Anita Leung was still in high school when she got a glimpse into her future in the tech industry. It was an exciting place to build a career, but it could also be a lonely place for a woman.
As a sophomore, Anita spotted a flyer about the need for more women in technology. She signed up for a class in peer-networking software. Out of 30 students, she was the only girl. When students partnered up for projects, she was chosen last. This pattern repeated itself every semester. Even so, Anita enjoyed the classes and started feeling that a career in computer science would be a good fit.
Before finishing high school, Anita landed an internship at Amazon. Once again, she was the only woman on the team, but by this point she was used to it. After graduating from a computer science program at the University of Washington, she landed a job as a software engineer at Google. Anita says the underrepresentation of women was less apparent there than in many other organizations, thanks to a women’s engineering networking group and other initiatives.
And yet, she noticed a lack of women in the middle rungs of leadership. Early in her career, Anita perceived a widespread trend: The higher one looks up the organizational ranks, the fewer women one finds.
Despite accounting for 59 percent of college graduates in the United States, women represent only 48 percent of those entering the corporate workforce. When promotion time comes, the ranks of women are thinned again: For every 100 men, only 81 women are promoted. This advancement gap compounds over women’s careers, with lower representation at every step of the leadership ladder. While there has been progress, with women now accounting for 29 percent of top executives reporting to the CEO, that first often delayed or missed promotion to manager affects the whole talent pipeline. We call this phenomenon the “broken rung.”
This gap in promotions, in turn, is a hidden driver of the difference between women’s and men’s incomes over the course of their careers. For men and women alike, roughly half of their lifetime earnings come from what they bring to the table when they start their careers—their talents and education. The other half stems from the value of the skills and experiences gained on the job—what we call experience capital. When women aren’t promoted, they miss out on the new responsibilities that help build experience capital.
It is for women like Anita that we wrote The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It. Working from more than a decade of McKinsey and outside research, conversations with women leaders, and our own experiences, the book aims to help women understand the broken rung and accelerate their career journeys to maximize their lifetime earnings.
In the tech sector in particular, the numbers support Anita’s observations. Overall, more than half of women in the industry leave by the midpoint of their careers. Of these women, 23 percent cite a lack of management support and opportunity, while 75 percent of women who stay in technology credit their role models for helping them thrive.
Companies can take important steps to make sure women are getting equal opportunities. And to add to whatever companies do, women themselves can take individual action to increase their own chances of stepping over the broken rung.
Our book examines how women can increase their odds of building experience capital by carefully choosing sectors, companies, and jobs. It lays out the importance of skill building as a clear pathway to higher wages. It also outlines how women can tackle bias when they encounter it on their career journey, and how they can make decisions to prepare for motherhood during their career, as well as changes in physical and financial health.
In this excerpt, we focus on some of the concrete steps women can take to build experience capital. We’ll look at key drivers, including the multiplier effect of strong and varied professional networks, the importance of building soft skills, and the benefits of thinking like an entrepreneur.
The multiplier effect of networks
The Hershey Company’s Susanne Prucha credits her network with having a positive impact on her career from the very beginning. After graduating from Indiana University, she joined a consulting firm, where she worked on strategy development for blue-chip companies. On her first project, led by a male senior partner, Susanne was the youngest and most inexperienced person on the team, as well as the only woman.
So she was surprised when the senior partner consistently encouraged her, rather than more senior colleagues, to present her work to leaders at global banks. It was intimidating, but Susanne recognized it as an opportunity to learn—quickly.
She recalls how one bank executive bristled, “How much could you know? You’re right out of college.” Susanne had learned how to respond to such challenges. “I may not have all your years of experience,” she told him, “but I have done the research and talked to all of the key stakeholders, and I would love to share those findings with you.” The meeting improved. Still, the senior partner pulled the client aside later and asked him to be more respectful to the team. It meant the world to Susanne that he not only supported her work but also had her back.
Susanne was grateful for such mentors. But as she grew in her career, she was keenly aware that none of them were women. Then, a client chose a woman to lead a new organization. Susanne loved watching her in action. And she recalls how, during a presentation led by men on Susanne’s team, this leader sought out Susanne’s opinion—her first experience of a woman elevating another woman. The executive became a mentor. And since then, as Susanne advanced in roles at General Mills and the Hershey Company, she has made a consistent effort to give back to other women in big and small ways.
Susanne’s story is just one example of the importance of networks in building a successful career. People intuitively recognize the power of networks but don’t always know how to build and activate them.
A strong network can accelerate your experience capital momentum by pulling multiple levers that work to your advantage. Take job hunting. At least 70 percent of openings are not even posted or made public, so it’s difficult to hear about job opportunities without a strong network. At the application round, professionals referred by someone inside the company are nine times as likely as others to get a job.
Networks remain crucial as you move through your career. Bigger networks offer greater access to opportunities, information, and other connections. Networks made up of people from different industries, companies, backgrounds, and seniority can help you learn about new areas of interest and help open the right doors for you.
