Sheryl Sandberg discusses women's advancement at work: Progress is 'pretty fragile'

LeanIn and McKinsey have released their annual Women in the Workplace Report, and while there are clear signs of progress, women also face major headwinds. 

The percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs who are women has doubled from 5% a decade ago when LeanIn and McKinsey started doing this report, to 10% today. Companies now offer significantly more work-life benefits than they did even five years ago: In 2024, 92% of companies offered paid maternity leave and 86% offered paid paternity leave, up from 2018, when 78% of companies offered paid maternity leave and 70% offered paid paternity leave.

“We’re seeing some progress, but it’s pretty fragile,” says Sheryl Sandberg, the founder and board chair of LeanIn. Based on the current rate of change, the report finds that it will take 22 years for white women, and 48 years for women of color, to reach parity in the workforce. 

Sandberg’s biggest concern — one revealed by data in LeanIn and McKinsey’s report — is the lack of female employees who could be promoted into leadership roles. “People have added women to senior leadership in staff roles, but if you’re looking for, ‘Where’s the CEO pipeline?’ You still don’t see it.” 

While women have reached the C-suite, they disproportionately oversee staff functions, she points out, like legal and HR. The issue, she notes, is that there aren’t enough women in roles directly connected to companies’ output, like head of product, and those are the roles that are more likely to get promoted into CEO.

The Women in the Workplace Report shines a spotlight on the issue of broken rungs and that women, especially Black women, miss out on the first promotion to manager. For every 100 men who are promoted to manager, only 81 women are. The number is lower for Latinas and Black women (65 and 54 for every 100 men, respectively). 

The gap between men and women has widened in the last few years and reached levels last seen in 2019, when 79 women were promoted into the first manager role for every 100 men. Manager support is lower for women of color: Less than half of women report getting the support they need to be successful from managers, with women of color getting even less.

At the same time, commitment to programs that advance women, especially women of color, is declining. “The whole DEI field is facing some challenges now, and we know that a lot of companies are cutting their DEI programs. I think there’s more politics around this,” says Sandberg. “I think the message has to be that [investing in] diversity is not the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do.” 

“This is not just to make yourself feel good,” she continues. “This is because your results will be better.”

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