A woman who’s held several leadership roles and has decades of industry experience applies for a promotion. A male co-worker with fewer credentials and no managerial experience receives the role.
A Latina woman compares performance reviews with her white female counterpart and finds she was rated lower, despite performing better, and received a lower pay raise.
A woman striving to make partner finds that, because she needs to leave work at 5 p.m. to pick her kids up from daycare, she’s perceived as not working as hard as her male counterpart, so doesn’t receive the promotion.
A woman expresses an idea about the company’s new product line. Initially, the boss rejects her idea. Later, her male peers present the same idea, and the boss implements it without giving her credit for it.
Participation versus experience
Whether we attribute these scenarios to unconscious bias, discrimination or microaggressions, they happen frequently in the United States and globally.
The world has made strides toward gender parity, or equal representation. After all, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates women are participating in the workforce at near record levels. Since 1950, women’s labor participation rate (ages 16 and older) has increased by 68%, while men’s participation rate has decreased by nearly 22%.
Zeroing in on prime age labor statistics, BLS data indicates that 77.7% of women ages 25-54 were working or actively seeking work as of June 2025, which is the same percentage we saw in January 2025 and little changed from June 2024, when the rate was 77.9%. Men in the same age range were participating at an 89.4% rate as of June 2025, also little changed from June 2024’s 89.6%.
Women are certainly present in the workplace in greater numbers than ever. However, there’s still a gender gap — a disparity between men and women in opportunities, resources and treatment. Recent global, national and statewide studies reflect a lack of women in top leadership roles and in politics.
What’s more, company policies and practices often create barriers for women, and women often experience microaggressions and even sexual harassment in the workplace.
Global gender gap statistics
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 benchmarks the world’s gender parity in economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment for 148 global economies. The report shows global gender gap parity is up 3 percentage points over last year’s report, with the strongest gains seen in political empowerment.
In an interview with WEF’s head of public engagement, Saadia Zahidi, WEF managing director, said, “The world has closed 68.8% of the gender gap, but that number masks very different realities across the world.” Iceland leads the world for the 16th consecutive year, at 92.6% parity. Meanwhile, countries like Pakistan, Sudan, Chad, Iran and Guinea are below 60% parity.
The United States ranks 42nd, with an overall gender parity of 75.6%. The country moved up in ranking by one, and the total score went up by just 0.01.
There are also vast differences in the parity categories, Zahidi noted. Health and survival, and educational attainment, are very close to parity, but categories that involve “deploying that human capital,” she said, remain disparate for women.
Political empowerment shows the highest global gains among the 145 economies included in both 2024 to 2025 studies, improving by 0.7 percentage points, with economic participation and opportunity increasing 0.4 percentage points. However, these aspects of parity remain low, at 22.9% and 61%, respectively. Incidentally, high-performing Iceland has a political empowerment parity of 95.4% and an economic participation and opportunity parity of 79.8%.
Where access to health care and education may have been a challenge for women 50 years ago, these days global parity for health and survival is at 96.2%, and educational attainment is at 95.1%. In fact, women outpace men in higher education and occupy 41.2% of the global workforce, but only 28.8 % reach senior leadership — indicating a missed opportunity to apply women’s knowledge, according to the report.
In the United States, economic participation and opportunity shows 76.2% parity, educational attainment is at 100% (among 41 other countries), health and survival are at 97.3%, and political empowerment is at 29.1%.
Zahidi noted that people often see gender parity as a product of wealth, but that doesn’t reflect the full picture. “Resources matter, but it’s not only rich countries that can afford to invest in gender parity,” she said. “It’s countries that deploy the full breadth of their human capital that in the long term will grow more, will have more resilient societies and will have great prosperity for all their citizens.
“When it comes to the higher skill talent, many countries have at least gender-equal talent. So, if you’ve got that talent and you’re not doing enough to deploy that into the workforce, that’s where the gaps start emerging.”
