5 Ways to Elevate Women in Leadership

Women make up over half the workforce in America but only hold one-third of senior leadership roles. Unconscious bias, restricted access to mentorship and opportunities, and cultural pressures often keep women behind, leading to a “broken rung” in the corporate ladder that prevents women from making that first step up to management and continue on toward senior leadership from there — for every 100 men promoted to their first management role, only 86 women advance.

Fixing the leadership gap in our workforce requires a holistic and targeted approach. Workplaces don’t have signs hung up that say “no girls allowed” — the things holding women back in the workplace are much more subtle than that, and prejudiced treatment often comes from people who don’t realize that they’re acting on implicit bias and misogyny. Let’s take a look at some of these subtle factors that add up to a big impact — and then, 5 ways to help fix them.

Women leaders have a smaller peer group

Peer groups are essential in business. We analyze people with similar career paths across our industry and the workforce at large to identify career strategies, but that can become a negative feedback loop if only one subset of experiences is reflected in the group we are analyzing. After all, if we are looking at a conference of one hundred people…