Neil Freiman

Moving on, after a decade of slow but steady progress, women have hit a wall as they try to advance through the ranks of corporate America.

That's according to a new report from McKinsey and the women's advocacy group Lean In, founded by former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg says that a variety of factors, including the retreat from DEI initiatives to return to work mandates, show that employers are dropping their support for women's careers.

In fact, a little over half, 56%,

of HR professionals said that women's career advancement is a priority at their organization.

That marks a reversal from 2017 when 88% said gender equity was a high priority.

The most startling finding in this report was what Lean In called the ambition gap.

Overall, 80% of women surveyed said they wanted to be promoted to the next level,

compared to 86% of men.

And the divide is even wider when you zero in on entry-level and senior-level positions.

In 11 years of doing this report, Lean In has never found an ambition gap between men and women and blamed those loosening supports for causing women to lean out.

Rachel Thomas, the CEO of Lean In, said corporate America is signaling that they're kind of rolling back their commitment to women and women themselves are signaling that they are feeling it.

A couple of headlines from recent months and years highlight this, the progress being stalled for women in November.

Goldman Sachs promoted the smallest proportion of women to managing director since 2018.

And then in 2023, about 60 C-suite roles, women lost at companies in the S&P global total market index.

That was the first time the number of female executives at this level of the business world dropped in almost 20 years.

And those are the, that's the

quantitative data, the qualitative data.

Just look at Sheryl Sandberg's former boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

He said that his company, among his many changes, said he wanted his company to have more masculine energy, and that got a lot of pushback.