Volume X March 07,2025

Leeds News Updates

HOW WOMEN CAN WIN THE THE WORKPLACE:

Happy International Women's Day!

Although women today outperform men in educational settings, they immediately lose ground once they enter the workforce, moving up the career ladder at significantly lower rates. One of the big reasons for this, say three McKinsey consultants, is that women aren’t building as much experience capital—the knowledge, skills, and wisdom that can be gained only on the job. Multiple systemic issues are at work here, but there are actions women can take to address this problem themselves. They include finding supportive employers with a strong, diverse learning culture and smart strategies; making big, bold career moves that grow their skills; taking on leadership and line roles; choosing growing occupations and industries; and deepening their familiarity with technology, particularly AI.

Women achieved educational parity with men more than 40 years ago and today are outperforming men in formal educational settings. In 2021, for instance, women earned 59% of all bachelor’s degrees, 63% of all master’s degrees, and 57% of all doctorate degrees in the United States.

That’s the good news for women. But as soon as they cross the graduation threshold, something strange happens: They immediately lose their advantage. In the United States women represent only 48% of employees entering the corporate workforce—and when the first promotions to manager come around, only 81 women are promoted for every 100 men. This means that over the course of five years one million women will fall behind right at the start of their careers, held back by a broken rung at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Not only that, but women continue to lose ground throughout their careers: At the senior manager/director level, their representation falls to 37%; at the VP level, to 34%, and at the senior VP and C-suite level, to 29%. The numbers are even more extreme for women of color, who collectively make up only 7% of C-suite executives today. We see a similar drop-off for women at senior levels of leadership globally.

All of this raises some familiar questions: How is it possible, four decades after achieving parity in education, that women are still so far from achieving it in the workplace? If they’re beginning their careers just as qualified as or even more qualified than men, shouldn’t that translate into better representation all the way up the professional ladder? Why do these stubborn gender gaps exist in the workplace, especially at senior levels?

One of the big reasons is that education and entry-level skills get you only halfway to your full earning potential. The rest is based on knowledge, skills, and wisdom gained on the job. We call this experience capital.



To understand how men and women build experience capital differently, we analyzed about 86,000 professional profiles in the United States, using longitudinal data to trace actual career trajectories. Interestingly, our analysis shows that women move from role to role and learn new skills just as frequently as men do. However, men are more likely to move to growing occupations from shrinking ones. Their moves are also more likely to increase their pay than moves made by women, who often see a decrease in pay.

Experience capital can be gained through employer-provided learning and development programs, through job changes that challenge you to add new skills to your repertoire, and by observing how colleagues and bosses handle complex tasks or tricky situations. But building experience capital isn’t the only challenge; the other half of the equation is having it recognized in the form of new opportunities, promotions, and compensation increases.

Our research has shown that women aren’t earning the same amount of experience capital as men. There are multiple systemic issues at work here that need to be addressed if we want to solve this problem, including biases in hiring and promotion, but in the meantime there’s plenty that women can do to help themselves. That’s what this article is about: the actions that women can take. By distilling what we’ve learned in more than a decade of research and through interviews with successful female leaders, we’ve developed a set of strategies and practices for developing experience capital that can help women set themselves up for success—in a way that will benefit not just them but also the people and companies they work with.

Find the Right Company, Not Just the Right Job

The organizations you join at the start of your career can have a profound impact on your success. In our research we’ve found that early exposure to an effective organization that supports employees’ growth—ideally within the first five working years—accounts for 50% of the variation in experience capital among workers, on average.

To identify companies that will help you boost your experience capital, look for these traits.

A strong learning culture. Seek out companies in which all employees, new and long-tenured, are offered education and training—and are actively encouraged to take advantage of them by leaders who prioritize their growth. Such organizations also often promote peer learning and set the expectation that employees will take responsibility for developing one another.Successful competitive strategy. Identify organizations that have a clear strategy for winning in their industry and execute it systematically—whether it is driving innovation, involving employees in continuous improvement, being very attuned to the market and its changes, or building a broad set of leaders and general managers.High and cross-functional mobility. A company that actively helps employees move into new roles internally increases their experience capital. In such firms workers develop greater agility and feel that their organization invests in and values them, which increases engagement and retention.Diversity. People are more likely to learn new things and be innovative and creative when they have colleagues who differ from them. Organizations with leadership teams that reflect diverse cultures and genders are more likely to make better decisions and be open to continuous improvement, which can increase their employees’ experience capital. (Note that we’ve found only that these benefits are correlated with diversity; it’s not possible to put a company through a double-blind test to prove causation.)The question, of course, is how to identify companies that actually possess these traits. The most obvious places to start are company websites and the information that companies’ HR departments make available. It’s always a good idea to talk to people who work in the organizations and to compare what they tell you with what you find out through external sources, such as media outlets or websites like Glassdoor and Indeed. You can ask questions like these: What are the core values of the company, and how do leaders walk the talk each day? How many hours a year (or what percentage of time) are employees encouraged to invest in their personal learning? How does that learning actually happen, and what company support and resources are there to ensure that it happens? What is the promotion structure? How high is employee turnover? What percentage of employees make cross-functional moves within the organization? What kinds of formal sponsorship and mentorship programs exist?

