Broken Rung: How Women Can Overcome It to Reach Their Full Potential at Work

The broken rung: a phenomenon even more pervasive than the glass ceiling in holding women back from career success. This book explains it and gives you strategies for how to overcome it and fulfill your potential.

Women around the world do extremely well when it comes to their education. They graduate at higher rates than men do and have higher average GPAs. But then a strange thing happens: Upon entering the workforce, they immediately lose their advantage. When the first promotions come around, the slide continues--for every 100 men who are promoted to manager, only 87 women and 73 women of color get promoted.

This is what McKinsey senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez call "the broken rung," and its effects compound throughout women’s careers, causing women to fall behind at the start and keeping them from catching up. In this groundbreaking book, the authors reveal the problem’s underlying cause: while about half of a person’s lifetime earnings come from education and half from experience, men get more value from their experience than women do. As the authors show, it is also here, in one’s experience, that the solution lies: How can women build their "experience capital" to level the playing field and maximize their earning potential?

Based on over a decade of research, conversations with more than 50 remarkable leaders, and their own experiences as senior partners and as the first three consecutive chief diversity and inclusion officers for McKinsey, the authors weave data on the potential pitfalls across a career with inspiring and instructive stories of women who have climbed over the broken rung by using strategies that increased their experience capital.

Leaders and companies must do more to address structural gender inequalities in the workplace--but you don’t have to wait.Broken Rungis your guide, right now, for moving up the corporate ladder and reaching your full potential at work.

Kweilin Ellingrudis McKinsey’s Chief Diversity Officer and a director of the McKinsey Global Institute, based in Minneapolis. As a senior partner at McKinsey, she has led research on the topics of gender equality, racial equity, generative AI, the future of work, and global competitiveness. She also helps financial services organizations transform.

Lareina Yeeis the chair of the McKinsey Technology Council and cohead of McKinsey’s Ecosystems and Alliances. Based in San Francisco, she is a senior partner leading the firm’s work in technology and AI. She served as McKinsey’s first Chief Diversity Officer and, in 2015, cofounded Women in the Workplace, an annual research study that has worked with more than 1,000 companies in understanding the barriers to women’s advancement in corporate America.

María del Mar Martínezchairs the committee that elects McKinsey’s senior partners globally. Based in Madrid, she has led McKinsey’s Risk & Resilience Practice, served as McKinsey’s Chief Diversity Officer, and actively researched global diversity topics. She was the first female partner elected in Iberia. As a senior partner, she advises financial institutions and boards on growth, transformation, risk management, and resilience.