Women have made progress in the workplace—but there’s more to be done

It’s a tough time for women in the workforce.

The gender pay gap has widened in recent years, women are leaving the workforce in record numbers, and systemic issues continue to inhibit career advancement.

There’s “a false narrative” of women’s progress in the workplace because many issues still persist, Stefanie O’Connell, author The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up―and Then Pushes Them Down, told HR Brew.

O’Connell sat down with HR Brew to talk about her book and the barriers that keep women from earning more and advancing their careers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you write this book?

I started the proposal in 2023, so certainly before the last presidential election…I thought I was going to be dismantling the narrative that just because a woman is the president doesn’t mean that gender inequality is any less prevalent…I thought I was going to be writing a book about how that was a fallacy.

A completely different world, and yet not so much, I realized, because, at the end of the day, a lot of what has enabled women’s outcomes to stay so locked in place for so long is the false narrative of “how far we’ve come,” and so much of this book is a reckoning with the story we’ve basically been sold over the last several decades, even before this last two years.

There’s been a real conflation with the rhetoric of empowerment with women’s actual access to power, which really hasn’t shifted over the time. And, in fact, because of the rhetoric of empowerment with girl power, girl boss…People have enormous misperceptions over how well or how poorly women are actually represented or not represented.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

I want them to understand how inequality shows up even when it’s not explicit…The book, it reveals what we, in workplaces, and certainly in corporate practices, maybe think of as neutral when they’re actually exclusionary. So, I argue that meritocracy is really just a cover for a male-dominated power structure…What counts as merit-worthy shifts to protect the access to power, and resources, and opportunities of the identities of the people who are still overwhelmingly white and male, typically heterosexual.

There’s great studies where you have people being considered for a job, and the man will have a college degree, and the woman will have more experience. And, in that scenario people will say, “Well, what really matters for this job is college degrees, so we’re going to hire this man,” and then you flip it and the woman with a college degree, male with more experience, and then they’ll be like, “Well, what really matters for this job is experience, not so much education,” and so the man still gets hired over the woman.

There is a level of complacency, I argue, with how poorly women are represented in positions of power, in their access to pay. When you talk about gender pay gaps, people are like, “Okay, this again, we’re going to talk about the gender pay gap again?”...The fact that people aren’t outraged about it, in fact, what they do instead is try to justify it or explain it away, as opposed to meaningfully address it…is actually one of the biggest barriers to actually changing these metrics.

What else can HR do?

When they see a gap emerge, they should get curious…There’s a really great example I give in the book when a company adopted a pay transparency policy…and they see their gender gap grow. And, so, in a typical scenario, I think you could have a company be like, “Okay, well, I guess that women just aren’t as productive, or like they’re not as interested in advancing”...What the company did was say, “Okay, now, if this is growing as we’re being more transparent, what’s actually driving this?”

The company at play found that they had a lot of women at the entry level, but they just were not advancing women into positions of leadership at a rate that would enable women throughout the company to be accessing equitable pay. And, because of that role division within the company, they have this pay gap…Then they made a more concerted effort to diversify their leadership…for the sake of, “Oh, well, if you have something that’s really just so clearly inequitable across identity, it probably tells us something about how we’re undervaluing performance of these people.”