The Broken Rung: Why Women Still Fall Behind at the First Promotion to Manager

For decades, conversations about women and leadership have focused on the glass ceiling. The image is familiar: a talented woman climbs the corporate ladder until she reaches the highest levels of leadership and suddenly encounters an invisible barrier.

There is just one problem with that picture. For many women, the career ladder becomes uneven long before they get anywhere near the ceiling.

One of the most significant barriers happens at the first promotion to manager. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org refer to this as the broken rung, and after more than a decade of studying women in corporate America, the rung remains broken.

According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study, for every 100 men promoted from entry-level positions into manager roles, only 93 women received the same promotion. For women of color, the number fell to 74 for every 100 men. More detailed LeanIn.Org data shows that the gap is not experienced equally: for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 82 Asian women and Latinas and 60 Black women were promoted.

Those numbers are not simply a small career-development disparity. They influence the entire leadership pipeline.

Why the First Promotion Matters So Much

Imagine two groups starting a race with roughly similar numbers. Before the second stage begins, one group is allowed to send significantly more runners forward. The next promotion is then selected largely from the people who advanced in the previous round. Over time, that gap compounds.

By the time you reach the finish line, it may look as though fewer members of one group were capable of reaching the top. But the imbalance actually began much earlier.

That is what happens in the corporate leadership pipeline.

In the 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn.Org data, women represented 49% of entry-level employees at participating organizations. At the manager level, that representation fell to 42%. At senior manager or director, women represented 39%. At vice president, 35%. At senior vice president, 32%. And by the C-suite, women represented only 29%.

We should absolutely talk about getting more women into executive leadership. But if fewer women become managers in the first place, every level above management begins with a smaller pool.

You cannot repair a leadership pipeline only at the top.

The Broken Rung in Women's Leadership Is About Opportunity, Not Simply Confidence

One of the easiest explanations for leadership disparities is to turn them into a personality problem. Women need more confidence. Women need to raise their hands. Women need to ask for promotions. Women need to take more risks.

There can be value in encouraging women to advocate for themselves. But the latest data makes it difficult to argue that confidence alone explains the problem.

Entry-level women are receiving fewer of the opportunities that traditionally prepare employees for advancement. McKinsey found that four in 10 entry-level women had not received a promotion, stretch assignment, or leadership or career-training opportunity during the previous two years.

Those are not extracurricular activities. They are career accelerators.

A stretch assignment gives an employee evidence that she can handle greater responsibility. Leading a project creates visible proof of leadership. Managing people builds managerial experience. Career training expands skills. Presenting to senior leadership creates visibility.

If one employee repeatedly receives those opportunities and another does not, their résumés will eventually look different—even if their underlying capability began at the same level. Then the résumé difference itself may be interpreted as evidence that one person was always “more ready.”

Opportunity compounds. So does the absence of opportunity. Broken-rung women's leadership is a true issue.

Sponsorship Is Another Missing Piece

Mentorship receives a great deal of attention in women's professional development, and mentors can be enormously valuable. They advise you, help you think through career decisions, share experience, and may help you navigate difficult situations.

But careers are not advanced through advice alone. Sometimes someone needs to say, “I think she's ready.”

That is where sponsorship becomes important.

A sponsor does not only advise. A sponsor advocates. They recommend you for a project, mention your name for a promotion, introduce you to someone influential, create visibility for your work, and use some of their own professional capital on your behalf.

In the 2025 Women in the Workplace research, only 31% of entry-level women reported having a sponsor compared with 45% of entry-level men. Sponsorship was also strongly associated with advancement. Employees with sponsors had been promoted at nearly twice the rate of employees without sponsors during the previous two years.

This is why the advice to “find a mentor” is incomplete. Professional women need advice, but they also need access, visibility, opportunity, advocacy, and people willing to open doors.

The First Management Job Often Requires Previous Management Experience

There is another workplace contradiction that deserves attention. Organizations frequently say they want to develop new leaders. Then a management opening appears, and the preferred candidate is someone who has already managed people.

So where does the first opportunity come from?

Some employees begin supervising interns. Others lead project teams, manage vendors, become team leads, or are deliberately placed into situations where they can prove their leadership capability before a manager opening becomes available.

If those opportunities are distributed unevenly, the final promotion decision may look objective while still reflecting unequal preparation.

The question for organizations should not only be, “Who is ready to become a manager?” It should also be, “Who have we been preparing to become a manager?”

Those are very different questions.

What Professional Women Can Do About the Broken Rung

The responsibility for repairing workplace systems should not fall on women alone. But knowing that the broken rung exists can change the way you manage your own career.

One of the most important steps is to stop waiting until the annual performance review to understand what advancement requires. Ask your manager, “What specifically would I need to demonstrate to be considered for the next level?”

Then make the answer measurable.

“More leadership” is vague. “Lead two cross-functional projects and present results to the executive team” is useful.

“Become more strategic” is vague. “Build the FY2027 market-entry recommendation and present it during planning” is useful.

“Improve executive presence” is particularly problematic unless someone can define the exact behaviors they mean. Ask for examples.

Clarity makes it easier to determine whether you are genuinely progressing—or being kept in a permanent state of “almost ready.”

Ask for the Experience, Not Only the Promotion

A powerful career-development question is, “What experience would make me the obvious candidate?”

