In 2020, the number of women running Fortune 500 companies hit an all-time high: 37, or just 7.4 percent. Of those CEOs, only three (less than 1 percent) were women of color. In their new book, Glass Half Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, Gender Initiative Director Colleen Ammerman and HBS professor Boris Groysberg ask why. When women made up the majority of college-educated workers in the United States in 2019, why are they still dramatically underrepresented in the ranks of business leadership? Here, the pair offers some answers to this complex question—and some straightforward advice for organizations committed to change.

In the last half of the 20th century, women made great advances in the business world. Why has this progress stalled?

Colleen Ammerman: Women were restricted in their opportunities and rights in egregious ways 50 or 60 years ago. Discrimination used to be perfectly legal; it wasn’t until the 1980s that the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defined and prohibited sexual harassment in the workplace. We certainly have made progress on the legal front, and I think as a business community and as a society we thought that would be enough.

Boris Groysberg: Our expectation for the 21st century was that it was only a matter of time before we reached gender parity in leadership. But so far the changes have been disappointing. The hardest challenges to overcome are still ahead of us. There’s only so much we can ask individual women to do while systemic barriers still exist. We need to make institutional and cultural changes.

Have we moved beyond the need to make the business case for creating more diverse workplaces?

CA: The narrow focus on trying to establish a causal link between diversity and bottom-line performance limits the conversation. The more helpful conversation to have—the more impactful one—is about the conditions under which we can leverage the benefits of having a diverse set of employees.

BG: Diversity is about counting the numbers. Inclusiveness is about making the numbers count. There are many organizations nowadays that know how to count the numbers—but they still have cultures that are not inclusive.

In your research, you found that many women in college today don’t see gender inequality as a career obstacle.

CA: Young women today grow up in educational environments that are quite equal. They expect that to be true in the business world, too. We do a real disservice to them when we don’t talk about the continuing obstacles in the workplace because, without that information, they can internalize these barriers as their own failings.

BG: Most organizations understand that there are biases in hiring and are trying to address that, so these young women often don’t perceive the obstacles at first. But once they start working and go through the first performance-management cycle, they start to question things. They see differences in assignments, compensation, mentorship. And it is shocking. They were told, “You can be anybody.” There should have been an asterisk: not the CEO, not a senior executive…

You also discovered that businesses eager to improve diversity often misdiagnose the problem.

CA: Both men and women look to easy explanations for why this inequality persists. And one of the most enduring ones is the idea that women opt out and would rather prioritize their parenting role. But if you really look into the research, you see that professional women are actually pushed out by inequality. These are people who get a lot of meaning and satisfaction from their jobs, so it shouldn’t be surprising that when they start to feel devalued at work, they exit.

And we still have inequalities at home, too, which is why the pandemic has had such a deleterious impact on women’s careers. We’ll have to wait and see how this all plays out. Maybe it will spur companies and governments to do things differently and create an infrastructure to better support people who are caregiving and working.

What advice can you offer to business leaders who want to address these issues?

BG: In the book we talk about the organizational processes that have to change, but we also realize that there is a manager managing these processes. If you have a good process and a non-inclusive manager, nothing will change. In the book we ask, What does it mean to be an inclusive manager? It will take leadership across all different levels of business for us to advance. We can also make so much more progress if we get men involved in helping companies do the right thing.

What can other organizations learn from the School’s efforts to improve diversity and inclusion?

BG: Our story is complicated. It’s not just, “Look how well we’ve done.” It’s a story of ups and downs, all the way from first admitting eight women in 1963 to today. It’s a process for every organization—two steps forward, one step back. And when you step back, it’s so discouraging. But that’s the time to say, “We’re still making progress. Keep pushing forward. Two more steps.”

CA: In those early years, it was primarily women students agitating for equality, and they accomplished a lot. But in more recent decades, the School itself really bought in and accelerated change. Now we are mobilizing men in the effort. If we combine that with the right organizational processes and a culture of inclusion, think about how much faster we can go.

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