Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Lean In's own survey splits the promotion gap between the manager and the home
Sheryl Sandberg says women with equal career motivation are opting out for lack of sponsorship and support, and the 2025 Lean In data hands managers only the part of that problem they can fix themselves.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- The 2025 Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey surveyed 9,500 US employees at 124 organisations and found women as career-motivated as men but less likely to want a promotion.
- KPMG senior economist Matthew Nestler found labour force participation between 2023 and 2026 fell most among women with children under 5, at every education level.
- A 2025 IZA working paper using US Census data found adding a woman to the board raised female employment and earnings at public companies by 1-2%, through retention of existing female workers.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The survey's own reason codes push a retention budget toward sponsorship and schedule control ahead of another pipeline programme, because the people declining promotion already report equal motivation.
- constraint Childcare economics bound what any internal fix can achieve, since the sharpest participation decline sits with mothers of children under 5, a group no promotion process touches.
- contradiction Sandberg's causal claim runs ahead of the numbers in the record: the survey reports what employees said about themselves, and the one quasi-experimental figure is 1-2% from an unreviewed working paper.
- capability A board appointment now has a retention figure attached to it, so it can be argued in the same terms as any other retention spend.
The reason codes are where a manager has something to act on. Among employees who said they did not want to advance, 25% of women cited personal obligations against 15% of men [6]. That is a gap of 10 percentage points, and about 1.7 times the male rate [20]. It is also self-reported: the survey records what 9,500 US employees at 124 organisations said about their own choices [5], and the account gives no figures for the report's household-labour and mentorship gaps [21].
Motivation is equal and appetite for the next rung is not [5]. Some of that constraint sits at home, and no employer can legislate the division of housework. Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG, found that labour force participation between 2023 and 2026 fell most among women with children under 5, regardless of education level [8], while it rose for almost all groups of men, for college-educated women with school-age children and for women with no children [9].
Sandberg's framing puts both halves in one sentence. "It's the women saying, 'I don't want to do it because I'm not wanted, I'm not getting the same opportunities and the same support, and I face an unfair burden at home,'" she told Business Insider [2]. On the home side she said, "We know women do more of the housework at home," and "We know women do more of the childcare" [10][11].
The oldest objection to Lean In is that it told women they could have it all. In a 2013 McKinsey Quarterly interview Sandberg said, "No one can have it all," and "That language is the worst thing that's happened to the women's movement" [15]. The 2013 book contained a chapter titled "The Myth of Doing it All" [16].
The one figure in the record with a research design behind it is small. A 2025 working paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, using US Census data, found that adding a woman to the board of directors increased female employment and earnings at US public companies by 1-2%, driven by retention of existing female workers [12]. It has not cleared peer review, and 1-2% will not close a promotion gap by itself. It does point at retention, which is what Sandberg and the survey are both describing.
Sponsorship, stretch assignments and who gets named in a succession conversation sit inside a manager's control and cost mostly attention [7]. Leave, schedule control and childcare support show up in the budget, and they are what the participation data points at [8]. This quarter's choice sets next quarter's measurement problem: a company that funds the first and not the second can show more women put forward for promotion and no change in who leaves.
What to watch
- Whether the IZA board-seat finding holds up once the 2025 working paper goes through peer review.
- Whether participation among women with children under 5 recovers as return-to-office mandates settle in.
- The next Lean In and McKinsey edition, and whether the promotion-appetite gap moves while mentorship gaps do not.