When interviewing for a job, never forget that it’s a two-way process: The people at a company may be interviewing you, but you’re also interviewing them. Outside the interview process, seek every possible opportunity to speak to current and former employees. Find out about the culture. Learn everything you can about the CEO, the executive team, and your future boss: What are their values and leadership styles, and how do they interact with others? Consider the board of directors, too. How diverse is it in terms of background and expertise? Board members, after all, are the people who shape the organization from the very top.

Make Big, Bold Moves

The moves you make throughout your career—across organizations, occupations, and industries—play an enormous role in the growth of your experience capital. But not all moves are created equal. Our data shows that two types of moves have the greatest impact. The first is a big move, which involves starting over in a new occupation or industry. Big moves can make sense when you find yourself in the wrong occupation or industry: It just isn’t a fit, or perhaps the field is being disrupted significantly by generative AI. In the latter case it may be a good time to jump to one that is growing and needs more people.

Workers who start out in line roles have lifetime earnings that are 20% higher, on average, than those who start out in support roles.

The second type is a bold move, in which you take a role that requires a significant number of new skills. To determine whether a move is bold, we use a measure we call “skill distance”—the percentage of new skills needed in the new job. The median skill distance for all job moves is roughly 25%, meaning that a quarter of the required skills were not used in the person’s previous role. When a job move has a skill distance higher than 25%, we consider it to be bold.

One way to increase your experience capital is to make bold moves throughout your career. Your pay tends to go up the most when you take a new job that requires novel skills, which is when your learning curve is the steepest. When you make multiple bold moves during your career, you compound your experience capital.

Whether you’re looking to make a big move early in your career or a bold move later on, it can take some work to find the right opportunity. Here are a few steps you can follow:

Stretch yourself. Make sure you’re reaching for roles with a high skill distance. If you go after jobs that require only the skills you already possess, you won’t maximize your experience capital.Build your narrative. Before starting your search, know what story you plan to tell. Even if you feel that your previous role or roles didn’t work out or were a bad fit, figure out how to describe them as learning opportunities that provided you with valuable skills. This is key: To persuade companies and hiring managers to make a bet on you, you need to talk about what you’ve liked and learned in your previous roles, not what made you unhappy or frustrated.Activate your network. Because big moves often require crossing over into new industries or functions, and because bold moves often involve getting people to take a chance on you even though you may not yet have all the necessary skills for a job, networking is key. You’ll need a network that’s broad and diverse enough to facilitate cross-industry moves—and includes sponsors who can encourage leaders who don’t know you to give you a shot. Start by strengthening your personal connections. Systematically free up time on your calendar for coffee chats, lunches, and so on, and use this time to talk to people in areas you’re interested in. Ask them about their roles, about other people they think you should talk to, and—if you feel comfortable with it—whether they can connect you directly to those people. Continue doing this until you understand exactly what kind of opportunity you’re looking for and what truly interests you. Once you know where you want to go, figure out how best to get there. Be straightforward and clear as you continue to reach out to people: “I’m really interested in this area. How can I best prepare myself and build the right skills?” As you make progress and start to apply for positions, update the people in your network who’ve been helpful. This is especially important in the case of sponsors or mentors, who are likely to be in the room when hiring and promotion decisions are made.Signal the right skills. Often job seekers have the skills that are required for a role but fail to highlight them on their résumés, in their LinkedIn profiles, or in other ways. This gap is widest when it comes to soft skills such as teamwork, conflict resolution, and communication. Together, soft skills make up 25% of the top 20 skills listed in job postings, but most people focus predominantly on signaling their technical skills. Don’t make that mistake.Close with confidence. At the end of an interview, make it clear why you’re the person for the job. To pull off big and bold moves, you have to believe in yourself, the skills you’ve developed, and your potential to apply them in a new role. If you’re willing to bet on yourself, prospective employers will be more willing to bet on you too.Enter the Power Alley

When it comes to building experience capital, two types of positions are accelerators: leadership roles and those with profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. Because both give you a significant amount of clout, we think of them as being in what we call the power alley. The more time you spend there, and the wider the variety of roles you hold there, the more experience capital you’ll accumulate.

