Changing Companies Minds About Women

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 11

o r g a n i z a t i o n p r a c t i c e

Changing
companies’ minds
about women
Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee

Leaders who are serious about getting more women
into senior management need a hard-edged approach to
overcome the invisible barriers holding them back.

The problem
Your company has trouble retaining
promising women or promoting them
into top jobs. Structural changes,
such as “flextime,” aren’t helping enough;
they do little to address the invisible
but powerful beliefs, held by many man-
agers, that subtly, and unintentionally,
hamper women’s careers.

Why it matters
A bevy of research highlights strong
statistical correlations among large num-
bers of senior women, financial per-
formance, and organizational health. The
bottom line: companies gain hard
business benefits from a more diverse
senior team.

What to do about it
There are no sure answers yet. But
the experience of companies making
progress suggests that injecting greater
rigor into people processes—more
data, thoughtful targets that push
women into the consideration set for
key roles, a company-specific business
case for women, better sponsorship
approaches—can make a difference.

2

Despite significant corporate commitment to the advance-
ment of women’s careers, progress appears to have stalled. The
percentage of women on boards and senior-executive teams remains
stuck at around 15 percent in many countries, and just 3 percent
of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

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 indi-
cated 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 prob-

3

lematic 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 illus-
trate 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 corpo-
rations, our research shows.1 But according to Catalyst, a leading advo-
cacy 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 expla-
nations 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

1 The entry-level figure is from our April 2011 report, Unlocking the full potential of women

in the US economy. Read an executive summary or download the full report on the
McKinsey & Company Web site.
2 The full report, Women at the top of corporations: Making it happen, part of McKinsey

& Company’s Women Matter 2010 series, is available on the McKinsey & Company
Web site. The differences among countries reflect significant variance in their starting
points and cultural norms—which, for example, can make it difficult for a woman to
outearn her husband.
3 Part of the reason is that almost twice as many executive-level women as men (60 percent

versus 35 percent) occupy staff roles that are less likely to lead to the top job.

4

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
(exhibit). 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.

Subtle changes in these attitudes toward advancement are another
powerful benefit of changing how companies “think about women

4Our data show that like the men we surveyed, most women who leave a job move to another

rather than exit the workforce.

Q4 2011
Mind-sets
5
Exhibit 1 of 1

Like their male counterparts, most young women want to move up.
Many of those who advance retain that ambition.

Desire to move to the next level, % who agree or strongly agree

Young Young Women of all ages
men women
98
92
79 83

Aged 24–34 In early stage In early to middle
of career1 management

1 Entry-level, nonmanagement roles; excludes administrative, maintenance, or other support services.

Source: Feb 2011 McKinsey survey of 1,000 women and 525 men currently working in large corporations or professional-
services ﬁrms; McKinsey analysis

around here.” By addressing the mind-sets holding women back,
corporate leaders can reshape the talent pipeline and its odds, increasing
the number of women role models at the top and, in turn, making
it likelier that more women will retain their ambition.

Changing companies’ minds

No program or initiative can be the “silver bullet” to advance women into
senior roles. Rather, the whole organization must change. That’s hard
work; it will take years and, potentially, even a generational transition.
This goal requires a serious commitment from busy leaders, whose
natural tendency is to discuss the issue, create a plan, and hand it off
to HR. And it requires real engagement up and down the line,
including engagement from women.

To make these changes, corporate leaders need to see them as no less
important than a major strategic or operational challenge, such as
falling market share or changing the corporate cost structure. And like
efforts to address those challenges, efforts to advance women can’t
just be add-on programs. They must be integrated into the organization’s
daily work through goals, performance monitoring, processes that
force tough conversations, and serious skill building.

6

Undertaking such a transformation in difficult economic times, when
there are fewer opportunities to go around, may seem like a recipe
for failure. But the fact is that these changes never will be easy and that
a few companies, including those we focus on below (Pitney Bowes,
Shell, and Time Warner), have managed to stay on course through both
good times and bad.

Make it personal
Make no mistake: as a senior executive, you are already inf luencing
your company’s approach. If you’re not paying much attention to
the issue of women’s advancement, you’re ensuring that things won’t
change. As Shell’s executive vice president of global supply and
distribution, Peggy Montana, says, “When you look at corporate mind-
sets, change starts at the top. I haven’t seen change in diversity start
from middle management.”

And if you’re personally committed, you can catalyze change that will
improve not only your company’s treatment of women but also, in
all likelihood, its business results. 5 In the early 1980s, Pitney Bowes
CEO George Harvey learned that the most productive newly hired
salespeople were women, many of whom had previously been school-
teachers. Curious to know the explanation, he visited sales offices
late in the day and discovered women “writing personal notes to their
customers with a lot of conviction”—a practice that, further inquiry
revealed, seemed to be driving sales.

