COULD YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO
YOUR ROLE IF YOU’D SPENT
SIGNIFICANT TIME WORKING
REMOTELY?
GOING FORWARD, WILL REMOTE
WORK HELP OR HURT WOMEN’S
CAREERS?
AGE 30 TO 39
AGE 40 TO 49
AGE 50 OR OLDER
11.5%58.4%26.6%3.5%AT WHAT AGE DID YOU GET THE JOB
OR PROMOTION THAT WAS A
TURNING POINT IN YOUR CAREER?
AGE 20 TO 29HAVE YOU EVER TAKEN A BREAK
FROM THE WORKPLACE OF LONGER
THAN A YEAR FOR CARETAKING
RESPONSIBILITIES?
NO YES
90.3% 9.7%
47.3%
HURT48.2%
HELP4.5%
NOT SURE23.9%
YES54.9%
NO
21.2%
NOT SUREmanager for every 100 men. “Think
of this as an economist, not a femi-
nist,” says Nooyi. “This is our single
biggest opportunity, and somehow
we’re suboptimizing that.”
One way to address corporate
America’s self-defeating failure to
empower women is to put people
devoted to improving diversity in
leadership roles. Those people tend to
be women, and particularly women
of color: The McKinsey/LeanIn.org
study found that female executives
were almost twice as likely to spend a
substantial amount of time on diver-
sity, equity, and inclusion outside of
their core jobs compared with men.
It’s a vicious or virtuous cycle, de-
pending on how you look at it: Lose
women at the top, and you lose the
engine driving change throughout
the company.CURRENT AND FORMER
female Fortune 500 CEOs
say they are less con-
cerned about the out-
comes of the generation now poised
to enter the C-suite than women
further down the pipeline. It’s the
senior directors and the VPs who are
at risk—the women who may still
have younger children at home, the
ones Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford
describes as “those who don’t know
what is yet possible for themselves.”
In our survey, 58% of respondents
who could identify a promotion or job
that had been a turning point in their
career said it came during the prime
child-rearing age range of 30 to 39.
For Ford, it wasn’t until she was in
her forties that she realized she had
the potential to be a CEO. When the
Land O’Lakes board tapped her for
the job in 2018, she had worked at
seven companies across six indus-
tries. Research by executive search
firm Korn Ferry has shown that this
kind of range is critical for female
CEOs, who tend to work in more
sectors, organizations, and jobs over
the course of their careers than malechief executives. But some of that
movement has stalled over the past
year and a half. “When you’re on that
trajectory, you’re taking opportuni-
ties to move. You’re being seen by the
senior team; you’re understanding
what it’s like to be a leader,” Ford
says. “Some of those things are still
happening, but it’s happening totally
differently. There’s a delay, and it’s
causing some real problems in terms
of your vision for yourself, your aspi-
ration, your ambition.”
When Ursula Burns took the helm
at Xerox in 2009, she was the first
Black woman to ever run a For-
tune 500 company. Burns says she
had always been prepared, good at
what she did, but not any kind of “su-
per brain.” What made the difference
for her was she was known, seen, and
spoke up. The most senior execu-
tives took an interest in her success,
selecting her for special projects that
revealed the inner workings of the
company. But during this era of work-
ing from home, Burns says the risk of
“out of sight, out of mind” has been
more acute for women and people of
color. It has also made it even harder
to find a cohort of people who look
like you at work. “That was rare. And
now it’s literally gone,” she says. “It’s
more likely that you are isolated and
not recognized and not known.”
The pandemic has put at risk not
just employees’ own visibility but
also their ability to gain insight into
the companies they work for. Ellen
Kullman, CEO of 3D printing tech-
nology company Carbon, says she’s
concerned that it’s harder to assess a
work situation in a remote environ-
ment. She spent her formative years
at GE but left in 1988. “It was feeling
that I was potentially never going to
be allowed to compete at the highest
levels,” she says. “My experience there
was that it was different for me than
it was for some of my male counter-
parts. At some point, you just make
a choice.” She joined DuPont, which
she says had a more egalitarianPowerful Perspective
In September, Fortune surveyed 115 members
of our Most Powerful Women community
about the impact of the pandemic and the
forces that have shaped their careers.