I found out I was pregnant with my daughter on International Women’s Day this year. My hope for her—like the hopes of all parents—is to give her the entire world. But the world she’ll be born into next month is still far from an equitable place for women—especially from my particular vantage point. I’ve spent over a decade in a career focused on advancing women in the workplace, and research shows that there is still significant work to be done.
More specifically, it will take 48 years for the representation of white women and women of color in senior leadership in corporate workplaces to reflect their share of the US population, according to the latest data from Lean In and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report.
The past decade has seen some meaningful improvements in women’s advancement—women today make up 29% of c-suite positions, compared to just 17% in 2015. But that progress is fragile. Most of those gains came from employers adding new c-level roles, rather than women gaining ground in existing ones—a pattern that isn’t sustainable for the long term. And the fundamental problems on the path to leadership have gone largely unchanged: Women still lag behind men in entry-level roles, and are still promoted to manager at lower rates than men.
Repairing these early headwinds up the corporate ladder requires organizations to both broaden and deepen their focus. Programs to help women’s career development, like mentorship, sponsorship, and leadership coaching, are valuable, but not enough. As we outline in this year’s report, accelerating the pace of women’s progress in the workplace means changing the culture of work on a systemic level. To do this effectively, companies need to simultaneously shift the mindsets and behaviors of managers, senior leaders, and employees alike, with the goal of making them part of the solution.
Here are three ways organizations can get everyone on board:
Revamp how manager success is measured.
Managers are on the frontlines of employee experience and, in turn, have outsized power over the trajectories of the people on their teams. But our report found that just over a third of managers are evaluated on how well they support employee development and wellbeing, and just over half on how well they support inclusion—despite the fact that a majority feel more pressure from their organizations in those areas than they did a few years ago.
This misalignment between managers’ priorities and their performance metrics is to everyone’s detriment. Involving them as partners in gender equity means not only expecting them to do the necessary work, but recognizing and rewarding them for it. With this in mind, companies should:
- Look for opportunities to reduce managers’ individual workloads so they have more time for development of the people on their teams. The software company Canva, for example, refers to its managers as “coaches” to emphasize that they’re responsible for the success of the people they manage as well as the quality of the work product.
- Include support for their reports as one component of how their own performance is measured. This can be assessed by including upward and peer feedback performance evaluations, as well as looking at their reports’ development of new skills, participation in business-critical projects, and promotions.
- Consistently solicit managers’ feedback on new policies and practices and how to improve them. A dedicated Slack channel for managers, manager-specific town hall meetings, and surveys sent to managers at a regular cadence are all ways to accomplish this effectively. Many studies show that when companies allow managers to give feedback and shape policy, it helps keep them motivated and makes any company initiatives more likely to succeed. In contrast, when companies give top-down directions to managers and don’t invite their input, initiatives are more likely to fail.
Create institutional support for men’s allyship.
Because men make up at least half the workforce and hold a majority of leadership positions, their support is critical to advancing women and fostering inclusion. But most senior-level men have an overly optimistic view of the state of women at work, according to our report, and commitment to gender diversity remains relatively low among men overall. Here are some strategies companies can use to make men into stronger, more committed allies:
- Audit their policies and programs to ensure they support equity for employees of all genders. For example, offering equal parental leave to all parents regardless of gender counteracts any implicit assumption that women will shoulder the bulk of the caregiving load. Employers can also take steps in benefits-related communication to encourage men to take advantage of offerings they might not see as being for them—for instance, by including stories from men in leadership who have taken their full leave about how it benefited their family and their own wellbeing.
- Codify what it means to be an ally. Meg Warren, an associate professor of management at Western Washington University who studies workplace allyship and inclusion, has suggested employers create an allyship document in the same vein as a culture document, specifying what allyship means and the concrete behaviors that support it. Workplaces can also support the creation of allyship groups for men in the same way they would sponsor employee resource groups, making it clear that allyship is aligned with company priorities and further motivating men to be committed to the issue.
Tell a more powerful story that gives all employees a stake in the outcome.
Despite important progress, employees still struggle to identify workplace bias, and are no more likely to identify or act as allies than they were four years ago. It’s clear that employers don’t just need new ways of working; they need new rhetoric, too. To change employees’ hearts and minds in a way that will encourage them to show up differently, companies should:
- Give employees the “why” behind efforts to advance women, including sharing data on the downsides of inaction, such as lost talent or reduced innovation. Decades of research show that this is an essential first step to get employees buy-in on any change initiative—and that hearing the likely downsides of inaction is usually more motivating than hearing about potential upsides.
- Be explicit about what employees have to gain personally by supporting women’s advancement. Research has found that people are more likely to buy into an organizational change when they have a clear understanding of how it affects them directly. When unveiling a new system to de-bias performance reviews, for example, don’t just frame the change as one meant to make promotions more equitable; explain that everyone has a better understanding of how to advance when there are practices in place to make promotions fair.
- Be transparent about how difficult this work can be. One study published last year found that employees are more motivated to work towards diversity, equity, and inclusion goals when leaders acknowledge that diversity goals are hard to achieve. Leaders should emphasize that “diversity is valuable for organizations, but only if you overcome the challenges—if everyone learns to take other people’s perspectives, or if people learn to successfully navigate the tensions that might arise,” explained study author Lisa Leslie, a professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Highlighting the level of effort needed over the long term helps employees calibrate their expectations and prepares employees for the hard work that lies ahead.
I would be remiss not to mention the critical work that needs to simultaneously happen at home: Women still shoulder more than their share of the caregiving load, and still do far more housework than men, according to our report. Today, roughly four in 10 women with partners say they are responsible for most or all of the housework—the same as in 2016. And it’s clear that we can’t get to equality in the workplace without also addressing the uneven distribution of labor at home.
As I think of my daughter rising through the ranks of the workplace of the future, my hope is that we can use this knowledge to accelerate progress well before she gets there. Over the last decade, our data prove that women have remained highly ambitious and deeply committed to work. We owe it to the next generation to create a working world where that ambition and commitment are rewarded.
Caroline Fairchild is editor in chief and VP of research and education at LeanIn.Org. She is also a co-author of Women in the Workplace, the largest study on the state of women in corporate America. Before Lean In, Caroline was one of the first journalists hired to launch LinkedIn News, where she led coverage of women in the workplace. At Fortune, she founded and wrote The Broadsheet, a popular daily newsletter on women leaders.