The last generation of workplace innovations—policies to support women with
young children, networks to help women navigate their careers, formal
sponsorship programs to ensure professional development—broke down structural
barriers holding women back. The next frontier is toppling invisible barriers:
mind-sets widely held by managers, men and women alike, that are rarely
acknowledged but block the way.

When senior leaders commit themselves to gender diversity, they really mean
it—but in the heat of the moment, deeply entrenched beliefs cause old forms of
behavior to resurface. All too often in our experience, executives perceive
women as a greater risk for senior positions, fail to give women tough feedback
that would help them grow, or hesitate to offer working mothers opportunities
that come with more travel and stress. Not surprisingly, a survey we conducted
earlier this year indicated that although a majority of women who make it to
senior roles have a real desire to lead, few think they have meaningful support
to do so, and even fewer think they’re in line to move up.

Our ideas for breaking this cycle are directional, not definitive. They rest
on our experience in the trenches with senior executives, on discussions with 30
diversity experts, and on the reflections of leaders we’ve interviewed at
companies that have been on this journey for years. These companies include
Pitney Bowes, 38 percent of whose vice presidents are women; Shell, where more
than a quarter of all supervisors and professional staff worldwide are women;
and Time Warner, where more than 40 percent of the senior executives in its
operating divisions are women and where the share of women in senior roles has
jumped 30 percent in the past six years. Great progress, but even these three
companies are the first to admit how much further they have to go.

Their collective experience suggests to us that real progress requires
systemwide change driven by a hard-edged approach, including targets ensuring
that women are at least considered for advancement, the rigorous application of
data in performance dialogues to overcome problematic mind-sets, and genuine
sponsorship. Committed senior leaders are of course central to such efforts,
which can take many years. We hope our suggestions, and the real-life examples
that illustrate them, will stir up your thinking about how to confront the
silent but potent beliefs that probably are undermining women in your
organization right now.

Invisible, unconscious, and in the way

For evidence of the problem, look no further than the blocked, leaky
corporate-talent pipeline: women account for roughly 53 percent of entry-level
professional employees in the largest US industrial corporations, our research
shows.¹ But according to
Catalyst, a leading advocacy group for women, they hold only 37 percent of
middle-management positions, 28 percent of vice-president and senior-managerial
roles, and 14 percent of seats on executive committees. McKinsey research shows
similar numbers for women on executive committees outside the United States—from
a high of 17 percent in Sweden to just 2 percent in Germany and India.² Our analysis further reveals
that at every step along the US pipeline, the odds of advancement for men are
about twice those for women. And nearly four times as many men as women at large
companies make the jump from the executive committee to CEO.³

To understand what’s going on, look to the words that appeared most
frequently in open-ended responses to our recent survey as explanations for poor
retention and promotion of women: “politics,” “management,” “the company,”
“people,” and “the organization.” These forces manifest themselves in myriad
ways. We’ve all heard endless variations on the mind-sets that set women up for
failure:

“She’s too aggressive” (or “too passive”). Whether a woman is
perceived as aggressive or passive, that’s different from the judgment a man
would face, and she often doesn’t receive the coaching a man would to help her
assimilate into the company’s culture.

“I don’t want to tell Bob he didn’t get that job.” There’s a limited
pool of senior positions, and leaders are not comfortable telling protégés they
have groomed for years that someone else is getting the spot.

“I don’t know how to talk to or mentor her.” Men tend to sponsor other
men, find it harder to build relationships with people when they share fewer
common interests, and sometimes are nervous about forging a close relationship
that could seem inappropriate.

“If I put a woman in that role and she fails, it’ll set back all
women.” Mind-sets like this one inadvertently treat men as individuals and
women as representative of their whole gender.

“A woman isn’t right for that role.” Long-held stereotypes about the
relative strengths of men and women survive, at least in vestigial form.

In the face of these silent but potent forces, it’s little wonder the careers
of many promising women die on the vine. Slowly but surely—despite the best
intentions of HR departments and individual executives—the experience of women
starts to diverge from that of their male peers: Less opportunity for
professional growth. Unintended performance bias and softer feedback. Fewer
sponsors offering fewer opportunities and less advocacy. Lowered ambition.
Greater satisfaction with staying put. Attrition and a fresh start at a
different company.⁴

A word about the role women play in this vicious cycle: they start out
ambitious. Most young women, like young men, hope to move to the next level, and
women who reach more senior levels retain that ambition. That said,
women also turn down advancement opportunities for varied reasons, ranging from
commitments outside work to risk aversion for positions that demand new skills
to a desire to stay put in roles that provide personal meaning. In addition,
mothers with more than one child are much more satisfied with staying put, our
survey shows, though they remain highly confident about their performance and
abilities.