Women are asking for promotions, but men keep getting them

NEW YORK – Women want to be leaders in the workplace, but employers are still passing them by in favour of their male counterparts.

For every 100 men promoted to a manager role in 2022, only 87 women received the same boost, according to the Women In The Workplace report by former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. The number of women promoted inched up from 86 in 2021, but they are still getting overlooked despite asking for promotions at the same rate as men, the survey found.

One reason for the gap: the way men and women tend to receive their promotions.

“We promote men based on potential and women have to have already proven it to you,” Ms Sandberg said in an interview. “You can’t prove you can be a manager until you’re a manager.”

The numbers are even worse for black women, who are being promoted at the lowest rate in at least five years compared with men. Only 54 black women were promoted in 2022 for every 100 men, down from 96 in 2021, according to the report, which started tracking respondents’ race in 2018.

The number is now closer to the 58 seen in 2018 and 2019, before the Black Lives Matter protests prompted much of corporate America to promise to hire more people of colour.

The report, based on research from 276 companies in the United States and Canada and including a survey of more than 27,000 employees from 33 firms, found that men also benefited disproportionately from in-office work compared with women.

“Men report when they are on-site that they get more mentorship and sponsorship than women. They feel more ‘in the know’,” said Ms Rachel Thomas, co-founder and chief executive officer of LeanIn.Org.

If that is already happening when everyone is in the office, the challenge will be to make sure it does not happen on an even broader scale in a hybrid work environment. Ms Thomas suggested that companies need to better train managers to evaluate workers on flexible schedules, and that performance reviews need to be redesigned to emphasise results, not when and where work is done.

Ms Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook owner Meta Platforms, said: “The perception that it’s women who are lazy, who are disgruntled, that it’s women who are demanding flexibility rather than how that flexibility can fuel ambition is really unfortunate.”

The report also found that women are more ambitious than before the Covid-19 pandemic, with about 80 per cent saying they would like a promotion, compared with 70 per cent in 2019. BLOOMBERG