For every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women were promoted — the eleventh consecutive year of that first-step gap, per the Women in the Workplace 2025 report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company. For Black women the figure is 60, and for Latinas and Asian women 82. The broken rung, not the glass ceiling, remains the root of the leadership gap.
What changed in the 2025 findings?
Company commitment is falling. Sixty-seven percent of companies say diversity is a high priority, down from 90 percent in 2021, and about two in ten have scaled back bias training, per the report. Flexibility now carries its own penalty: only about a third of mostly-remote women received a promotion in the past two years or have a sponsor, versus more than half of mostly on-site women, while men's outcomes barely differ by location. One in four companies discontinued or scaled back remote and hybrid options altogether.
What does the report say about ambition and burnout?
For the first time, the survey found a measurable ambition gap: 80 percent of women want a promotion, against 86 percent of men. Burnout runs heavier at the top — six in ten senior-level women report frequent burnout, versus half of senior men and roughly four in ten employees overall. Sponsorship stays thin early: 31 percent of entry-level women report having a sponsor, against 45 percent of men. The report also flags an emerging AI support gap, with far fewer women than men encouraged to use AI tools at entry level.
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Why it matters for women planning their next move
The data reframes two common pieces of career advice. First, the decisive bottleneck is the move into management, so the case for a first promotion deserves more preparation than the case for a later one — the numbers never catch up once the first step lags. Second, remote work is not a neutral choice: women who use it pay a documented promotion-and-sponsorship penalty, which means the negotiation over flexibility belongs in the promotion conversation, not after it.
What is the report based on?
The annual study draws on survey responses and human-resources data from hundreds of participating organizations, per LeanIn.Org and McKinsey. It is self-reported employer data, which the report's own methodology notes, and its findings describe participating companies rather than the entire US labor market. For federal benchmarks on pay, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' quarterly earnings series remains the independent reference point.