The rub is that women around the world have struggled to make their networks as robust and powerful as men’s. On average, women’s professional networks are smaller and less diverse in terms of role, tenure, and industry. Women are also much more likely to have a network made up mostly of other women.
Having a gender-diverse network is key. Since men are disproportionately represented in senior-level positions, they tend to be in greater positions of power. Without an adequate number of men in your network, you reduce the number of opportunities they represent. In addition, the women who have made it to senior roles tend to already be mentoring or sponsoring more people on average than their male peers.
Women are also sometimes locked out of the formal and informal networks that are important promotion pipelines. To some extent, this may be due to senior-level men’s concern about propriety: More than half of male managers say they are uncomfortable working alone with a woman. Senior-level men are also more likely to hesitate to plan work dinners and travel with a junior-level woman. It is important to find ways to address these issues that do not leave women at a disadvantage.
Relationships matter
The type of relationship that you have with the people in your network is another important factor. While it’s valuable to have strong connections to peers and junior colleagues, it is the more senior leaders who have a greater ability to advise, support, and unlock opportunities.
The bulk of your network is probably made up of connections—people you know in a professional or personal context, and who may be more or less senior than you. You may also have some mentors, who share knowledge, wisdom, and advice, and who are usually more senior to you. And then there are sponsors: those who understand and inspire you, as a mentor does, but also open up real opportunities, such as promotions, project assignments, a specific role in a meeting, or greater visibility.
Sponsors are particularly important to help you advance. For every new sponsor you have, your chance of being promoted increases by 10 percent. If you have four or more sponsors, you are five times more likely to be promoted. Women, as well as people of color, tend to be “overmentored and undersponsored”—that is, they have enough people who offer advice but not enough who create real career opportunities for them.
To expand and diversify your network, push yourself outside your comfort zone. Reach out to role models and senior executives and make an effort to attend events where influential people will be gathered, even if you may not know anyone. Recognize the power of weak links—people outside of your immediate contacts, or “friends of friends”—who may have value in terms of employment opportunities and promotions.
While it’s a good idea to nurture all of your connections, pay particular attention to building relationships with your current and aspirational mentors and sponsors. The best way is to spend time with people one-on-one. Most people—95 percent of men and 93 percent of women—find it easiest to give and receive guidance in a personal setting. Take care to ensure that the relationship is reciprocal, even if the other person is more senior. Try to be of help to them and look for opportunities to work with them directly. And make sure they know about your aspirations so they can help support you.
Finally, it’s important that your network has an ethos of support that goes both ways. Try to help the other women in your network and to pay it forward. When you do succeed in becoming a more senior leader, consider giving back and mentoring or sponsoring other women. You’ll be playing an essential role in helping them build their experience capital and advance through the pipeline without being held back by broken rungs.
Hard facts about soft skills
When Julie Morgenstern was young, she says she was one of the world’s most disorganized people. Always late, she left everything to the last minute and spent what felt like half of her days looking for things she had lost. But her spontaneity was on-brand with her identity as a creative theater person, and chaos notwithstanding, she managed to pull off excellent work.
But the stress and anxiety were draining. Her disorganization, and the fact she didn’t attend a top-tier university, left Julie feeling like she was starting her career at a disadvantage. Her first step was to focus on learning from everyone she encountered, believing they would all have a skill, talent, or perspective to teach her.
Then Julie became a mom. One day, she decided to go on a walk with her newborn daughter, who had just woken up from a nap. Spontaneous as always, Julie started grabbing a few things the baby would need. She couldn’t find half of them. Once she found something, she’d think of something else. Two hours later, the baby had fallen back asleep, and they’d missed the window for the walk.
Previously, Julie had been the only victim of her chaos. Now, flashing forward in her mind, she saw her daughter missing doctor appointments and showing up late to school. That didn’t seem fair. Julie sat down on the nursery floor and organized her diaper bag for future outings. From there, she slowly began to organize everything else in her life. Far from dampening her creative spontaneity, she found that having immediate access to everything she needed fueled her creativity.
Her change was so profound that Julie decided to start a business helping other people bridge the gap from chaos to order. Realizing that her success hinged on offering effective solutions, she created a list of questions to help her comprehend every client’s needs. To become an astute listener, Julie says, you need to ask great questions and aim to speak only 20 percent of the time—spending the rest listening, documenting answers, and clarifying anything you don’t understand. Most important, don’t offer any recommendations before taking time to process what the other person said. As she began hiring coaches to work with her, she taught them to replicate these steps.
In the more than 30 years since she started her business, Julie has taught countless women how to utilize the same skills to enhance their own careers. She has become a renowned organization and productivity expert, keynote speaker, executive coach, and best-selling author.
Julie’s story demonstrates that soft skills aren’t innate; they can be learned. And they can even be the foundation of an impressive career.
The quiet contributor
Soft skills encompass a wide range of complex abilities that fall within five broader categories: self-awareness and self-management; entrepreneurship; mobilizing systems, which includes role modeling and creating win–win negotiations; developing relationships; and fostering teamwork effectiveness.
While these skills are clearly needed in the workplace, they have historically been undervalued there. Even the term “soft skills” implies that they are less important and complex than hard skills, which are the learned, technical, and measurable abilities needed to perform in an occupation or industry.
