I'm an ex corporate girl, turned founder, and 2x bestselling author, and I help women get into positions of power - and STAY there - without burning out.

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Think about the last promotion you wanted and did not get. Now think about the very first one, the step from individual contributor to manager, the one that felt like it should have been automatic. That first step is where women quietly fall behind, and most of us never see it happen. My guest this week, Lareina Yee, is a senior partner at McKinsey and a coauthor of The Broken Rung, and she has the data to prove that the ceiling is not where the problem starts. The floor is.

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Lareina spent nearly 25 years at McKinsey in the technology practice. When she made partner, the promotion she was most excited about, her sponsor sat her down and asked one question that changed her career. Not "how does it feel," but "what will you do that is greater than what you have already done?" Her answer became a decade of research. She had looked around the executive room and realized the women were gone, so she set out to use McKinsey's data to understand exactly where in the pipeline they disappear.

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Here is what she found. Women are 57% of college graduates and about 48% of entry-level hires, but at the very first promotion to manager, the math breaks. For every 100 men promoted, only 81 women move up, and for Black women that number drops to 54. This is the broken rung. It is not the glass ceiling near the top. It is the first step, and because every rung after it is built on that one, the gap compounds for the rest of a woman's career. McKinsey's most recent Women in the Workplace report, its 11th year, shows the rung is still cracked, with 93 women promoted per 100 men in 2025 and just 60 Black women, alongside a brand-new finding: for the first time, a measurable ambition gap has opened between women and men, and the researchers are clear that it is a support problem, not a motivation problem. When women and men get the same career support, the ambition gap disappears entirely.

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So what do you actually do about it? Lareina's answer is a concept called experience capital, and it is the most hopeful idea in the whole conversation. About 50% of your lifetime earnings come from what you learn on the job, not from your degree. Women tend to crush the school half and then accrue less of the work half. In this episode she walks through how to change that: choose a company, not just a job, treat your soft skills like hard skills, and refuse to count yourself out of technical work, because with AI everyone is a beginner right now and no one is more than a year or two ahead of you.

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The part that will stay with the working mothers listening is her reframe of motherhood. Lareina does not call it a career hindrance. She calls it an experience capital escalator, the multitasking, the empathy, the sheer operational load, all of it building skills the quarterly scorecard never measures. She tells you to book a round-trip ticket, plan your leave and your return, and lean on your network, not just your company's policy, to come back strong. If you have ever been told you hit the top of your pay grade at 30, or felt your momentum stall right when you were ready for more, this episode hands you the data and the strategy to climb the rung anyway.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: