Female leadership faces a new 'pipeline problem' in executive departures: Lean In CEO
Lean In CEO Rachel Thomas and McKinsey Senior Partner Lareina Yee join Yahoo Finance Live to discuss employment trends for women in executive positions and the tech industry.
Video Transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
SEANA SMITH: A new survey out highlighting an alarming trend in the workforce. Women leaders are leaving their jobs at the highest rate on record, and it could have serious implications for companies. Joining us now are the co-authors of this report of women in the workplace.
We want to bring in Rachel Thomas, CEO of Lean In, and we have Lareina Yee, McKenzie Senior Partner. Rachel, let me start with you. Just in terms of the fact that women are leaving the workforce, especially women in leadership positions, what do you attribute this to?
RACHEL THOMAS: So you're absolutely right, we're in the midst of a big breakup. Women are leaving their companies at the highest rate we've seen and at a higher rate than men leaders. And we want to be clear. Women leaders are just as ambitious as men, but they're looking for more opportunity, and they're placing a higher premium on the culture of work.
They want more flexibility. They want to work for companies that are deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and employee well-being. And to give you a sense of the scale of the problem, for every woman director who's getting promoted, two women directors are leaving their company. That's one up and two out. So the message to companies is they need to figure out how to hold on to those precious women leaders.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: So, Lareina, what do they need to do? What are some of these women in leadership roles, what are they asking for that they're not getting from the companies that they're leaving?
LAREINA YEE: That's a great question. So what we're seeing is we're seeing an enormous number of headwinds for women, and we're also seeing a change in stance in terms of what women are thinking about. So in terms of the headwinds, imagine you go to work. 40% of the women we surveyed said that they had other people take credit for their ideas on a regular basis. They are two times more likely than men to be mistaken for someone more junior.
And there just a really long list of these slights and cuts day to day that take away their experience. And what it boils down to is companies are sending women signals that they're not going to advance because of these experiences, but also because the extra work that they do, the performance that they give, it's not always reflected in their performance reviews. And so that's what's happening on the headwind side.
On the other side of that, women are saying, wait a second. I'm ambitious, positively ambitious. I'm talented. I actually might go try somewhere else. And what's critical is they're not breaking up with work. They're just breaking up with the companies that they're at.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: And, Rachel, I mean, this is the largest study on the state of women in corporate America. What are you hoping that people take away from these findings? What do you hope that they're actually going to do?
RACHEL THOMAS: Well, so for the last eight years, we've been reporting that there's a broken rung at the first step up to manager. So for every 100 men promoted to manager last year, only 87 women were and 82 women of color. So that's one pipeline problem. Now we have this new pipeline problem that women are leaving their companies at the highest rate ever. So we want this to be a wake-up call to corporate America because we know that women leaders are precious.
They're not only underrepresented. They're more likely to be investing in lifting up employees, good people management. They're more likely to be fostering inclusion on their team. And they're more likely to be showing up as allies. And we also know business results are better when there's more women and more diverse leadership. So it's about the numbers, but it's also holding on to the women who are driving the change in organizations that we need to see right now.
SEANA SMITH: Lareina, this study also broke it down by company-specific roles. I notice a massive, deep underrepresentation of women in technical roles. From companies in this sector that are doing it right, that are able to attract women into these jobs, any idea what they're doing?
LAREINA YEE: Yeah, so a couple of things. So in 2018, we saw that technical roles, women only had 18% share of those jobs. And today, we see that number has gone down to 16%. And you may be asking, why is that so important? Well, one of the things is when we look at economic growth, when we look at job growth, technical roles, either engineering, data science, all of these types of roles, that's where job growth is in America.
And we see such a small participation of women. And you can't just say it's an education pipeline problem. It actually is also the responsibility of companies to recruit more, to invest in the career development, in the training, and also the ability to advance. And so this is a really big miss.
SEANA SMITH: A huge miss here. And, Rachel, this troubling study coming at a time when we're seeing the economy slow down. Odds of a recession seem to be rising almost on a daily basis. What do you think that this will potentially do just in terms of further complicating that gender gap?
RACHEL THOMAS: Yeah, it's interesting. Certainly, the recession will likely have an impact on the dynamics we're seeing. But I actually think we've seen a sea shift. Employees saw what companies were able to do as a result of the pandemic. They invested in flexibility in a way that we'd never seen. They invested in employee well-being at levels that were unheard of before.
And I think employees, and particularly women employees, have said, we're not going back to the past. We want to lean into the future of work. And so what that'll look like over the next 6 to 12 months during what might be a recession, I don't know. But I think that sea change is permanent. And I think we're seeing employees expect something different out of organizations going forward, and particularly those women leaders and those rising women leaders, those young women.
SEANA SMITH: Rachel Thomas, Lareina Yee, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
