Why Are There So Few Women in Leadership?

While women and men share a nearly even split of the U.S. workforce, things don’t look so even at the top of the country’s org charts. According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study from Lean In and McKinsey & Company, women are underrepresented at every level of leadership, with the ratio getting worse the higher you go up the corporate ladder: about 40% of managers and senior managers are women, but 35% of vice presidents, 32% of senior VPs, and only 29% of the C-suite are women.

According to Mary Noble-Tolla, Head of Education at Lean In, there are currently zero industries that have more women than men in leadership.

There are many deep-seated reasons why this gender leadership gap exists, and it starts to become visible at the “broken rung,” a phenomenon that’s crucial to understanding where things start to get off track.

Key Takeaways

• The lack of women in leadership can in part be attributed to “the broken rung,” which is the gap in promotion rates between men and women at the first step up from entry-level to manager.
• Sponsorship gaps, unclear and unequal performance review practices, caregiver bias, the motherhood penalty, and flexibility stigma are all contributors to the broken rung, and these issues persistent at the subsequent steps to higher levels of leadership
• Having women in leadership has been shown to benefit all employees, and companies that have gender-diverse leadership teams tend to outperform ones that don’t.

What is the “broken rung”?

In keeping with the corporate ladder metaphor, researchers with McKinsey and Lean In have identified a phenomenon called the “broken rung” that plays a large role in explaining why women are underrepresented in leadership positions. Simply put, the broken rung is the gap in promotion rates between men and women at the first step from entry-level to manager, which breaks the pipeline to senior leadership early on. The most recent Women in the Workplace study found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women were promoted. This is worse for women of color: only 82 Asian women, 82 Latina women, and 60 Black women were promoted for every 100 men. If women are passed over for that initial chance to become a manager, it is difficult for them to ever catch up.

Noble-Tolla says that companies tend to focus on the wrong part of the organizational structure when they try to even out the number of men and women in leadership positions.

“Companies often will say, ‘Oh, we need more women who are visible in leadership,’ and so they'll focus on the director or VP level,” Noble-Tolla says. “But if you hardly have any women at [the early manager] level, then your pipeline's broken.”

The broken rung isn’t fixed by bringing in a woman CEO. There are many structural issues common throughout corporate America that contribute to the gender leadership gap.

4 Structural Barriers That Contribute to a Lack of Women in Leadership

Sponsorship Gaps

It’s becoming more and more clear that having a good sponsor who can not only give career advice but also advocate for a person’s growth within the company is crucial for that individual’s professional success.

This is not the same as a mentor, who offers general advice and support but may not have influence over promotions or stretch assignments. “Women really need access to sponsors: people who are senior [at the company] who advocate for you,” Noble-Tolla says. “Men are receiving more sponsorship than women.”

Ideally, companies will do the work to pair more junior employees with senior ones. “If you're a large company, it's helpful to have formal sponsorship programs,” Noble-Tolla says. “But even if you're a smaller company, it's a good idea to have something formalized in place to connect more senior employees with more junior ones and make that open to everyone.”

For those seeking a sponsor independently, it’s better to approach this in an organic rather than transactional way. Consistently doing good work, taking on tasks that directly help senior leaders, and making that work visible can drive potential sponsors’ interest in your career.

Unclear and Unequal Performance Review Practices

Unlike in school, work environments don’t always share clear expectations and success metrics so employees can understand what it takes to get to the next level.

“It’s partly about transparency and making people at every level aware of what they need to do — and making the steps to get there obvious to everyone,” Noble-Tolla says.

Even if that criteria is clear, bias persists in who gets the assignments and support that can help position people for a promotion.

“[Men] are more likely to be sponsored and offered high-visibility stretch opportunities, meaning projects that make you look really good,” Noble-Tolla says. “They are often offered these projects without ever asking for them.

Plus, promotion rates don’t always track with performance review results; On average, women receive higher performance ratings, but men are promoted more often — and women are more likely to be penalized when they ask for a promotion.

Noble-Tolla emphasizes that, in performance reviews, men are more likely to be described in concrete terms about the work they’ve done, while women tend to receive “shorter, vaguer assessments where people describe them in terms of traits, like ‘confidence’ or presence,” Noble-Tolla says.

A 2020 study found that when companies created clear evaluation criteria—and, crucially, actually trained managers to use them consistently — subjective comments about women in their reviews dropped significantly.

