According to McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s latest Women in the Workplace report, women are now less likely than men to say they want a promotion.
For the first time in 11 years of tracking this data, a measurable aspiration gap has emerged: 69% of entry-level women want to advance, compared with 80% of men at the same level.
At senior level, the gap holds: 84% of senior women want a promotion versus 92% of their male peers.
At first glance, it invites an easy conclusion, writes Anja van Beek, leadership strategist, workplace coach and founder of the WholeLeader Collective. Maybe women are becoming less ambitious?
I don’t believe that is what the research is telling us.
Read beyond the headline and McKinsey’s findings become far more specific. When women receive the same career support as men, the aspiration gap disappears entirely. Women who experience strong managerial advocacy, meaningful sponsorship and workplaces where they can envision a sustainable future continue to aspire to leadership at rates that match their male colleagues. The report does not reveal an ambition problem but rather where organisations have misunderstood what it takes to sustain ambition over time.
That distinction matters because it changes the question entirely. For years, organisations have asked how to help more women become leaders. Possibly, the more useful question is this: how do we design leadership environments where talented women still want to lead?
The instinct is to look at the women (the data points elsewhere)
After 11 consecutive years of McKinsey’s research, women still represent only 29% of C-suite roles, unchanged from 2024. Only 93 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men, and for women of colour that figure falls to 74. These numbers have not changed despite sustained investment in women’s development programmes across most major organisations.
That gap does not suggest a shortage of motivated women. It suggests that organisations have been responding to a symptom while the underlying cause sits somewhere else entirely.
McKinsey’s data reveals a meaningful distinction between having nominal access to support and actually receiving it. Entry-level women are significantly less likely than men to have a mentor: 31% compared with 45% of men at the same career level. Employees with mentors have been promoted at nearly twice the rate of those without over the past two years. Even when women do have mentors, they are promoted at a lower rate than men in identical circumstances, suggesting that the quality and nature of advocacy matters as much as its presence.
One of the assumptions organisations continue to make is that support looks the same for everyone. In my experience, it rarely does.
What organisations typically provide is mentoring. What the research consistently identifies as the more powerful driver of advancement is sponsorship: the active, visible advocacy of someone willing to put their own credibility behind another person’s potential, open doors on their behalf and create visibility at the moments that shape career outcomes. Mixing these two forms of support may explain much of why sustained investment in women’s development has not produced equivalent gains in women’s advancement.
The support women need is often not the support organisations have been designed to provide.
Leading in two worlds
Many of the women I coach carry leadership responsibilities across two distinct environments simultaneously. They lead businesses, projects and teams while also carrying much of the invisible coordination that keeps family life functioning: school calendars, medical appointments, sporting commitments, elder care arrangements, the endless mental checklist that rarely appears on a job description but never disappears from the mind of the person managing it.
Research from the OECD has consistently found that women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid care and household coordination. That invisible load does not make women less ambitious; it means they make career decisions while weighing realities that most organisations never stop to consider, because those realities are never surfaced in a talent review or a succession conversation.
One of my coaching clients, a mother of three and a high-performing finance professional, had been identified as the natural successor for a senior leadership role. Everyone around her saw the promotion as the obvious next step. She experienced something different. “Why do I have to choose?” she asked me, more than once.
She wanted to build a successful executive career. She also wanted to be present for the years her children would never get back. The two felt irreconcilable inside her organisation’s current definition of what senior leadership required. Eventually, she accepted a senior role elsewhere. Not because she had lost her ambition, but because she found an organisation whose definition of leadership made room for both.
That conversation has stayed with me because it reflects exactly what McKinsey’s data is capturing at scale. The issue was whether leadership felt sustainable.
The ‘Invisible Leadership Leak’
The Invisible Leadership Leak is a pattern I observe consistently in organisations that are later surprised to find a gap in their leadership pipeline.
Talented women rarely leave overnight. They continue performing and remain engaged, carrying significant responsibility with the same commitment they always have. From the outside, very little appears to have changed. What changes is internal, and far harder for any talent process to detect.
Quietly, gradually, high-potential women stop imagining themselves in the next role. The ambition hasn’t gone anywhere. Her “calculation” has changed: the accumulated weight of daily experience has changed where leadership feels like it costs against what it appears to offer, and for many women that calculation no longer resolves in the organisation’s favour.
By the time this shift becomes visible in succession data or a talent review, the decision was usually made months or years earlier, in the slow accumulation of experiences that never appear in an engagement survey and are rarely discussed in a performance conversation.
McKinsey’s research reinforces why this matters operationally. Supportive managers are directly associated with lower burnout, stronger engagement and higher leadership aspiration, yet women continue to receive meaningfully less active sponsorship than their male colleagues at every level of the pipeline. These are leadership capability and business performance concerns.
For South African organisations already navigating skills shortages, constrained talent pipelines and mounting succession pressure, the Invisible Leadership Leak represents a cost that rarely appears on a balance sheet but surfaces eventually in the depth and quality of the available leadership bench. Losing high-potential women affects organisational capability, strategic continuity and long-term competitiveness in an environment where experienced leadership talent is already scarce.
The right questions to ask
McKinsey’s data is clear on one point: this is a solvable problem. The conditions that produce equitable advancement for women are not particularly complex or expensive.
They are, however, deliberate. Organisations where women advance at rates comparable to men share consistent practices. Senior leaders are held accountable for advancement. Bias in hiring and promotion is actively identified and addressed. Sponsorship is treated as an intentional leadership discipline, not an informal arrangement available only to those with the right existing relationships.
At those organisations, the gap is closing. At organisations that have retreated from these practices, it is widening. That divergence is accelerating.
Women’s Month offers an annual opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women in leadership. It should also be an occasion for honest internal reflection. The more productive conversation happens not in a campaign or a panel discussion, but in the questions leadership teams are willing to ask themselves, and sit with, when no one is watching.
Four are worth starting with:
- Are we developing sponsors, not only mentors? Understanding that active advocacy, not just guidance, determines who advances.
- Do our managers understand that different people need different kinds of support? And are we equipping them to provide it, or simply assuming that good intentions are sufficient?
- What does leadership actually look like to someone watching it from the level below? If the answer involves unsustainable workloads, limited flexibility and little visible recovery, the most perceptive observers will draw their own conclusions.
- Have we unintentionally designed leadership roles that talented people no longer see as worth the cost? The Invisible Leadership Leak rarely begins with a conversation but rather with an observation that nobody in the organisation thought to address.