San Francisco, California | Human dignity dictates equality between men and women. And yet the practice in companies often seems to be different. According to a study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, this has to do with the fact that men and women have the same working environment in mind but evaluate it differently. A total of 65,800 people from 329 companies were interviewed.
Almost half of the men surveyed (44%) believe that women are well represented in their company if only one out of ten managers were female. Only 22% of all women surveyed agreed.
In addition, if men see a problem in the low presence of women in management positions, they blame this circumstance on the fact that there are simply too few qualified women in the company. In the McKinsey survey, on the other hand, 40% of all women surveyed criticized the double standards applied between men and women in terms of skills. According to them, they blame prejudices for the unsatisfactory status quo.
The data described and collected in the study thus show to what extent the attitudes of men and women correlate with the current status. But what does it look like? – According to a similar study, even newcomers to the profession and the “first promotion” to a manager show that there are only 72 women for every 100 men. And this even though the qualification is usually similar shortly after starting a career.
For Alexis Krivkovich, Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-author of the study, the results show that gender equality in companies has improved. In recent years, an even larger proportion of the men surveyed believed that women were well represented in company management, although the company data objectively did not permit this conclusion from the perspective of equality. Gender equality is also a higher priority today than it was a few years ago.
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