WEF collaborated with LinkedIn to explore gender gaps in the workforce. Sue Duke, LinkedIn managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America, and vice president of global public policy, commented on the U.S. leadership results during an interview with WEF’s head of public engagement.
“We’ve gone forward less than 1% since 2020,” Duke said. In fact, LinkedIn data indicates that the percentage of U.S. women hired into senior leadership roles has declined from 41.4% in 2022 to 40.1% in 2024. While U.S. women hold 52% of entry-level positions, they hold just 34% of vice president positions and 27% of C-suite positions.
“The backsliding is coming at this time of economic uncertainty,” said Duke. “There’s been tons of studies that show that during these times of economic uncertainty, when there are more job applicants looking for fewer roles, we see a decline in women being hired into leadership roles. We do not see a decline in the number of women applying for leadership roles, but we see a shift in kinds of decisions that are made when there is pressure on the system.”
Duke called out two reasons for the decline of women in leadership roles. One is unconscious bias toward women in both internal promotions and external recruitment. Another is a lack of flexible work policies and caregiving resources. Since women often manage caregiving and household duties, this lack of flexibility can limit their career path progress.
“Where there is inequity, we have a tax on growth and competitiveness,” said Duke. “When we have these gaps at leadership levels, we have lower growth economies; it has an impact on productivity, on innovation, on employee engagement. If a country is not taking advantage of the full availability of human capital, that is going to cost that country.”
“It’s likely to take 123 years to get to parity, said Zahidi. “This is still too many generations away, and that is overall a loss for productivity, creativity, innovation and growth in our economies in addition to leading to unfair outcomes.”
U.S. women’s representation in the workplace
Women in the Workplace 2024, a report from McKinsey & Co. and Lean In, provides a national picture of women’s work experience. The report, which includes survey results from more than 280 human resources leaders and 15,000 employees, indicates that it will take almost 50 years to reach parity for all women in corporate America, and 22 years to reach parity for white women alone
This report zeroes in on experiences at work, while the global report considers other societal aspects like health and politics.
The report considers 10 years of data, as it first reported in 2015. It indicates progress in women’s representation at every level in organizations, including a 12 percentage-point gain in C-Suite positions (29% in 2024 versus 17% in 2015), a 7-percentage point increase in vice president positions (34% versus 27%) and a 5 percentage-point increase in director positions (37% versus 32%).
However, the report illuminates two issues with women’s representation. The first is that women of color are widely under-represented, holding just 7% of C-suite positions, 6% of senior vice president positions (versus 22% for white women) and 8% of vice president positions (versus 26% for white women). They’re even under-represented in entry-level positions, showing up at 19% versus 28% for white women.
Secondly, when compared with men’s representation, women remain under-represented across the corporate pipeline. Terry Barclay, chief executive officer for Inforum Michigan, said this under-representation is the biggest challenge women face in the workplace.
“In corporate America, the biggest challenge is what the McKinsey-Lean In Women in the Workplace report refers to as the ‘broken rung’ on the career ladder,” Barclay said.
From the get-go, women are at a disadvantage. While they hold 59% of bachelor’s degrees and represent 51% of the population, they make up only 48% of entry-level employees. Then, for every 100 men promoted to manager level, only 81 women were, creating a smaller pipeline for senior roles. In 2018, this number was only slightly lower, with 79 women promoted for every 100 men. With fewer women in manager roles comes fewer in director positions and higher.
The pipeline is not sustainable, because there’s a smaller pool of women to promote.
The picture is even bleaker for women of color. White men make up more than half of C-suite leaders, senior vice presidents and vice presidents, and almost half of directors and managers.
Meanwhile, despite nearly equal representation in entry-level positions, Asian men’s representation in the C-suite is more than double that of Asian women’s (6% versus 3%). Also, Latina women are vastly under-represented in entry level roles relative to their population, and Black women experience the greatest drop in representation as managers (3%), despite 6% represented at the entry level.
