There are lots of theories—and plenty of imagery—that seek to explain why women don’t make it to the top of many fields, including the law. For decades it was the glass ceiling, the impenetrable top women could never break. More recently it’s become the glass cliff, the alluring bridge to nowhere offering executive women their only chance to lead.

Most recently you hear a lot about the broken rung, the step on the ladder of success that men can use to advance their careers that is not available to women. There isn’t just one broken rung. There are initial rungs that must be climbed to get women into a field in the first place, like majoring in STEM to become a patent attorney. There are intermediate rungs that prevent women from getting into leadership, such as getting a first management position. And then there are those penultimate or ultimate broken rungs, such as the one that prevents women from getting anything more than initial rounds of funding for new businesses, or the one that has historically kept us from electing our first woman president. It seems like everywhere you turn—regardless of industry—there are broken rungs for women.

Given how often the image of the broken rung is invoked to talk about what happens to women in the workplace, I thought it might be useful to explore that imagery to see if there are insights we can gain from looking at it more closely.

The Origins of the Broken Rung

Unlike the glass ceiling or even the glass cliff, the imagery of the broken rung is relatively new. It appears to have originated approximately ten years ago in McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report. Its recent 2024 edition continues to use that terminology.

To the Women in Workplace report, the broken rung means a very specific thing: the lack of first-level management positions available to women when they are ready to progress. McKinsey’s 2024 report found that, for the ninth consecutive year, women experienced a promotion gap at that first promotion to management. At that level, only 87 women are promoted for every 100 men. It’s much worse for women of color: for each management position, only 54 black women are promoted for every 100 men.

You might think the gap at this level is not as concerning as the dearth of women in the C-Suite or equity partners of law firms, but it is. Women can’t ascend to those highest levels if they don’t get promoted at the lower levels of management first. The reason so many companies and firms say they “can’t find” qualified women to promote is because they weren’t promoted at earlier stages.

The 2024 McKinsey report suggests that the reason for this broken rung is that, while companies are encouraging managers to promote diverse candidates, they aren’t rewarding those managers for doing so. You can see this breakdown in the graphic below: while managers are almost always rewarded for delivering on business objectives, they are rewarded far less for promoting equity and inclusion, for managing their employees’ career development, or for ensuring employee well-being.

In short, while companies are saying all the right things, their employees aren’t walking the walk. And, when they don’t walk the walk, there are not consequences.

Where Its Imagery Helps—and Fails—Us

While the broken rung represents a management opportunity not available to a woman, the reason the rung is broken is far more complex. Indeed, the McKinsey report doesn’t solely attribute women’s failure to rise in the workplace to the broken rung. It also discusses the continued prevalence of sexual harassment, microaggressions, and feelings of isolation as “the only” that many women experience. Women still have their competence questioned; they are assigned more office “housework,” and are more subject to ageism than their male counterparts.

So while in some ways the broken rung accurately describes what’s happening in our workplaces, in many ways it is far too simplistic. It’s accurate because, unless we’re one of the lucky few, we simply don’t have access to the steps men in the same position have. However, the image is far too simplistic for several reasons. First, a broken rung appears to be something that can be easily repaired. Second, the broken rung implies that we’re all climbing the same ladder, when we know that many of us, including women of color, neurodivergent women, and women with disabilities, aren’t starting at the same place. And finally, as I stated at the outset of this article, there is not just a single broken rung.

I’ve seen the theme of the broken rung appear repeatedly when I read about why women aren’t rising to the top of many fields. For example, the New York Times ran an article [paywall] on Saturday talking about how women entrepreneurs are hitting a funding wall. It found that, while many women-owned companies were able to get initial rounds of funding from women-led funds, when those companies needed more substantial amounts of funding from those funds, the funds didn’t have it. Jenny Abramson, the founder of the venture capital firm Rethink Impact, refers to the dearth of funding for women-led start-ups at later stages as “the valley of death.”

The valley of death is not just a broken rung, it’s a rung that stigmatizes those who climb it. At least one study from INSEAD, the French business school, found that, even if women-led funds had sufficient funds to support women-owned businesses at later stages, obtaining money from those funds signals to other investors that the funding was based on gender rather than merit, making it harder for those businesses to raise additional money.

Similarly, the Washington Post published a story a few weeks ago about how, despite the existence of and Formula One’s support for the F1 Academy for women drivers, there still are not more Formula One drivers. One of the reasons the F1 Academy hasn’t created women drivers at the Formula One level is that there is a rule designed to encourage “progression” that limits drivers to two seasons in the Academy. So the F1 Academy has established an intermediate rung in the Formula One ladder—but there’s no path from that intermediate rung to Formula One racing.

As with issues in the workplace more broadly, there are complex reasons that path hasn’t been built. The Post article discusses how “there are long-standing systemic issues holding women back, ranging from resources and funding to what some say can be a misogynistic culture.” More than Equal, an organization that has researched the challenges female drivers face, has concluded that the barriers include a lack of role models, a shallow pool of female driving talent, stereotyping, noninclusive or unwelcoming environments, and substandard facilities for female racers in karting.

Whether we’re talking about the corporate world, venture capital funding, or Formula One racing, we can’t simply build a rung where one is broken. A new rung can only be constructed—and endure—in environments that want women to succeed in the first place.

Closing Thoughts

On one hand, there’s something quite apt about the image of the broken rung. In the workplace, women do not have the same means to climb upwards that men do. On the other hand, the image is deceptive—because it suggests that the broken rung can be simply repaired or replaced. As the examples from venture capital funding and Formula One racing both illustrate, we can’t simply create a path for women where one didn’t previously exist for decades or longer.

The same is true of the legal profession. It’s why, even when more women graduate from law school than men, and even when more than 50% of law firm associates are now women, we still don’t see systemic change. There are many broken rungs and many reasons for those broken rungs—from finding sponsors or people who look like us, to receiving fair and impartial evaluations that are not based on personality, to how we are treated when we become mothers, to being promoted to partner or equity partner, to becoming lead trial counsel or leading a deal, to being paid the same amount or receiving the same credit for business origination.

But we can’t simply slide a rung where a broken one previously hung. Rungs must be built with care by a culture that will maintain them. As the Women in the Workplace report observes, until we reward others for replacing broken rungs—and then tending the new ones built in their place—there is no point in building in the first place.

As we often say in this newsletter, our culture—and values—must change first.

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