Maybe you need budget responsibility. Maybe you need direct reports, client exposure, revenue responsibility, conflict-management experience, or experience in another business unit. Perhaps you need to lead a high-stakes project or present to senior leadership.

Once you know the missing experience, ask for an opportunity to build it.

Do not wait passively for someone to decide that you should be developed. Participate actively in your own development plan.

Keep a Career Evidence File

Visibility becomes particularly important when promotion criteria are subjective. Maintain a simple document that tracks projects completed, revenue generated, cost savings, client wins, problems solved, teams led, positive feedback, new responsibilities, metrics improved, processes created, people developed, presentations delivered, awards, recognition, and examples of work beyond your current job description.

This is not an ego file. It is documentation.

Your manager may oversee 10 people. Their manager may oversee 100. The promotion committee may barely know you. Do not assume everyone remembers everything you have contributed.

Make your results easy to explain.

Build Sponsors Before You Need Them

A common networking mistake is waiting until a job opens to build relationships with decision-makers. By then, it may be too late.

Sponsorship usually grows through repeated exposure to someone's work. Ask yourself who understands what you do well, who has seen you solve difficult problems, who knows what you want next, who participates in promotion conversations, and who has influence in the area where you want to grow.

You do not walk up to an executive and announce, “Will you be my sponsor?” Instead, you build professional credibility. You seek feedback. You volunteer for meaningful work. You make your aspirations known. You follow through.

Over time, advocacy can grow naturally from that relationship.

Companies Need to Stop Treating This as a Women's Problem

There is only so much individual career strategy can accomplish if the system repeatedly produces unequal results.

Organizations serious about women in leadership should look closely at the first manager promotion, not only the C-suite, not only the board, and not only their annual International Women's Day campaign.

Who gets nominated for promotion? Who gets stretch assignments beforehand? Who manages people informally? Who gets introduced to senior leaders? Who gets talked about as “high potential”? Who receives developmental feedback? Who is encouraged to apply? Who gets second chances after making a mistake? Who gets told they need “a little more time”?

And critically, do those patterns change when the data is broken down by race and ethnicity?

The 2025 numbers for women of color make clear why examining gender alone is not enough.

Managers Can Repair a Rung in Everyday Decisions

Leadership equity can sound like an enormous corporate initiative, but it often appears in decisions made on an ordinary Tuesday.

A manager decides who will present at the executive meeting. Someone chooses who will lead the difficult client project. Someone selects an employee to supervise the new hire. Someone recommends a person for leadership training. Someone mentions a name when a senior executive asks, “Who should we be developing?” Someone else says, “She isn't quite ready.”

Those individual decisions accumulate into careers.

Managers should regularly examine who receives visible work and who receives support work. Who gets revenue-generating assignments? Who is praised for potential? Who has to prove performance repeatedly? Who receives feedback that is actionable, and who receives vague personality feedback?

The broken rung is built, or repaired, through these choices.

Promotion Criteria Should Not Be a Secret

One of the simplest organizational improvements is transparency. Employees should understand what advancement requires before a promotion decision is underway.

That means clearly defined competencies, examples of performance at the next level, transparent application processes where possible, consistent evaluation criteria, regular career conversations, real explanations when someone is not promoted, and a development path after the decision.

“Keep doing what you're doing” is not a career plan.

Neither is, “Your time will come.”

People need to know what to build.

We Need to Stop Waiting for the Glass Ceiling

The glass ceiling is powerful imagery, but it has also encouraged organizations to look too far upward.

A company can appoint a woman CEO and still have a broken pipeline underneath her. A leadership team can reach gender parity while entry-level women continue receiving fewer development opportunities. A company can celebrate women executives while women of color remain dramatically underrepresented in management.

Representation at the top matters, but representation throughout the pipeline tells us whether progress can last.

The 2025 numbers provide both encouragement and warning. Women have made meaningful gains in corporate leadership over the past decade. Yet women still occupy only 29% of C-suite roles in participating companies, and the first promotion to manager continues to favor men.

After more than a decade of tracking this problem, the broken rung remains.

That should tell us something.

The solution is not another conversation about whether women are capable of leadership. We already know they are. The conversation needs to be about access to the opportunities that turn capable employees into experienced leaders.

For Women: Know the Rung Exists, Then Build Strategically

Ask what the next level requires. Seek experiences before openings appear. Document your results. Build relationships with people who know your work. Find mentors—and build sponsors. Ask for feedback you can actually use. Become visible to decision-makers.

And if an organization continually changes the definition of “ready” every time you meet it, consider whether you are trying to climb the wrong ladder.

Career advancement should require growth. It should not require endlessly proving that you deserved to enter the race.

For Leaders: Fix the First Step

Organizations often ask where all the women leaders went. A better question might be: Who did we promote when their leadership careers were just beginning?

That is where the numbers start changing. That is where future directors, vice presidents, CEOs, founders, and board members are created.

At the Women's Leadership Impact Initiative, our work is grounded in the belief that developing women leaders requires more than inspiration. It requires information, skills, networks, opportunity, visibility, advocacy, and institutions willing to examine the systems that determine who gets to move forward.

We can keep talking about breaking the glass ceiling.

But first, we need to repair the rung.