Staff versus line roles
The report notes that the “modest but meaningful gains” in vice president and senior vice president roles from 2018 to 2024 are because of their representation in staff versus line roles. Staff roles include human resources, information technology and other support functions, while line roles focus on core operations like product development that impact profit and loss. The time period showed no growth of women in line roles, but a 5 percentage-point increase in women in staff roles.
Why is this important? Because line roles are more likely to feed into C-suite positions.
“People have added women to senior leadership in staff roles, but if you’re looking for, ‘Where’s the CEO pipeline?’ You still don’t see it,” Lean In Founder and Board Chair Sheryl Sandberg said in a September 2024 CNBC Make It article.
The report finds women’s representation in C-suite roles even more precarious. From 2019 to 2024, women in C-suite roles increased, but those gains were mostly in staff, or support, functions. “The primary reason women’s representation increased was that companies, on average, added a staff role and were more likely to hire a woman into this new position,” the report states. “Since companies cannot add new staff roles indefinitely, this is not a viable path to parity.”
Michigan women in leadership
Inforum Michigan, an organization dedicated to accelerating careers for women and boosting talent pipelines for companies, conducted its own study of women in leadership roles, focusing on the largest publicly traded companies in Michigan. Women’s Leadership in Michigan Public Companies 2024, the eleventh in a series of reports on women in leadership, indicates that women occupy 26% of board seats for these public companies, and 18% of the highest-level paid executive positions. That’s up from the first report, which showed only 9.6% of women on boards and 7.1% in the top five compensated executive roles.
These initial numbers look promising. However, there’s still a leadership gender gap to overcome, given these statewide numbers, which mirror national results, said Barclay.
On public boards of directors, we saw 40% fewer women newly appointed—28 compared to 47—than two years ago. In senior leadership, women represented 18% of named executive officers, or those highest-paid, whose compensation must be disclosed. However, the report notes that a substantial number of companies had no women in these positions.
For the smallest companies in the study, labelled Tier 1, 42% had zero women as named executive officers. For medium-sized companies, labelled Tier 2, 38% had no women in these positions. And for the largest companies in the study, 58% had no women in these positions. “While there has been progress, there is still a need for greater gender diversity in executive leadership roles across all tiers of companies,” the report stated.
The report also notes that, while the total percentage of women in executive roles jumped 13 percentage points from 2003 and 3 percentage points from the previous year, 24 of the companies in the study still had no women represented in their executive leadership.
“The evidence appears to show that large public companies have seen the benefit of broadening the pools of candidates they consider for board seats — men and women, actually,” said Barclay. “The complexities of business today often demand a more diverse set of knowledge and expertise than has been the case in the past.”
Company practices supporting women in the workplace
Women in the Workplace 2024 reviews company practices that support women over the 10 years of the report. As with women’s representation, the results are mixed.
On the positive side, companies have put practices in place to remove bias from performance reviews, invested in training to recognize bias and practice inclusion, made work schedules more flexible and put in place support mechanisms for caregiving and for employees and families facing health issues. For example:
- Ninety-two percent of companies offer remote and hybrid work schedules, up from 76% in 2015.
- Half of companies provide emergency backup childcare services, and eight out of 10 offer benefits for fertility treatments, surrogacy and adoption.
- More than half of companies offer paid family leave beyond what’s required by law, 96% provide paid bereavement leave and 84% offer paid sick leave beyond what’s legally required.
On the flip side, fewer companies are investing in career development to support women, and many efforts to address bias and improve women’s experience have not translated into positive culture changes. For example:
- Companies are investing in fewer career programs geared toward women and women of color, with just 37% of companies offering formal mentorship programs for women (compared to 45% in 2017) and 15% offering such programs for women of color (versus 25% in 2022). Just 16% offer formal sponsorship programs for women (versus 31% in 2017), and only 8% offer such programs for women of color (versus 16% in 2022).
