The Rung Was Never Broken. It Was Built That Way.

By Van Tran, Founder & CEO of Career Rising

CAREER RISING  ·  WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP SERIES

The ladder isn't broken. It was built with a different person in mind.

That's the only conclusion available when you look at eleven consecutive years of the same gap at the same place in the corporate pipeline. McKinsey and LeanIn.Org's Women in the Workplace research has tracked the first promotion to manager — what they call the "broken rung" — since 2015. In 2025, for every 100 men promoted to that level, 93 women were. That number alone would be troubling. But it's also misleading, because it averages over a reality that hits women of color with far greater force.

For every 100 men promoted, only 74 women of color made that same move. Black women: 54. Latinas: 65, the worst gap ever recorded in this dataset. And at the top, only 29% of C-suite positions are held by women and a dismal 7% of C-suite positions are held by women of color.

Black women and Latina figures are from the McKinsey and LeanIn.Org 2024 report; Asian women figure is from the 2025 report. The 2025 report shows modest improvement across groups — but the authors note the data may overstate progress, as companies willing to report tend to already outperform. The broader picture across corporate America is likely worse than the headline numbers suggest.

When a system produces results this consistent, this durable, and this unequal — it isn't failing. It's working. The question is what it was built to do, and who benefits from leaving it intact.  

Those aren't variations on the same problem. They're different magnitudes of the same structural failure — and they've been sitting in the same report, year after year, largely without the organizational urgency they deserve.

Here's the thing: the broken rung is not a mystery. It has been named, studied, and quantified for over a decade. What's less discussed — and I to get honest about — is why three distinct, compounding forces have continued to quietly operate inside organizations that genuinely believe they're doing the right thing.

The broken rung is not a talent problem. It's a design problem. And design problems can be redesigned.

Borrowing from a brilliant friend and executive coach, Jessie Anne Zayas, this isn't a call-out, this is a call-in.  I'd like to call-in to leaders who have the authority to change something as well is the women of color navigating these systems right now who deserve more than a decade's worth of the same data and a shrug.

So let's name what's actually happening.

Problem One: The System Filters Before Anyone Is Even Evaluated

Most conversations about the broken rung focus on promotion decisions — who got the nod, who didn't. But the filtering often happens well before anyone sits in a calibration meeting.

It happens in who gets sponsored. In how performance reviews are written. In whose name gets mentioned in the hallway conversation that happens before the formal process begins.

Consider the sponsorship gap. Only 31% of entry-level women have a sponsor — someone with actual organizational power who will put their name forward in the rooms they're not in — compared to 45% of men at the same level. And the gap is widest for women of color. While a third of entry-level men have multiple sponsors, just 16% of women can say the same.

Sponsorship isn't a nice-to-have. It's the currency of the closed-door conversation where promotion decisions are actually made.

The performance review data is equally revealing. In an audit of a law firm's evaluations, only 9.5% of people of color received any mention of 'leadership' in their written feedback — more than 70 percentage points lower than white women. Think about what that means practically: if 'leadership potential' doesn't appear in your written record, it won't appear in your promotion case either. Women are also 11 times more likely than men to be described as 'abrasive' in performance feedback, and Black women are four times more likely than white men to have the word 'overachiever' in their reviews. 'Overachiever' sounds like a compliment. It isn't — it signals surprise. It quietly codes ambition as exceptional rather than expected.

And here's the part that doesn't get enough attention: these patterns compound over time. Research from Harvard Kennedy School found that when organizations tried to reduce evaluation bias by removing self-ratings, managers simply reached for another anchor — the prior year's review. The bias didn't disappear. It just moved. The only employees who saw improvement were newly hired women of color, because there was no prior record to anchor on.

In other words, the system doesn't just filter in the moment. It encodes its own history and carries it forward automatically.

 61% of Black women 

say their race/ethnicity has played a role in missing out on opportunities — up from 45% in 2018. For Latinas, that figure rose from 20% to 29%. For Asian women, from 26% to 39%. (McKinsey/LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2024)

Women of color aren't becoming more sensitive to bias. They're becoming more clear-eyed about what they're navigating. That clarity deserves to be met with equal honesty from their organizations.

The accountability question this section asks: When did you last audit whether your sponsorship relationships, your performance language, and your promotion criteria produce equitably distributed outcomes — not just equitably worded policies?

Problem Two: Leadership Has a Face — And It Doesn't Look Like Everyone

Here's something that rarely gets said plainly: most organizations have a mental model of what a leader looks like. It's not written in any policy. It lives in the room — in what gets described as 'executive presence,' what gets coded as 'strategic thinking' versus 'being collaborative,' what reads as 'confidence' versus 'aggression.' And that prototype is not culturally neutral.