Soft skills are often stereotypically associated with women—based on the assumption that they are naturally better listeners, connectors, and empathizers than men. That same stereotype perpetuates the myth that they also have weaker hard skills than men. This faulty assumption is important because hard skills are most often listed in job requirements and used to make hiring decisions, especially for certain high-paying jobs. An analysis of over ten million job postings showed that jobs requiring hard skills, such as specific programming languages, paid twice as much as jobs requiring soft skills, such as communication and teamwork.
And yet, soft skills are a quiet contributor to career success. A McKinsey survey of 18,000 people across 15 countries reveals that while soft skills can be learned, they are not as directly tied to formal education as hard skills. And although job listings may not reflect the importance of soft skills, workers who are most proficient in them have higher rates of employment, higher salaries, and greater job satisfaction than those who aren’t.
Soft skills will only grow in value as you progress throughout your career. As the need for routine and manual cognitive tasks in the workplace gives way to automated activities, there is a greater need for workers who can power higher-level human-to-human interactions. Early in your career, your value may be more tied to your specific subject area expertise, but as you rise, your ability to lead, inspire, and collaborate with other people will increase in value. In fact, this ability is a big differentiator between good and great leaders.
Entrepreneurship is a skill, not a profession
When we think of an entrepreneur, most of us imagine someone who, like Julie, has started a company. While this is a common and visible form of entrepreneurship, there are many others. Within a role in an existing organization, entrepreneurship can look like taking initiative, starting a new project, identifying fresh opportunities for impact, or creating a team. It can also mean becoming an independent worker or contractor or taking over an existing business. In fact, it is more accurate to think of entrepreneurship as a set of skills that you can use across a variety of roles, rather than as a specific job.
Those attributes include courage and risk-taking; driving change and innovation; energy, passion, and optimism; and breaking orthodoxies. They are required for a founder, but the truth is that regardless of your role, they are also critical for advancing your career. Since it is not measurable or directly tied to education, being entrepreneurial falls under the umbrella of soft skills that will be in increasing demand.
Senior leaders with stellar entrepreneurial skills are often candidates for top jobs. But as with network building, there is also a gender gap in entrepreneurship. At the initial stage of entrepreneurship, where opportunities are merely being identified and developed, women’s participation lags behind that of men, and this disparity continues—from the intention to form a business through the early stages of founding one.
Women entrepreneurs also experience a severe lack of funding. In 2020, only 2.3 percent of venture capital funding across the globe went to women-led businesses. In the United States, roughly half of start-ups are founded by women, but start-ups with all-women teams receive only 1.9 percent of venture capital funding. In overall fundraising, women founders raise 38 cents for every dollar raised by a male founder.
And yet women’s companies are often more profitable than those led by men. Women-owned start-ups generate 78 cents in revenue for every $1 of investment, compared with 31 cents generated by men-owned businesses. It’s not just women entrepreneurs who are missing out due to a lack of funding—investors themselves are overlooking valuable business opportunities.
In most cases, women who want to expand their experience capital would do well to make bold moves across industries and roles. But entrepreneurship is different: Some of the most successful entrepreneurs tend to start companies that are closely connected to their previous industries and roles and tap their deep industry-specific expertise.
Mining those connections
Christa Pitts exemplifies this idea. Early in her career, Christa was working in sales for a window and door manufacturer when her mother-in-law convinced her to attend an audition for on-air hosts at the shopping channel QVC. Christa thought the idea was ridiculous but played along. She landed the job.
Working at QVC was like receiving a master’s degree in retail, Christa said. She learned about data analytics, statistics, and merchandising. She learned how to engage a potential buyer’s “romance factor” by helping them imagine how a product would make them look and feel, while also engaging on technical specs and price considerations. She got real-time feedback from customer callers. And vitally, she met with the entrepreneurs who made the products she was selling. She made a point of asking them what worked and what they wished they’d done differently—an invaluable education on how to launch a business and what pitfalls to avoid.
Back home in Atlanta, Christa’s mom and sister were working on a passion project that they never expected to become anything more than a hobby or side hustle. Going back generations, Christa’s family on her mother’s side would put out a toy elf before Christmas, telling the children that he worked for Santa and would report back on their behavior.
Christa decided that if she was going to keep working as hard as she was at QVC, she was going to do it to help her mom and sister share their project with the world. Christa’s sister, a teacher, became the creative force behind the business. Christa managed all of the operations. They founded the Lumistella Company and released its signature book, The Elf on the Shelf.
More than 19 million people worldwide have bought their own Elf on the Shelf toy. The Lumistella Company, with 150 additional products that are sold in 23 countries, now employs 110 people and has brand partnerships with HarperCollins, Netflix, and the Food Network—an entrepreneurial application of every aspect of the deep knowledge in retail that Christa had gained at QVC.
Whether you intend to found, run, or work for a company, building your entrepreneurial skills is crucial. Alongside developing other soft skills and building a strong network, entrepreneurship is essential to maximizing your experience capital.