- Ninety-five percent of companies tell managers to encourage a respectful and inclusive culture, and 91% provide training on this issue. However, managers are not consistently acting on this instruction and training, with only 54% of employees saying their manager encourages a respectful and inclusive culture and just 46% saying managers provide them with the resources they need to succeed.
- Most companies are also failing to effectively incite managers to implement well-being and inclusion practices, while at the same time asking them to do more to support employees. Seventy-eight percent of managers surveyed said they’re expected to do more in this area than they were five years ago, yet only 54% of companies evaluate their managers on promoting and inclusive environment, and only 36% evaluate them on how well they ensure high team morale and happiness.
- More companies offer bias and allyship training to promote inclusion, but it’s not translating into changes in employee behavior. Less than half of employees surveyed said they’ve taken key allyship actions like mentoring or sponsoring women of color, taking a public stand against racial inequity and interrupting microaggressions against women.
- There’s a declining commitment to diversity efforts, with just 78% of companies indicating gender diversity is a priority (versus 88% in 2017) and 69% indicating a priority for racial diversity (versus 77% in 2019).
Women’s experiences have not improved
According to Women in the Workplace 2024, “Women continue to worry it will be harder for them to advance, and their day-to-day interactions look largely like they did in 2015. In fact, this stands out as the area of least progress across the 10 years of this study.”
Here’s a snapshot of women’s experience, according to the report:
- From 2017 to 2024, the percentage of women who say their gender played a role in missed career opportunities stayed about the same, at 36%, and 27% say their gender will make it harder for them to get a raise or promotion, down slightly from 2017’s 31%. However, more women of color (61% versus 45% in 2018), Latinas (29% versus 20%) and Asian women (39% versus 26%), say their race or ethnicity has led to missed work opportunities.
- Ageism is an issue for younger women. In 2024, 49% of women under age 30, compared with 35% of men in the same age group, say their age has led to missed work opportunities. Compare that to 38% of women and 37% of men age 60 and older who say the same, and just 29% and 25% age 50 to 59.
- Women are more likely than men to experience comments or actions that undermine their skills and expertise. These experiences, known as competence-based microaggressions, include having their judgement questioned in their area of expertise (38% of women in 2024, versus 26% of men), being mistaken for an employee at a lower level than they are (18% versus 10% of men) and being interrupted or spoken over more than others (39% of women versus 20% of men).
- “Othering” microaggressions involve having identities marginalized, and the report finds they’re just as likely to occur in 2025 as five years ago. For example, 13% of women say they feel they can’t talk about themselves or their lives outside of work, compared to 10% in 2019. That number goes up significantly for LGBTQ+ women (28%, versus 25% in 2019) and women with disabilities (24%, versus 21% in 2019).
- Another “othering” microaggression involves people expressing surprise at language skills or abilities. We see the biggest percentage — 23% — of this experience for women of color.
- Women who experience three or more microaggressions are 2.7 times more likely to consider leaving the company, 4.5 times more likely to see their gender as a barrier to advancement and 4.2 times more likely to almost always feel burned out.
- Sexual harassment happens as often today as it did six years ago, according to the report. About four in 10 women, or 37%, say they’ve experienced sexual harassment like sexist jokes, obscene or sexually explicit comments, sexual coercion and being touched without consent. That’s compared to 35% in 2018. Just 53% of women expect that reporting sexual harassment would be effective, compared to 52% in 2018.
The future of women in the workplace
The Women in the Workplace 2025 calls for “tenacity, creativity and optimism” from companies seeking to make meaningful changes in culture and infrastructure. The report names four important elements to implementing practices that improve outcomes for women and women of color:
- Making sure employees understand why a new practice is important.
- Teaching employees the skills they need to do their part.
- Putting mechanisms in place to support the practice.
- Ensuring leaders model the right behaviors. The report also lists practical steps for fostering inclusion and advancing women:
- De-bias hiring and promotions processes.
- Inspire and equip employees to curb bias and practice allyship.
- Unlock the power of managers to influence careers and team culture.