Leadership advancement in Western organizational culture is deeply tied to individual visibility, direct communication, and performed confidence. These norms are so embedded in how companies evaluate talent that they can seem like leadership itself — rather than one cultural expression of it among many. But they're not universal. They're a default.

Women of color — many of whom carry cultural leadership that values relational authority, collective contribution, and trust built over time rather than announced up front — aren't failing to lead. They are leading in ways the organization's recognition system isn't built to read.

Your organization isn't evaluating leadership. It's evaluating conformity to a leadership prototype — and calling it a meritocracy.

The research on this is precise. Asian American women, for example, are frequently typecast as hyperfeminine, acquiescent, and overly focused on compliance — traits that get coded as the opposite of leadership readiness, regardless of actual performance. The so-called 'bamboo ceiling' means Asian American women fall off by up to 80% between entry-level and C-suite. At the senior manager level, Asian women receive roughly one promotion for every two Asian men. By the C-suite, that ratio drops to one for every six.

For Latinas, the issue is compounded by a cultural norm of humility and deference — keeping one's head down, being grateful, delivering results quietly — that organizational cultures can interpret as lack of ambition or low leadership appetite, even when that interpretation is completely wrong. Latinas actually prioritize career advancement more than any other group of women, and they want to reach senior leadership not just for themselves but because they want to pay it forward. The ambition is there. The system isn't calibrated to see it.

For Black women, the trap is perhaps most insidious: the same leadership traits organizations publicly celebrate — directness, emotional authenticity, advocacy, resilience — are evaluated differently when a Black woman embodies them. Empathy becomes 'too emotional.' Directness becomes 'aggressive.' Resilience becomes an expectation rather than a recognized strength. The result is that Black women are penalized for performing exactly the leadership qualities their organizations say they value.

200 years of leadership research  

shows that Black female leaders have taken on higher risks to counter intersectional invisibility than their white counterparts — yet their advancement aspirations go unrealized generation after generation. (Scientific Reports, 2024)

This is where Cultural Intelligence — CQ — enters as something more than a training program. Cultural intelligence is the organizational capacity to recognize, interpret, and advance leadership across its full range of cultural expressions. Leaders with high CQ don't just tolerate difference. They develop the metacognitive ability to examine their own mental model of leadership and ask: whose cultural norms built this prototype? And who gets consistently misread as a result?

An organization with low institutional CQ will keep promoting the same leadership profile — not because it's the most effective, but because it's the most familiar. That's not meritocracy. That's monoculture wearing the costume of objectivity.

The accountability question this section asks: Does your organization's definition of leadership — in how it's evaluated, rewarded, and sponsored — reflect one culture's expression of leadership, or many? Who in your organization has the mandate to examine that question honestly?

Problem Three: Getting Promoted Isn't the Same as Belonging

Here's the part of the broken rung conversation that gets the least airtime, maybe because it's the most uncomfortable: what happens after women of color break through.

Author and former Deloitte senior partner Deepa Purushothaman gave a name to it: the inclusion delusion. It describes the experience of being highly visible as the first or only woman of color in a room — celebrated, photographed, cited in the annual report — while simultaneously never quite feeling like you belong, have real authority, or are respected on your own terms. Companies hire women of color, put them in team photos and on panels, and point to them as evidence of progress. What they often don't do is examine what it actually feels like to lead inside a culture that wasn't built with them in mind.

You can have diverse faces in the room and a culturally narrow room at the same time. The former doesn't fix the latter.

The pipeline data tells this story in stark terms. Women of color represent 21% of entry-level employees. By the time you reach the C-suite, that number drops to 7%. White men, meanwhile, go from 32% at entry level to 56% at the C-suite. The representation doesn't just stall — it actively contracts, at every single level, for women of color, even after the broken rung is cleared.

And recent progress is more fragile than it looks. In 2024, Black women's promotion rates regressed to 2020 levels — erasing gains made during the post-George Floyd moment of corporate commitment. For Latinas, 2024 was their worst broken rung on record, despite consistently reporting the highest career ambition of any group in the study. Asian women have seen some improvement at the manager level, but face a second cliff at the director-to-VP transition — where they have among the lowest promotion rates of any group just as the C-suite is finally within reach.

78% drop in Latina representation  

between entry-level and C-suite — the steepest decline of any racial or gender group. (LeanIn.Org, State of Latinas in Corporate America)

The inclusion delusion operates at both the individual and the organizational level. For women of color, it's the exhausting math of hypervisibility without real power. For organizations, it's a dangerous misreading of their own data — celebrating promotions as evidence of an equitable culture while leaving the systems that created the problem entirely intact.

