Are women on a collision course with the COVID ceiling?

[Kathleen Martin]

When former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi joined the beverage and snack giant in 1994, she had never worked with a more senior woman or even had a close female colleague at her level. The 15 top jobs in the company were all held by white American men in blue or gray suits. The bylaws of corporate America had been written for men by men. Nooyi would go on to change some of those rules, but to get to the top, first she had to learn them. “If you don’t understand what happens in the corridors of power by interacting with men, you end up falling further behind,” she says.  Those corridors, like the rest of our lives, have moved online over the past 18 months, making it even more challenging for women to elbow their way into the spaces that have long shut them out. In a survey of members of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women community—a group that primarily consists of CEOs and other C-suite executives—55% said they did not think they could have advanced to their current role if they had spent significant stretches of their career working remotely. In a virtual world, how do you know that no one clued you in on the important Zoom that is happening right now? When you’re physically present, you can walk past the conference room or peer into your boss’s office. “At least then you know you weren’t invited,” Nooyi says with a laugh. 
No matter the industry or title or level of seniority, the economic disruption caused by COVID-19 will leave a scar on working women in ways that other downturns have not. Blue-collar women lost their jobs and have yet to fully regain them. Working mothers whose livelihoods were saved by telework dropped out at higher rates than women without children and men. Those who remained did so at a cost. “Mothers who stayed in the labor force had great stress, anxiety, and frustration,” says Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard. “They were working under tremendous strain.” 
It’s acutely wrenching that the pandemic arrived just as women were reaching new milestones in the labor market. In January 2020 they made up more of the workforce than men for the first time in over a decade. At the very top of corporate America, women were starting to not just receive invitations to those closed-door meetings but actually run them. In June, when the most recent Fortune 500 list was published, a record 41 women led some of the biggest companies in the U.S. Let’s pause to acknowledge this is still a depressingly low number—but it is progress. Ten years ago, there were only 12. 

Given the urgency of the crisis hitting women in other segments of the working world, it’s understandable that there hasn’t yet been much attention paid to the pandemic’s potential impact on women in the C-suite. But whether the ranks of female CEOs will continue to grow in a post-COVID future has implications far beyond the corner office. Women are graduating from college at significantly higher rates than men and are starting to get closer to parity in the most competitive MBA programs. But the ratio flips inside U.S. corporations, and the discrepancy grows the closer you get to the top. A recent report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org found that women face a “broken rung” at the step up to manager. Last year, 89 white women and 85 women of color were promoted to manager for every 100 men. “Think of this as an economist, not a feminist,” says Nooyi. “This is our single biggest opportunity, and somehow we’re suboptimizing that.” 
Continue reading: https://fortune.com/longform/covid-women-in-leadership-corporate-america-pandemic-effects/