The Motherhood Penalty and Caregiver Bias

The "motherhood penalty” is the tendency for women's pay, hiring prospects, and promotion rates to drop after becoming mothers, because many people incorrectly assume that their ambition will drop after having kids. Meanwhile, men may receive a “fatherhood bonus” after having children because they are viewed as more stable or hardworking.

Not every woman is, or wants to be, a caregiver or mother, but that doesn’t prevent them from facing the motherhood penalty. Studies have found that women job applicants who mention wanting to have children or even just mention they’re recently married are more likely to receive an offer for temporary work than a full-time job.

When a family does come into the picture — whether it’s children or another relative who needs caregiver support — it’s true that women are more likely to leave the workforce. “It's often not because they love the idea, it's because it's really hard to pay for care and they often make less than their husbands, because we still have the pay gap,” Noble-Tolla says. “So it makes more sense for them to be the ones who leave work or who step back from work.”

Even if they eventually return to work, that gap in work history can make it harder for a woman to jump back up over the broken rungs on the way to leadership.

Flexibility Stigma

Flexibility stigma is the unfounded belief that employees who make use of flexible work options are less committed to their jobs.

This affects women more acutely, because they are more likely to take advantage of flexible work arrangements due to their disproportionate share of caregiving responsibilities — and the stigma seems to hit them harder. The report found that “women who work remotely most of the time are less likely to have a sponsor and far less likely to have been promoted in the last two years than women who work mostly on site.” Men, however, do not have these problems: Male remote workers reported having similar levels of sponsorship and promotions as their in-office counterparts. Entry-level women who work remotely are about 1.5 times less likely to be promoted than people in the office. This is not the case for entry-level men.

What are the benefits of having women in leadership?

Having equal opportunity to be promoted provides obvious benefits — like higher pay, more responsibility, and/or additional vacation time — for the women who want the job, but there are upsides for the company too. “There are so many studies that show companies that have an equal mix of women and men tend to perform better,” Noble-Tolla says. Women tend to inspire employees to believe in a company’s mission, improve team collaboration, and help get rid of bias in the workplace — or at least make other employees feel like they’re being treated fairly.

A widely-cited 2023 study by BlackRock found that it’s actually an even mix that makes for the most success: companies with the most diverse workforce outperformed the least diverse by an average of 29% per year. Sounds like a pretty solid incentive to set those clear performance review goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of CEOs are women?

As of 2026, 11% of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs.

What is the broken rung and why does it matter?

The broken rung is the gap in promotion rates between men and women at the first step from entry-level to manager, which breaks the pipeline to senior leadership early on

What prevents women from leadership roles?

There are many common structural issues that can make it more difficult for women to grow at work including sponsorship gaps, unclear and unequal performance review practices, caregiver bias, the motherhood penalty, and flexibility stigma.

What are the benefits of having women in leadership?

In addition to the obvious benefits for women, studies have shown that companies with an equal mix of men and women in leadership tend to outperform the ones where the top of the org chart is not gender diverse.

^Endnotes

1. For a review of research see Carol T. Kulik, Isabel Metz, and Jill A. Gould, “In the Company of Women: The Well-Being Consequences of Working with (and for) women,” in Handbook on Well-Being of Working Women, ed. Mary L. Connerley and Jiyun Wu (New York: Springer, 2016), 189; Sarah Dinolfo, Christine Silva, and Nancy M. Carter, High-Potentials in the Pipeline: Leaders Pay it Forward, Catalyst (2012); K. E. O’Brien, A. Biga, S.R. Kessler, and T.D Allen, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Gender Differences in Mentoring,” Journal of Management 36, no. 2, (2010): 537–554, http://jom.sagepub.com/content/36/2/537.short.
2. Romila Singh, Belle Rose Ragins, and Phyllis Tharenou, “Who Gets a Mentor? A Longitudinal Assessment of the Rising Star Hypothesis,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 74, no. 1 (2009): 11–17; and Tammy D. Allen, Mark L. Poteet, and Joyce E. A. Russell, “Protégé Selection by Mentors: What Makes the Difference?,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 21, no. 3 (2000): 271–82.
3. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace 2019 (September 2019), http://womenintheworkplace.com/ui/pdfs/Women_in_the_Workplace_2019.pdf?v=5.
4. Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard, “Research: Vague Feedback Is Holding Women Back,” Harvard Business Review, April 29, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/research-vague-feedback-is-holding-women-back.
5. Ibid.
6. Sylvia Ann Hewlett et al., The Sponsor Effect: Breaking Through the Last Glass Ceiling, a Harvard Business Review Research Report (December 2010), 9–11, http://30percentclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Sponsor-Effect.pdf