What would it actually mean for a woman of color to not just be in the room, but to lead fully from within it? To have real authority. A genuine sponsor. A leadership environment calibrated to recognize how she leads — not just willing to tolerate it. To be evaluated by criteria that weren't designed around someone else's cultural default.

That's the question the inclusion delusion forces us to ask. And it doesn't have an easy answer, but it has a directional one: belonging isn't a feeling you can culture-initiative your way into. It's a structural condition. It's built — or not built — in the architecture of how organizations evaluate, sponsor, advance, and recognize talent.

The accountability question this section asks: When a woman of color is promoted in your organization, what changes for her — and what doesn't? Does she have real authority, meaningful sponsorship, and a leadership environment that recognizes how she leads? Or does the organization add her name to its progress narrative while leaving everything else unchanged?

So What Does This Actually Ask of Us?

Here's the honest thing: these three problems aren't inevitable. They are design choices. Biased systems were designed — which means they can be redesigned. Narrow leadership prototypes were built — which means they can be rebuilt. The inclusion delusion persists because organizations let it — which means they can decide not to. 

The McKinsey data is clear about what the organizations that are actually closing the gap have in common. They hold senior leaders accountable for advancing inclusion — not as a cultural priority but as a performance metric. They establish mechanisms that surface bias in hiring and promotion decisions before those decisions are made. And they invest in sponsorship architecture that is structured and visible, not ad hoc and relationship-dependent.

None of this is magic. All of it requires will. And yes, I know it’s not an easy thing to do, and in this climate, I doubt it’s at the top of most corporation’s list of priorities, but it is worthwhile. Companies with diverse teams are up to 39% more likely to financially outperform their peers.

When women of color receive the same career support as men — the same sponsorship, the same manager advocacy, the same access to stretch assignments and high-visibility work — the ambition gap disappears entirely. Let that land for a second. The gap that looks like a motivation or readiness problem is actually a support architecture problem. Fix the architecture, and the outcome changes.

The broken rung is not a verdict on the readiness of women of color. It is a measurement of organizational failure. And organizational failures can be fixed.

For executives and organizational leaders reading this: the ask isn't guilt. It's specificity. Audit your sponsorship relationships and ask whether they're distributed equitably or concentrated in the usual places. Look at your performance review language across race and gender and ask what story it tells. Examine your leadership prototype — the invisible criteria behind who gets described as 'high potential' — and ask whose cultural norms built it. These are not soft questions. They are the questions that determine whether your organization can actually develop the talent it's already hired.

For women of color navigating these systems: the data is not describing you. It is describing the organizations failing you. Your cultural perspective, your relational leadership, your earned authority, your willingness to lead while carrying the weight of these systems — these are not deficits. They are precisely what organizations that are serious about their future need to learn to recognize, develop, and advance. You don't need to fit the prototype. The prototype needs to expand.

Business has to evolve. And the leaders — at every level — who are willing to be honest about why the rung is where it is, and what it would actually take to fix it, are the ones who will build organizations worth belonging to.

Sources & Further Reading

McKinsey & LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2025 — womenintheworkplace.com

McKinsey & LeanIn.Org, Women in the Workplace 2024 (10th Anniversary Report) — mckinsey.com

LeanIn.Org, The State of Latinas in Corporate America — leanin.org

Catalyst, Performance Feedback and Support Crucial for Retaining Black Employees, 2025 — catalyst.org

Textio, Language Bias in Performance Feedback, 2024 — textio.com

Harvard Kennedy School, The Role of Gender and Race in Performance Appraisals — hks.harvard.edu

Institute for Women's Policy Research, Black Women's Wage Gap Fact Sheet, 2024 — iwpr.org

Scientific Reports, The Impact of Intersectional Racial and Gender Biases on Minority Female Leadership Over Two Centuries, 2024 — nature.com

Deepa Purushothaman, The First, the Few, the Only (HarperBusiness, 2022); 'Women of Color Can No Longer Buy into the Inclusion Delusion,' Fortune, March 2022

NBC News, 'Asian American Women Fall Off by 80% at Corporate Leadership Levels,' 2022 — nbcnews.com

CKGSB Knowledge, Corporate Challenges for Asian American Leaders, 2024 — english.ckgsb.edu.cn

Stanford GSB, 'The Language of Gender Bias in Performance Reviews' — gsb.stanford.edu

Livermore, D. et al., Cultural Intelligence for Organizations (2021); CQ framework — culturalq.com

Van Tran is the Founder and CEO of Career Rising, a leadership consulting and advisory firm serving executives, senior leaders, and HR professionals committed to advancing leadership and workplace equity.