According to Pitney Bowes executive vice president Johnna Torsone,
Harvey’s recognition of the value of these committed women touched
off a wave of change. Torsone says Harvey became “determined to
open up an environment that allowed people to come in who hadn’t had
a true opportunity on a level playing field.” They would be motivated,
he reasoned, and their success would “increase the competitive environ-
ment for the men and for everybody else in the organization.” The
end result, Torsone explains, “was an HR strategy based on business.”

5For evidence of the strong correlation between women at the top and stronger financial

performance, see Georges Desvaux, Sandrine Devillard-Hoellinger, and Mary C. Meaney, “A
business case for women,” mckinseyquarterly.com, September 2008.

7

Make no mistake: as a senior executive,
you are already influencing your company’s
approach. If you’re not paying attention
to the issue of women’s advancement, you’re
ensuring that things won’t change.

This is a powerful idea that resonates with our experience: strong as
the general business case for women is, companies are more likely to
transform mind-sets if they build their own case. That case should
be grounded in the impact women are having at your own organization—
whether hard business results or indirect benefits, such as building
better teams. Harvey’s commitment also highlights the importance of
having leaders start this journey by changing their own mind-sets:
all transformations start with the self; leaders influence everyone else
in the organization through their attitudes and actions.6

Change the conversation
It’s one thing for executives to commit themselves to change. It’s another
to actually make progress. A starting point is making sure enough
women are being considered for advancement, to boost the odds that
some will get through. Broadening the conversation ensures that
high-talent women aren’t “underexposed,” compared with men, as senior
executives talk through promotion possibilities. While putting one
woman on the promotion slate will not change the discussion, focusing
on metrics will. And though most companies are loath to consider
quotas, they’re far from the only way to introduce a hard edge to the
ongoing talent dialogue.

6For more on the role of senior leaders in catalyzing change, see Joanna Barsh, Josephine

Mogelof, and Caroline Webb, “How centered leaders achieve extraordinary results,”
mckinseyquarterly.com, October 2008; and Carolyn B. Aiken and Scott P. Keller, “The CEO’s
role in leading transformation,” mckinseyquarterly.com, February 2007.

8

Pitney Bowes, for example, focused on the front end. For a number of
years, every list of candidates for promotion there had to include 35 per-
cent women and 15 percent minorities, equal to their representation
in the workforce at the time. Harvey chose this approach because “he
felt that white men had been disproportionately advantaged and had
gotten complacent,” Torsone explains.

Shell focused on outcomes, setting a long-term target for women at the
top: currently, 20 percent of the company’s senior executives world-
wide. So far, women hold just over 15 percent of those positions, up from
10 percent in 2005. The company includes an assessment of progress
against this target in all senior executives’ reviews and presents the over-
all results in its annual report.

At Time Warner, chief diversity officer Lisa Quiroz explains that each
division is required to have a succession plan and a robust promo-
tion slate for its top layers of management. The CEO and the HR chief
review the plans and slates every year for diversity, among other cri-
teria. This review also includes specific discussions about how individual
women are being prepared for their next role, including rotation
among the company’s divisions and between staff and line roles. For
more than a decade, a noticeable part of each divisional CEO’s bonus
has depended on meeting the company’s expectations for diversity.

Will men raise concerns? Maybe. They did early on at Pitney Bowes,
despite support for diversity from the top. “George [Harvey],” Torsone
explains, “brought challenge and passion to the focus, but it felt alien-
ating to the men. That was not the intention, and so it had to evolve.
When I came in, we broadened our efforts to upgrade talent devel-
opment, making it better for everyone. We still see resistance from men
occasionally, but the overall culture changed, and those attitudes are
really disappearing.”

Any top-down talent review process
conducted primarily by senior men can
unintentionally reinforce the status
quo. Bottom-up survey data can help shake
things up.

9

And what about women? Shell’s Montana says her response to fears from
women that they’re getting jobs just because of their gender is, “Get
over it. I’ve never seen a selection panel pick somebody on the basis of,
‘She’s not really qualified, but we need a female in this job.’ It just
doesn’t happen. We’re running a business, and we’re not taking undue
risks. It’s never going to be a risk-free exercise. But neither is it for
the rest of the population.”

