Everyone talks about the glass ceiling. But according to Lareina Yee, co-author of Broken Rung and former McKinsey senior partner, the more urgent problem is much closer to the ground.
What Is the Broken Rung?
The broken rung refers to the very first step on the career ladder: that initial promotion from individual contributor to manager. For every 100 men who receive that promotion, only 81 women do. For Black women in the United States, that number drops to 54.
That gap at the bottom compounds everything above it. Across corporate America, women make up 48 percent of entry-level employees — close to population parity — but by the time you reach VP level, that share has fallen to 34 percent. The C-suite sits at 29 percent, and CEO roles have barely crossed 10 percent among Fortune 1000 companies. A woman who misses that first promotion is likely to earn 25 percent less than her peers over the following 15 years.
The glass ceiling isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete. The real picture is that the barriers exist at every single rung.
The Performance-Potential Trap
Women consistently outperform men on performance reviews and are less likely to quit. Yet they are rated more harshly on potential — a metric with no clear definition and no objective measure. Since promotions are increasingly driven by perceived potential rather than demonstrated performance, this gap has outsized consequences.
Yee’s advice: don’t wait for the organization to recognize your potential. Signal it yourself. That means telling mentors and sponsors explicitly what roles you’re interested in, pursuing high-visibility assignments that build your case, and seeking out profit-and-loss roles — what Yee calls the “power alley” — that demonstrate business ownership rather than functional expertise alone.
Stop Playing Checkers. Play Chess.
One of the most common mistakes Yee sees: women optimizing for their next move rather than their career trajectory. Strategic career development means thinking several steps ahead.
A few concrete moves:
Make bold jumps. A bold move is defined as a role where more than 25 percent of the required skills are new to you. Two or three of these over a career have an outsized effect on lifetime earnings and upward mobility.
Protect your time from office housework. Women are disproportionately asked to plan events, support recruiting, take notes, and carry culture — tasks that consume time without building the track record that drives promotion. Yee’s framing: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you do take on that work, bring others along and use it to demonstrate leadership rather than execution.
Test the market regularly. Even when you’re happy in a role, seeing what’s out there — taking recruiter calls, going on occasional interviews — gives you both a realistic sense of your market value and a wider network. You don’t have to be looking to benefit from looking.
Build Your Personal Board of Directors
Yee recommends assembling a personal board: a small group of people inside and outside your organization who will both root for you and tell you the truth. Unlike a mentor who offers advice, a board member actively advocates — connecting you to opportunities, vouching for you in rooms you’re not in, and helping you navigate moments of bias in real time.
Networks matter especially because the research is clear: women tend to have more narrow and more junior networks than men at equivalent levels. Investing in senior relationships early — even when it feels premature — pays compounding returns over a career.
Busting Bias in the Moment
Structural bias is real and documented. But Yee argues that waiting for organizations to fix it isn’t a strategy. Instead, she offers several in-the-moment techniques:
When a colleague’s idea gets interrupted or restated by someone else, redirect: “Wait — Sarah, I didn’t catch your idea. Can you explain it again?” This brings the spotlight back without shaming anyone, and it works whether you’re a man or a woman.
When feedback is vague — she just needs more gravitas — push for specifics: What would that look like? What would she be doing differently? Reducing ambiguity reduces bias, because objective criteria create more equal conditions.
And when you’re in a performance review discussion as a manager, you have real power to slow down assumptions that are being treated as facts.
The Bottom Line
The data is sobering, but Yee’s overall message is one of informed optimism. Women are doing the hard things — they’re graduating at higher rates, outperforming on reviews, staying longer at jobs. The opportunity is to pair that performance with greater strategic intentionality: bet on your own potential, build your network before you need it, and make bold moves rather than safe ones.
The organizations need to change. And while that’s happening, there’s a lot a woman can do to beat the odds.
This post is based on an episode of Women Amplified, the podcast from the Conferences for Women, featuring Lareina Yee, co-author of Broken Rung and Vice President at Google.
Lareina Yee
