Ninety-three women are promoted to manager for every 100 men, according to the 2025 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, and that early gap is the largest single leak in the corporate leadership pipeline. Because most companies fill chief executive roles from inside their own ranks, the shortfall compounds for roughly a decade before it ever reaches the C-suite.
Researchers and executive recruiters call this first gap the "broken rung." It sits earlier than the more familiar metaphor of a glass ceiling blocking senior women from the top, and it explains more of the eventual shortfall than any single later-stage barrier does.
What is the broken rung, and where does it show up?
The broken rung is the gap that opens at a worker's first promotion from an individual contributor role into first-line management. The 2025 Women in the Workplace report, produced by McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women are promoted. The gap is wider for women of color: 74 are promoted to manager for every 100 men, per the same report.
That early shortfall then tracks through every level above it. Women's share of roles falls at each successive rung, according to the 2025 report: 49 percent at entry level, 42 percent at manager, 39 percent at senior manager or director, 35 percent at vice president, and 29 percent in the C-suite, a share the report says was unchanged from 2024.
| Level | Share held by women, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Entry level | 49% |
| Manager | 42% |
| Senior manager / director | 39% |
| Vice president | 35% |
| C-suite | 29% |
The pattern the report describes is not a steady, even decline. The steepest single drop happens at that first step, from entry level into management, before formal succession planning or executive search ever enters the picture.
Why does the first promotion matter more than the later ones?
Every later promotion draws from the pool the previous level left behind. If fewer women reach manager, a smaller pool of women is eligible for senior manager roles years later, and a smaller pool still for vice president and C-suite openings after that. The 2025 McKinsey and LeanIn.Org report found top-quartile companies had narrowed the gap in women's representation by an average of 7 percentage points since 2021, while representation at lower-performing companies improved only modestly and unevenly over the same period, widening the distance between the two groups.
That compounding effect is why a one-point gap at manager level shows up as a much larger gap by the time hiring committees are drafting a shortlist for chief executive.
How does a company actually decide who becomes CEO?
Executive succession is a board-level process, not a single hiring decision made near a departure date. In a report on C-suite succession published in March 2026, the search firm Spencer Stuart described a multi-year process: the board and sitting CEO first agree succession is a standing priority, then define the skills a future leader needs, assess high-potential internal talent against those criteria, build contingency plans for emergency and planned transitions, and develop internal candidates over years through stretch assignments, coaching and mentoring, while also benchmarking against outside talent.
The same Spencer Stuart research found that companies lean heavily on the internal pipeline when the process concludes: nearly 60 percent of S&P 500 functional leaders and 73 percent of sitting CEOs were internal appointees, meaning most chief executives are promoted from within rather than hired from outside. Development from a middle-management role to the C-suite typically takes upwards of a decade, the firm found.
That reliance on internal promotion is exactly why the broken rung matters for who eventually becomes CEO. A company drawing 73 percent of its chief executives from employees already climbing its own ladder is, by definition, drawing on a pool shaped by every promotion decision made a decade earlier, including the ones at the first rung.
What does that mean for how many women are CEOs today?
Catalyst, which tracks women's representation in corporate leadership, reported that women held 10.4 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions in 2024 data, with women of color accounting for under 8 percent of those seats. Catalyst also reported that women held 33 percent of board seats, with women of color holding 7.8 percent of board director positions.
Board composition matters to succession because boards run the process Spencer Stuart described: setting success profiles, sponsoring internal candidates, and ultimately voting on who gets the job. A board's own composition does not by itself determine who is promoted below it, but it is the body that decides which candidates the company invests a decade in developing.
None of the reports cited here measure intent or attribute the pipeline gap to a single cause; they measure outcomes at each level, year over year. Read together, they describe a mechanism rather than a single moment: the leadership gap most visible at the top is, by the numbers, largely set at the first promotion.
For a related careers perspective, read How to use pay-transparency laws to negotiate a higher salary.