The 10-year anniversary publication of Lean In’s annual assessment of the status of working women in the United States, “Women in the Workplace 2024,” points to a very concerning observation at the outset: Companies’ commitments to diversity are declining. Some gains are observed when it comes to women’s representation in corporate America, but the stats show there is still much work to be done and what has been accomplished is at risk.
The report, produced in conjunction with McKinsey & Company, reveals that women have gained representation at every level in the last decade, including in chief officer roles, known as the C-suite. Women held 29% of the C-suite positions in 2024 versus 17% in 2015. However, the representation of women of color in the C-suite remains very low, accounting for only 3% each for Asian and Black women, and 1% for Latinas.
Moreover, the results showing increases in C-suite representation may be misleading. “What we see is that most of the increases in representation were due to companies creating a new staff role and then hiring a woman into that position. This can seem like progress, but the fact of the matter is we can’t get to parity for all women by continuously adding more roles to the C-suite,” said Priya Fielding-Singh, Ph.D., one of the report authors and a senior manager of research and education at LeanIn.org. Instead of creating new positions just for women, she said, “We must also shift the distribution of the existing roles more toward women. That’s why this is not a sustainable path forward.”
The report showed men outnumbering women at every point in the corporate pipeline, especially at the entry and managerial levels. Women overall have witnessed a decline in promotions to managerial roles since 2023, with Asian women posing an exception. Latinas saw the worst decline in those numbers, and Black women regressed to 2020 levels.
“An important finding this year is that companies’ commitments to gender and racial diversity are declining; the percent of companies that say that gender diversity and racial diversity are priorities to them is decreasing,” said Dr. Fielding-Singh. “When companies are less committed, naturally, we expect that they’re potentially taking their foot off the gas a bit as far as the efforts to advance women and make their processes more equitable.”
Tracy White, a leader of the Society of Women Engineers Mid-Career Professionals affinity group, said that in her professional experience, women struggle more to balance life and work as they move up the corporate ladder. “I’ve mentored and seen a lot of women struggle with work/life balance when we get into that upper management level because work gets so demanding that we’re looking to shed everything about what we do at home so that we can focus on work.”
White, a senior pressure vessel engineer for the sustainable energy technology company Velocys, was unsurprised to find that the report showed many women continue to do most or all of the work at home — 39% in 2024 compared to 35% in 2016. “That, perhaps, holds women back from stepping out of the roles at home to go into the workplace to the level that it takes to be that next level manager,” White said. “I experienced that kind of burnout [when] I was middle management and working my way up [at another firm].”
The 2024 report also found that many companies are not as focused on career development and sponsorship programs for women and women of color — and efforts to get employees involved in such initiatives have not been very successful.
“It’s hard to change the culture of work — that is, to change people’s hearts and minds. And deep, systemic, organizational change is extremely difficult,” said Dr. Fielding-Singh. “It’s also not linear, nor is it a one-and-done push where you put the right policies in place at one time, and everything will follow. Getting it right requires ongoing efforts and continuous improvement.
“This is all to say that companies can [do], and, in certain places, are doing the hard work,” Dr. Fielding-Singh said. Although that work may not have the intended consequences across the board, she said, “We also identified some places where companies appear to be on the right track. But they might not be undertaking initiatives that are the highest quality or as research-backed as they could be.”
One example she provides is training. Nearly all companies today offer some form of bias or allyship training. However, not all training is created equal or implemented across an organization, and not all of it is going to have the intended impact. In its solutions section, the report noted that effective trainings are mostly live —whether in person or online — and provide repeated engagement with a topic. Ideally, these trainings offer employees authentic ways to brainstorm actions and commit to solutions to problems.
The changing legal landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI; the 2023 Supreme Court’s decision last year ending affirmative action policies in college admissions; and the number of anti-DEI lawsuits that followed are likely pushing companies away from investing more deeply in DEI efforts, Dr. Fielding-Singh said. The 2024 report found that companies have scaled back on formal mentorship, sponsorship, and career development programs to advance women and women of color in the workplace and few still track any outcomes of such programs.
“In the 2023 report, we talked about best practices for tracking DEI progress, and our underlying message was what gets measured gets done,” said Dr. Fielding-Singh. “If you’re not tracking representation, promotions, hiring, and attrition by both race and gender, then you’re not going to see where the barriers are — where women and women of color and women of different identities are getting stuck in the pipeline.”
One striking observation in the report is that ageism is more pronounced for younger women than older employees, with 49% of women under the age of 30 citing age as a factor in missed opportunities.
Dr. Fielding-Singh said a lack of awareness within companies around ageism and the barriers faced by younger women could potentially be leading to more demeaning treatment, more biased behavior, and more microaggressions.
Microaggressions continue to be a concern, especially for women with historically marginalized identities, who are likely to be the only ones like themselves in the room. “Onlys” face additional scrutiny at work, the report stated. Moreover, sexual harassment is still as commonplace as it was five years ago. The 2024 report indicated 37% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace, compared to 35% in 2018. And younger women are just as likely as older women to have experienced some form of sexual harassment during their careers.
White also expressed concern about the sexual harassment stats in the 2024 report. “With all the awareness that we have, all the training, all the push toward fixing that issue, the statistics aren’t saying that we’ve even really started to fix that issue,” she said. “What are we missing that we’re still experiencing that in the workplace?”
