A decade after ‘lean in,’ progress for women isn’t trickling down

That’s one of the central findings of a new, 10-year study of the roles and promotion rates of millions of women and men at major North American companies. After all the public efforts to advance women at work, most C-suite promotions put women in positions, like human-resources and marketing, that don’t lead to the CEO job. Now as company programs designed to diversify workforces face questions about fairness, sustaining the progress could get tougher.

The share of women in the lowest—and much larger—managerial ranks has grown by just 2 percentage points from a decade ago, to 39% from 37%, and slightly more among middle managers, according to researchers at McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, the nonprofit founded by former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg.

Their study, based on the workforce data of more than 1,000 companies since 2015, marks the biggest ongoing effort to measure women’s advancement inside big companies. The findings cast doubt over whether companies can build on those uneven gains, especially as they retreat from some of the measures they implemented in recent years to narrow the gender gap.

“The ability to grow talent from the entry-level up to senior leadership is one of the most fundamental challenges companies still haven’t gotten their hands around," said Lareina Yee, a senior partner at McKinsey.

The number of employers who said gender diversity was a high priority fell to 78% this year from 87% in 2019, according to the study—consistent with a broader pushback against corporate diversity programs. Gender-focused recruiting initiatives fell by nearly a third from 2022. So did the share of companies offering sponsorship programs aimed at helping rising female talent find senior executives who can champion them for bigger roles.

Research shows those sponsorship opportunities for women make a big difference, Yee says. With companies backtracking, she asks: “How do you think that’s going to go?"

A shaky pipeline

When “Lean In," Sandberg’s 2013 handbook for working women, came out, it started a conversation across businesses about boosting female representation, and results. Companies set female promotion and recruiting goals, expanded parental benefits and warmed to flexible work. They also cultivated more female leaders; 40 women led S&P 500 companies at the end of last year, according to executive search and consulting firm Spencer Stuart, compared with 21 in 2015.

The lopsided progress since then means companies can’t lose their focus on continuing to support women in their career ambitions, says Sandberg, who left her role as chief operating officer of Facebook parent Meta Platforms in 2022.

That the gender gap in workplaces persists “shows it’s going to take a very concerted effort to fix it," she says. “Women are doing their part, and we need companies to do their part."

The biggest change has occurred at the top, where the population of women in the C-suite rose to 29% from 17% in 2015, while the share of women of color climbed to 7%. Many of those senior women have been elevated in so-called staff roles, particularly chief HR officers, not as division heads with bottom-line responsibilities, the study data show. Those business-operating jobs, traditional steppingstones to becoming chief executive, continue to be filled mostly by men.

Without methodical efforts to identify and groom women for positions with the most power, companies will continue to face a shortage of women in leadership roles, says Jane Edison Stevenson, global vice chair of board and CEO services at executive-recruitment firm Korn Ferry.

“What will make the biggest difference? It is women in operating roles as soon as possible in their careers," says Stevenson, who points to General Motors as a case in point.

Under Mary Barra, who became the first woman to run a global automaker in 2014, about 36% of GM’s top managers are now women, including its executive chief engineer for battery electric trucks, head of trucks for North America and global system safety director.

The Lean In and McKinsey data show women tend to fall behind men in their career progress at the very first promotion opportunity. About eight women get their first promotion to manager for every 10 men—virtually the same rate they did in 2018. Promotion rates for women of color—which briefly surged as companies redoubled racial-diversity commitments after George Floyd’s 2020 murder—are worse than for white women.

That may be one reason a Census Bureau report last week showed women working full time experienced 1.5% in median-income gains last year, half the increase for men. The difference drove the female-to-male earnings ratio down to 82.7%, compared with 84% a year earlier, marking the first statistically significant decrease in two decades.

Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at Vanessa.Fuhrmans@wsj.com