Why Aren't More Women Being Promoted to Leadership Roles?

Though corporate America is making strides toward greater gender diversity, women are still underrepresented in leadership positions. At the beginning of 2020, women held 22 percent of C-suite roles, despite representing more than half of the workforce. Looking more closely at the hotel industry, women occupy just 18 percent of chief leadership positions.

At Pinsight, we conducted research to uncover what causes this lack of diversity across a wide range of industries. Based on data from 328 managers and 129 organizations that together employ more than 500,000 people, we found that unconscious bias against women and minorities creates a self-perpetuating cycle when it comes to promotion to leadership roles.

Our research, outlined in the report Repairing the Broken Rung: Overcoming Bias in the Leadership Pipeline, reveals that lack of diversity occurs because a large majority of organizations follow internal practices that center on the judgment of managers to determine who has leadership potential. Unfortunately, despite hours of training and everyone’s best intentions, unconscious bias significantly influences managers’ perceptions of who is a future leader. This bias leads to a disproportionate number of men being identified as “high potentials.”

Companies invest significantly more in developing their high-potential employees, on average $4,000 per year. Since women and racial minorities are less likely to be in this select group, they’re less likely to benefit from special training and resources designed to prepare them for a promotion faster. As a result, they miss out on executive coaching, networking opportunities with senior executives, and high-visibility projects that position their equally capable nonminority colleagues for a promotion.

How to Break the Cycle

We’ve determined five steps that organizations can take to ensure fairness in selection and development of future leaders:

1. Get the data. Start by obtaining data about your current practices for identifying emerging leaders and high-potential employees. Monitor the balance in these programs with the same rigor you apply to hiring decisions. Calculate adverse impact against any protected group periodically, after talent review cycles, or managerial ratings. Review industry trends and best practices, as well as legal cases to ensure that you’re aware of risks and trends in this space.
2. Roll out bias training for all. Bias training is a good starting point, but understand that it’s meant to increase awareness of the issue, not solve it. You can’t train bias out of people. All humans use biases to save time and energy when making decisions. Training can increase awareness of what biases exist; how they can affect organizational decision making; and where to look for them in talent reviews, high-potential selection, and succession decisions. Because most people are reluctant to see their own biases, use data from your organization as evidence that even your managers show bias.
3. Turn up the rigor. Apply rigor to your existing processes for identifying high-potential employees and successors across the entire leadership pipeline, from frontline managers all the way to senior executives. Examine not just how those decisions are made, but how the processes are executed. Do managers write down names and submit them in a sealed envelope, or is there a transparent assessment in place? Do you have a validated list of the characteristics and attributes needed for employees to access high-potential programs?
4. Identify selection criteria. Set criteria that have been scientifically validated to predict success in leadership roles, and insist that managers use these during the nomination process. Educate managers on the criteria and what potential performance looks like for emerging leaders at your company, and ask them to provide evidence that their candidates meet the criteria. Communicate the criteria to all employees to reinforce a culture of fair and consistent standards in promotion and succession plans.
5. Introduce blind auditions. This process provides managers with a more objective view of employee potential. You can set up a simulation of a leadership position and invite trained assessors who have no prior relationship to the candidates to observe their performance. Seeing all employees in the same standardized situation and using a validated set of criteria, you’ll arrive at a more objective evaluation of their leadership potential and readiness.

A version of this article was originally published by Women Leading Travel & Hospitality’s sister brand, Women in Retail Leadership Circle.