Leadership roles. The benefits of working in a leadership role are clear: You have a seat at the table in decision-making and are able to influence outcomes. You and your work become far more visible. You have an opportunity to build a network of senior colleagues, which can help open doors for you. And you can open doors for others. All of this requires excellent communication skills that are transferable across organizations and industries.But becoming a leader is not just about applying for a job or a promotion. It’s also about being seen as a leader, both by others and by yourself. This can be a struggle for women. Often biases are a factor: Women are nearly twice as likely as men to be mistaken for someone more junior and are far more likely to have colleagues question their judgment or imply that they aren’t qualified for their jobs. They’re more likely to have others take credit for their ideas—37% of female leaders say that this has happened to them, compared with 27% of male leaders. Female leaders are also more likely to report that personal characteristics, such as their gender or being a parent, have played a role in their being passed over for a raise or a promotion. Those experiences disrupt the learning required to become a leader, which in turn can prevent women from seeing themselves as leaders, creating a vicious cycle of external biases driving internal biases. However, we know that women do make effective leaders. Employees with female managers are more likely than those with male managers to say their boss checks in on their well-being, helps them balance their workload, and promotes inclusive behavior on their team—traits that are all increasingly important to employees.

Whether you’re just starting out in your career or are more established, it’s important to understand the shifts that are underway now and those that are coming. When you’re choosing an occupation, it pays to be strategic and pick an area that’s growing. If you’re currently in one that’s shrinking, you’ll need to think about reskilling and upskilling.

Here are some of the key aspects of the changing work landscape to consider:

Growing occupations. In the United States the industry that will experience the greatest job growth is healthcare, where employment is expected to increase 30% by 2030. The second-largest increases will be in jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math, collectively referred to as STEM, for which demand will increase 23%. The transportation-­services sector is expected to see job growth of 9% overall.Shrinking occupations. Automation and generative AI will lead to declining opportunities primarily in four categories of jobs—customer service and sales, food service, office support (administrative assistants), and production (manufacturing). People working in them will account for roughly 85% of the 12 million occupational shifts, or job changes, that will need to be made in the United States by 2030. Because women hold more of the jobs in all those occupations except production, they are 50% more likely than men to be affected by job loss from automation and gen AI.New occupational categories. By 2030 technology and other trends will also help create entirely new kinds of jobs. This is a long-standing pattern: In the United States about 9% of all jobs have been in occupations that are less than 10 years old. Recent examples include jobs related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, social media, renewable energy, and environmental sustainability.Cross-industry opportunities. Workers often don’t realize they can do a very similar job in a very different industry. As industries grow and shrink, it’s important to keep that possibility in mind and get creative about seeking opportunities. In some cases it may even be worth trading a higher salary for a role in a growth sector. Just as you do when jumping to a new occupation, when you move to a new industry you take relevant skills with you—and increase your experience capital.Everyone Can Be a Technologist

Once technology was seen as a back-office support function, but today tech skills are valuable in jobs of all types across all industries. An increasing number of jobs don’t require direct computer engineering skills but do require familiarity with technology. However, many women may perceive that those jobs are out of reach, perhaps because they didn’t study computer science or engineering in college.

But remember: What you learn in school is only half the story. You can still learn at work, and there are several ways you can embrace technology to set yourself apart.

Be an AI power user. Generative AI is accelerating the automation of tasks across hundreds of job categories and has the potential to increase productivity in the global economy by up to $4.4 trillion. By 2030, 30% of the activities of every job in the United States, on average, could be done by automation and generative AI. In some jobs up to 70% of activities can be augmented by gen AI. That’s not to say these jobs will disappear, but how workers in them spend time and add value will be substantially different, and being able to harness gen AI in them will be essential.One of the unique advantages of gen AI is that anyone can be a power user—the technology is complex to create but easy to apply. The basic prerequisite is simply the ability to ask good questions and have a dialogue with the tools.

Pilot new technology use cases. There are many actions women can take to gain gen AI experience capital that do not require a technical background. Seeking out opportunities and demonstrating that you are a committed early adopter can give you visibility and leadership opportunities in your organization. Parts of the process you might experiment with include technology design, user experience design, analytics, and research.Prioritize technology skill development. All of this may sound overwhelming if you haven’t spent a lot of time with technology, but there are practical steps you can take. A simple benchmark is to set aside 10% of your workweek to invest in yourself and the skills you’ll need to advance your technology experience capital. It’s also important to ensure that you have people with technology skills on your team. Not only does that improve its effectiveness, but you can learn from those colleagues. Finally, technology, particularly gen AI, is best when experienced firsthand. So have some fun with it. The more time you spend playing around with it, the more prepared you’ll be to apply it to your work.. . .

As you think about how to develop your experience capital, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my ambition, and how can I embrace it?
• Am I strategically building a portfolio of experiences that will help me meet my goals?
• What investments am I making in myself that will increase my chances of success?
• Do I have the right short- and long-term habits in place to ensure my career longevity?
• Am I asking for help?
• Am I giving back to my communities and lifting up others around me?

How you answer those questions will help you navigate the workplace. For the past decade women have consistently expressed a desire for promotions and leadership positions that is equal to or greater than men’s. Equal representation remains elusive, of course, particularly at more-senior levels, but it’s now clear what you need to do if you want to get ahead: Earn more experience capital.