The Broken Rung in the Path to Leadership
By Zoe Matthews · October 22, 2026 · 10 min read
Most of us were handed the same picture of how women get stuck at work. A ladder stretches upward, and near the top there is a pane of glass that lets you see the executive offices but not walk into them. The image is vivid, and for a long time it shaped how companies and women talked about advancement. In 2019, LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company looked at five years of pipeline data and pointed to a problem much lower on the ladder. They named it the broken rung.
What the broken rung is
To follow the idea, it helps to picture the first two steps of a corporate career. The first is an entry level job, where you do the work you are assigned. The second is manager, the first role where you are responsible for other people and what they produce. The broken rung is the gap between how often men and women are promoted into that second step. LeanIn.Org describes it as the single biggest structural obstacle women face on the path to senior leadership, and you can read its plain language explanation on its page What Is the Broken Rung?
The 2019 Women in the Workplace report, produced by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, put numbers to the idea. For every 100 men promoted and hired to manager, only 72 women were promoted and hired. As a result, men held 62 percent of manager positions and women held 38 percent. The report also estimated that corporate America would add one million more women to management over five years if women moved into first level manager roles at the same rates as men. That figure shows how much sits behind a gap that can look small on paper.
Why a small gap at the start becomes a large gap at the top
Every promotion draws from the group one level below it. When fewer women become managers, fewer women are available to become senior managers, and the same thing repeats at each level after that. The 2019 report made this point directly, noting that when men significantly outnumber women at the manager level, there are fewer women to hire or promote further up. McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2025 pipeline data shows the narrowing step by step. Women are 49 percent of entry level employees, 42 percent of managers, 39 percent of senior managers and directors, 35 percent of vice presidents, 32 percent of senior vice presidents, and 29 percent of the executive suite. Over the same climb, white men go from 32 percent of entry level employees to 56 percent of the executive suite.
This is why LeanIn.Org argues that the first step up matters more than any single move at the top. Its research finds that fixing the broken rung would do more for gender parity in senior leadership than any intervention at the executive level. A company can announce a goal for more women in senior roles, but if too few women ever become managers, the pool for those roles stays small. Think of a river that has been dammed far upstream, where the shortage shows up everywhere downstream no matter how wide the banks are. Repairing the first rung supplies every level that follows.
Where the numbers stand now
The most recent data comes from Women in the Workplace 2025, which McKinsey and LeanIn.Org published in December 2025. It draws on pipeline data from 124 organizations that together employ roughly three million people, a survey of about 10,000 employees, and interviews with more than 60 chief HR officers and other HR executives. In that report, 93 women were promoted to manager for every 100 men, up from the 81 women per 100 men reported for 2024, according to LeanIn.Org. For women of color the figure was 74 women promoted for every 100 men. The authors caution that the 2025 numbers may look better than the full picture, because the companies that shared data this year have more women in their ranks than typical participants did from 2021 to 2024.
What holds women back at the first step
One of the clearest findings concerns sponsorship. A mentor offers advice and perspective, while a sponsor is a more senior person who uses their influence to speak for you in rooms you are not in and to put your name forward for opportunities. In the 2025 data, 31 percent of entry level women have a sponsor, compared with 45 percent of entry level men. Employees with sponsors were promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without. Even with a sponsor, women are promoted less often than men, with a 15 percent gap in promotion rates between sponsored women and sponsored men.
Opportunity is the second piece. McKinsey reports that women early in their careers are far less likely than men to be people managers, which means more entry level men are already on a path that leads toward promotion. Four in ten entry level women said they had not received a promotion, a stretch assignment, or a chance to join leadership or career training in the previous two years. A stretch assignment is simply a project slightly beyond your current role that lets you practice skills the next job requires. Without those projects, a woman can do excellent work and still arrive at a promotion decision with a thinner record than the person next to her. The data also points to remote work, since women who work remotely three or more days a week were less likely to have been promoted in the past two years than men in identical working arrangements.
