It's Not About Ambition. It's About Systemic Bias.

Our Commentary On McKinsey's "Women in the Workplace 2025" Report

McKinsey's latest report confirms what we already knew: women occupy just 29% of C-suite roles. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women advance. For women of color, that number drops to 74. But here's the finding that has everyone worried: for the first time, there's an "ambition gap." Women are seemingly less interested in promotion than men. At entry level, 69% of women want advancement versus 80% of men.

McKinsey's diagnosis? Women need more sponsorship, better manager support, stronger career development programs. Fix the support systems, close the gap.

We see it differently.

When entry-level women look up and see that senior women are more likely to believe their gender will limit opportunities, is that lack of ambition? Or is it evidence-based risk assessment?

When women observe that corporations everywhere are dismantling flexible work arrangements, eliminating their DEI initiatives (while pay gaps widen), instituting RTO mandates - and that even with sponsors they're promoted at lower rates than men, is their hesitation irrational? Or is it clarity?

The report notes that "highly motivated women may be discouraged when faced with limited support or competing demands." This is framed as a correctable inefficiency.

But what if it's a rational response to an irrational system?

The Questions We're Not Asking

McKinsey operates from a pretty predictable assumption: that the corporate ladder, the C-suite, the entire architecture of "advancement" represents success worth striving for.

The report asks: How do we help women compete more effectively? But it should also ask: Who benefits from the competition being structured this way in the first place?

The report meticulously tracks promotions, pipeline representation, and sponsorship rates. All very key metrics but we think it's equally important to also measure:

• How many women are opting out because they've calculated the cost?

• How many are building alternative structures outside corporate hierarchies entirely?

• How many are redefining success as something other than a title that comes with 60-hour weeks?

• How many women, especially those struggling at the margins of our society, never had the privilege to enter this pipeline in the first place?

  
  

The AI Warning No One Is Heeding

Only 21% of entry-level women are encouraged to use AI tools, compared with 33% of men. McKinsey frames this as an urgent skills gap. Which it is. However, the bigger and harder to address problem is that AI systems are trained on historical data that reflects existing biases. When AI learns what "leadership" looks like from a dataset of 71% male executives, you can be sure it picks up on this pattern. And those patterns become prescriptive. So ultimately we're automating exclusion at scale.

McKinsey recommends fair hiring, better manager training, authentic sponsorship, stronger ERGs. Of course these aren't wrong. But they're insufficient. They treat patriarchy and hyper-capitalism as regrettable background conditions rather than as the actual architecture that needs dismantling. They assume women should aspire to power within systems designed to value everything except what women have historically provided: care work, reproductive labor, community building, and all the unseen labor of propelling society forward. They assume the goal is inclusion in structures built on exclusion and systemic bias.

Other Questions We Want To Ask:

• If we centered women at the margins, would corporate "advancement" even register as progress?

• What would work look like if designed for caregiving of children and elderly parents, cyclical energy, communal decision-making, and values other than endless growth?

• Why measure success by how closely women approximate male trajectories, rather than questioning why those became the standard!?

  
  

The real vanguard work isn't optimizing women's performance within existing hierarchies. It's asking what we'd build if we started from scratch. What equity looks like when it's not defined as equal access to inequality. Maybe the future isn't about getting more women into the C-suite. Maybe it's about building entirely new structures where C-suites become obsolete. Maybe women aren't stepping back from ambition. Maybe we're stepping toward something better . . . something that we're more deserving of.

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WAIV Magazine centers women, ethics, and equity in AI. We believe transformation requires questioning the systems we're building, not just who gets to build them.