's She Figures report provides EU-wide data on women researchers by field and career stage.
The AAUW's research, including "Solving the Equation" (2015) and the ongoing "The STEM Gap" series, is specifically oriented toward the academic and research-career dimensions of the women-in-STEM question in ways that the McKinsey report is not. These are the sources that should inform policy for women in STEM research careers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the McKinsey Women in the Workplace report?
An annual survey research report published by McKinsey and Company in partnership with LeanIn.org since 2015, covering women's representation and experience in US corporations. The 2019 edition, which introduced the "broken rung" framing, drew on data from hundreds of participating companies and tens of thousands of employee surveys.
Why is the McKinsey report insufficient for understanding women's experience in research science?
The report's sample consists of large US corporations; academic scientists, government researchers, and international research professionals are not represented. The corporate promotion hierarchy that underpins the report's analysis is structurally different from academic career processes. The report cannot speak to tenure decisions, grant review, citation patterns, or the other mechanisms through which gender inequity operates in research settings.
What data sources are more appropriate for women in STEM research careers?
NSF's Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities report covers the US research workforce. The CRA Taulbee Survey covers academic CS. OECD Education at a Glance and the European Commission's She Figures provide international comparative data. AAUW's research is specifically oriented toward academic STEM careers. These are the appropriate sources for policy on women in research.
← The NCWIT Scorecard 2015 | Grace Hopper Celebration 2018 →