McKinsey pissed me off with their "Five-Fifty: Overcoming the Broken Rung" report

Willful ignorance. Blatantly admitting that they only observe and do not look for "why".

Mid January a friend sent me a link to McKinsey’s “Five-Fifty” report “Overcoming the broken rung” on the findings in their 2024, 10th Anniversary “Women in the workplace” report.

Reading it, I got pissed off.

I turned to Claude to do a deep dive on that report, its sources, and their sources.

Its finding were unsurprising and confirmed the thoughts that got me pissed off. When I sent Claude’s report to my friend she said:

I actually immediately disliked the approach of this article. it makes it seem that it is all in the control by women of their own careers and that is just not the case. Why do they work less? Because men don’t pull their weight in sharing the burdens that cause women to ‘break the rung’. The article should be about putting men on educational programmes or something like that.

It really makes it sound almost as though it is women’s fault that they fall behind.

So i sent it to you to let off the steam!

She was as pissed off as I was, but she’s also British and tends to be less direct.

TL;DR (by Claude)

Bottom line up front: McKinsey’s “broken rung” framework accurately identifies where women fall behind—that critical first promotion to manager—but systematically avoids investigating why. Their own research explicitly states they “do not directly investigate the reasons” career paths diverge, then offers individual-focused solutions (”build your experience capital”) for what the academic literature overwhelmingly shows are structural, systemic problems. After a decade of tracking, the broken rung has barely budged (79 women per 100 men in 2018 → 81 in 2024), yet McKinsey continues advising women to navigate around bias rather than addressing the mechanisms that create it.

In case you didn’t get it, you don’t solve structural, systemic problems with individual actions. The most you can do is navigate it around it. And “build your experience capital” is not the way to do it. It’s absolutely useless advice.¹

Willfully ignoring the reasons and and not addressing the mechanisms that create the broken rung — not even mentioning them! — says to me they’re more interested in keeping their clients comfortable and themselves profitable.

Unsurprising, probably, as they’re a male-dominated consulting organization, but still disappointing and annoying as hell.

Especially considering McKinsey has the position, reputation, and the clients to make a real difference.

And it’s unlikely to change.

I’ve long held, and still hold, the belief that as long as “the bottom line” only looks at financial aspects, publicly held businesses are incentivized to maximize profit over everything else.

Sure, they may talk about important other stuff — like their carbon footprint, their DEI initiatives, etc. — in their annual reports, but until they’re forced to report accurate YoY (and Quarter-on-Quarter) bottom-line numbers on those, I fear that’s mostly posturing to polish their image in their shareholders’ eyes.

Still get pissed off every time I return to this.

So much so, I’m in no place to give you a level-headed analysis of what they “miss” and what’s more effective for you to focus on (if you're still convinced you want to work in corporate) and what might be better options for women.

I’ll get to that in future issues.

1. That advice totally ignores that men still get promoted over more experienced and higher-performing women!