The 2025 report also found a gap in how many people want a promotion. Among entry level employees, 69 percent of women want one, compared with 80 percent of men, even though women and men are equally dedicated to their careers. McKinsey's authors report that this gap falls away when women and men receive similar levels of support from managers and more senior colleagues. In other words, wanting a promotion is shaped by whether the path looks open and not only by personal drive. LeanIn.Org's explainer adds performance reviews that hold women to higher standards, thin sponsorship, and informal networks that favor men as contributing causes.
What you can do, step by step
None of the steps below place the responsibility for a system on one woman. A Johns Hopkins Carey Business School write up of a panel on the 2025 report points out that practical advice such as finding a sponsor still leaves the load on women, even though the lack of support is institutional. With that said, there are moves within your control that the research supports, and they work best as a sequence. Each step assumes you have never done it before, so go at your own pace and treat the first one as the foundation for the rest.
Step one, learn what the manager job requires. Ask your manager or HR contact whether your company has written criteria for promotion to a manager role, and ask what skills, results, and experience those criteria list. Quartz's coverage of the 2019 report notes that the authors suggested companies set clear criteria so potential managers know what to aim for. Write the criteria in a notebook, and next to each one add a short example from your own work that meets it. Mark the criteria where you have no example yet, because those blank spots become your list for the steps that follow.
Step two, say out loud that you want to become a manager. Schedule a conversation with your direct manager and use plain words, such as "I want to be promoted to a manager role within the next year, and I would like to know what I need to show you." McKinsey's data shows that fewer entry level women than men receive career boosting actions from senior colleagues, including being told what it takes to advance. Asking the question directly invites that information into the open. Write down what your manager says, then send a short follow up email that thanks them and summarizes the conversation, which gives both of you a record to return to.
Step three, ask for work that involves leading people. You do not need a title to start practicing management. You can offer to lead a small project, train a new colleague, or run a recurring team meeting. Because women early in their careers are far less likely than men to manage people, these tasks give you evidence that the next role is a natural step for you. Tell your manager which skills from your step one list you want the project to build, so the request is tied to a clear purpose.
Step four, build a sponsor relationship. Choose a leader a level or two above your manager who has seen your work, and ask for twenty minutes to hear how they got to their position. Share your goal of becoming a manager and send them a short update every month or two that lists your recent results. McKinsey notes that senior colleagues can help even without a formal sponsor title, by advocating for you, steering projects toward your goals, and being open about what it takes to advance. When the relationship has some history, you can ask directly whether they would be willing to speak for you when promotions are discussed.
Step five, keep a record of your wins and make your work visible. Open a running document and add an entry each time you finish something, with the date, what you did, and the result in a number whenever you can. This turns promotion conversations from a matter of memory into a matter of evidence. If you work remotely most days, share your progress in team channels and meetings so your contributions are seen, since the 2025 data shows women in remote arrangements are promoted less often than men in the same arrangements. Review the document before every check in with your manager so your examples are fresh.
What companies can do
LeanIn.Org recommends that companies track promotion rates by gender and race at every level, set specific targets for equitable promotion into management, train the people who evaluate candidates to recognize and counteract bias, and make sure women have access to the sponsorship and visibility that drive advancement. McKinsey's 2025 recommendations point the same way. It calls for fair hiring and promotion processes, managers who are given the time and tools to support career development, and sponsorship that goes beyond formal matching programs to leaders who actively open doors. The report also found that only about half of surveyed companies say women's career advancement is a high priority, and fewer say so for women of color. A leader can begin with one question that the company's own data can answer, which is how many women were promoted to manager last year for every 100 men.
A ladder with a broken first rung says very little about how strong the person climbing it is. The research from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey shows that women are as committed to their careers as men, and that the gap opens where support, sponsorship, and opportunity arrive unevenly. Seeing the problem at the first step changes where companies look for answers and where women can focus their own energy. Many women reading this are standing at that first rung right now, and the steps above give you a way to start moving toward the next one. Every woman who is promoted to manager also adds to the pool that fills each level above her.