Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
More women needed in leadership roles
Diversity & Inclusion | Leadership
November 17, 2022 – Despite modest gains in representation over the past five years, women—and especially women of color—are still dramatically underrepresented in leadership roles in corporate America, according to McKinsey’s latest Women in the Workplace report from senior partner Lareina Yee and coauthors, conducted in partnership with LeanIn.Org. The difference becomes more pronounced with each step up the corporate ladder: only one in four C-suite leaders is a woman, and only one in 20 is a woman of color.
To read the report, see “Women in the Workplace 2022,” October 18, 2022.
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Visual form
Leadership-pipeline chart.
Layout / body structure
The visual is laid out as a step-by-step corporate ladder, so the reader follows representation from lower levels up through senior leadership. The chart reads bottom to top, with the representation gap widening at each higher rung.
What is being compared
It compares women’s representation at successive levels of corporate leadership, with an additional emphasis on the even steeper underrepresentation of women of color.
Measurement system
The chart uses representation shares, so the viewer tracks the percentage of leadership seats held by women at each level rather than a revenue or output measure.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The main pieces are the hierarchy levels and the corresponding representation markers attached to each one. The narrowing shape of the pipeline is the key structural feature because it visually encodes the loss of representation on the way to the top.
Main takeaway from the visual
The chart shows that the leadership gap is cumulative and structural. Even where overall representation improves slightly, the upward path still sheds women at each stage, which is why senior leadership remains dramatically less balanced.
Key standout values or extremes
The page’s strongest emphasis is the dramatic underrepresentation of women in leadership roles despite modest gains over five years, with women of color shown as even more underrepresented. The visual power comes from how sharply the pipeline narrows by level.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.