麦肯锡-为了达到顶峰，女性应该专注于技能培养（英）

People & Organizational Performance PracticeTo climb to the top, women should focus on skill buildingLow advancement rates have hindered women’s careers. To make up ground, they can hone their entrepreneurial and soft skills and build a network of mentors and sponsors.by Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar MartínezApril 2025Anita Leung was still in high school when she got a glimpse into her future in the tech industry. It was an exciting place to build a career, but it could also be a lonely place for a woman.As a sophomore, Anita spotted a flyer about the need for more women in technology. She signed up for a class in peer-networking software. Out of 30 students, she was the only girl. When students partnered up for projects, she was chosen last. This pattern repeated itself every semester. Even so, Anita enjoyed the classes and started feeling that a career in computer science would be a good fit.Before finishing high school, Anita landed an internship at Amazon. Once again, she was the only woman on the team, but by this point she was used to it. After graduating from a computer science program at the University of Washington, she landed a job as a software engineer at Google. Anita says the underrepresentation of women was less apparent there than in many other organizations, thanks to a women’s engineering networking group and other initiatives.And yet, she noticed a lack of women in the middle rungs of leadership. Early in her career, Anita perceived a widespread trend: The higher one looks up the organizational ranks, the fewer women one finds.Despite accounting for 59 percent of college graduates in the United States, women represent only 48 percent of those entering the corporate workforce. When promotion time comes, the ranks of women are thinned again: For every 100 men, only 81 women are promoted. This advancement gap compounds over women’s careers, with lower representation at every step of the leadership ladder. While there has been progress, with women now accounting for 29 percent of top executives reporting to the CEO, that first often delayed or missed promotion to manager affects the whole talent pipeline. We call this phenomenon the “broken rung.”This gap in promotions, in turn, is a hidden driver of the difference between women’s and men’s incomes over the course of their careers. For men and women alike, roughly half of their lifetime earnings come from what they bring to the table when they start their careers—their talents and education. The other half stems from the value of the skills and experiences gained on the job—what we call experience capital. When women aren’t promoted, they miss out on the new responsibilities that help build experience capital.It is for women like Anita that we wrote The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It. Working from more than a decade of McKinsey and outside research, conversations with women leaders, and our own experi