Use data to create transparency and challenge
entrenched mind-sets
Most companies collect some data on diversity. Yet few track the
results in enough detail to help executives gain a real understanding
of what’s going on in their own departments or business units and
how their mind-sets may be contributing. Furthermore, many compa-
nies track data only at the executive level, not down to the front line.
They therefore have no idea what their pipeline really looks like, let alone
how to improve it. PepsiCo, by contrast, tracks the progress of women
at all levels and shares the results throughout its talent review processes.
As a result, the full pipeline of female talent—not just the senior ranks,
which are much harder to influence rapidly—is highly visible.

When the findings are impossible to overlook, leaders can use them to
make the invisible mind-sets visible and then manage these mind-
sets to remove their influence. Pitney Bowes carefully rates and scores
each division’s diversity plan and, like Time Warner, includes in
its bonus decisions an executive’s success in promoting diversity. Further-
more, Torsone says, from the time this process was started, during
the 1980s, the CEO “would talk about it at every operating and manage-
ment review.”

Of course, any top-down talent review process conducted primarily
by senior men can unintentionally reinforce the status quo. Bottom-up
survey data can help shake things up, however. Each year, Shell asks
all employees to answer a survey with 61 questions, ranging from how
they like working at the company to whether they feel able to speak
up freely. The company uses the results from five of these questions to
measure the inclusiveness of the work culture and how it changes
year to year. Shell also analyzes the responses of groups such as men and
women, different nationalities, and different tenures to see whether
their experiences diverge.

One way the company uses the results is to measure the effectiveness of
supervisors in creating an environment where everyone feels engaged

10

and able to excel. The results flag outliers: parts of the organization
where everyone can thrive and those areas where some or all employees
feel stymied (those are addressed by specific follow-up plans). Over
the years, Shell has seen the gap between men’s and women’s experiences
shrink—a positive trend. There’s still the question of whether gender-
based attitudes influence responses to surveys like these. In our experi-
ence and in Shell’s, though, they are much better than nothing.

Rethink genuine sponsorship for women
For men and women alike, effective sponsors can make careers through
ongoing, in-the-moment support. Sometimes that means supporting
women in stretch roles. In the words of a female executive at a financial-
services firm, “The head of the business offered me a big promotion
that entailed a move, but then he said, ‘We’re going to make 100 percent
sure that you don’t fail. We have your back, so take this promotion.’
He called the executive who would become my new boss to extract that
commitment, and that made it a lot easier for me to take on this
scary, big step.”

At other times, the best thing a sponsor can do is offer tough love. Shell’s
Montana says she has “held some people back from the next level
until they had more of an operational P&L role. I felt that if they didn’t
have it, at least in a reasonably early time in their career, it would
hold them back once they had the opportunity for more senior levels.”

Clear as the benefits are, so are the challenges of sponsorship for
women: many male executives feel more comfortable sponsoring men
or simply don’t know how to be effective sponsors for women. Take
one common kind of sponsor we’ve met in dozens of workshops—the
“relentless coach” who pushes the sponsoree to the breaking point.
While many men recall this grueling experience with gratitude and even
affection for the sponsor, it doesn’t work well for many women, espe-
cially those who carry the burden of responsibility at home in addition
to their work. Another valuable, but often controversial, kind of
sponsor is what we call the “devil’s advocate.” We all value being chal-
lenged to make our work better, but many women find that constant
questioning drains their confidence and energy. With self-awareness
and training, sponsors can learn to adapt their styles to the individ-
ual and situation at hand.

Effective sponsors are deeply, personally engaged, down to the level
of small details, whose importance adds up. Time Warner’s Quiroz
describes true sponsorship as “someone being planful about what you

11

do, who you’re exposed to, what development programs you go to, who
you have lunch with, whether you’re getting feedback or being assigned
a coach.” At her company, leaders work hard to make women’s careers
“intentional.” One key: making sure that sponsorees attend Time Warner
women’s leadership programs, where participants interact with top
management and learn to overcome their own limiting mind-sets and
behavior. So far, among the more than 300 leaders who have attended
Time Warner’s program for senior women, 22 percent have been pro-
moted, compared with only 11.8 percent of all women at a similar level
in the company.

We hope you draw inspiration from these examples. If you’re ready
to start challenging the broadly held mind-sets holding women back
in your organization, first become conscious of your own beliefs
and how they affect your behavior and decisions. Then, as you help your
company move forward, remain vigilant: every time a senior exec-
utive leaves or enters an organization, its culture can—and does—shift.
It is up to the senior team to help new executives become active
participants in this journey and to make regular efforts to inject the
energy that the organization as a whole will need to change its mind
about women.

The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of Heather Sumner
to the research behind this article.

Joanna Barsh is a director in McKinsey’s New York office, and Lareina
Yee is a principal in the San Francisco office.

Copyright © 2011 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.
We welcome your comments on this article. Please send them to
quarterly_comments@mckinsey.com.

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