New 2025 data: women want the promotion as much as men do, once they get the same support
Four out of five women in the study say they aspire to a promotion. Eighty-six percent of men do, the number rises that high. As the 2025 Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn shows, once women get the same backing men already enjoy, that six-point gap disappears entirely.
For Louisville women leaders, that finding should close a long debate. Long-standing accounts of why women drop away before reaching director rank pinned the blame on a supposed lack of ambition. They opt out. They put family first. They are "less ambitious," a phrase used in more talent reviews than most people would admit under oath. The data says the ambition is there, at nearly the same rate. What remains of the difference has nothing to do with temperament. It stems from the way women are received and treated at work.
Source of the numbers
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have produced Women in the Workplace, a yearly survey of American corporations and the people who work inside them. The 2025 edition asks women and men whether they want to advance, then examines what else is true of those who say yes. The number everyone quotes is the six-point gap. The finding beneath it is that among employees reporting equal manager support, sponsorship and encouragement, the gap disappears. It is a survey rather than an experiment, so it cannot prove that support causes ambition. It can show that the two move together, and that "women want it less" does not hold up among women who receive what men receive. Within that same research, 31% of women starting out in their careers report having a sponsor, a figure that stands against 45% for men. Backing is the thing absent here, and its absence begins at the very start of a career.
Imagine what this looks like inside a real Louisville boardroom.
Picture yourself in a talent review in Louisville's corporate or health system offices. Imagine you hold a vice president post in Louisville, and the shortlist for a senior vice president opening lists three candidates, two of whom are men. A colleague remarks that the woman on that list "hasn't really put herself forward." She has raised it twice, in one-on-ones, with a manager who nodded and changed the subject. None of the men on that shortlist ever had to speak up in order to be seen. In rooms like this one across Kentuckiana, their mentors spoke up on their behalf. The ambition is identical. The amplification is not. By the end of the meeting, her name has a question mark beside it, and that question mark lands on her, not on the manager who never carried the message upward.
How this bears on your own path
Anyone who has heard that they should "want it more" was handed a faulty explanation, usually by a person whose own drive was never doubted. What actually closes the distance is not a flaw sitting within you. It comes down to a manager who speaks your name when you are absent, a sponsor who places you in consideration, and support that shows up before you have to request it. Every organization chooses whether to offer these things, and the choice is theirs alone. You can go looking for them, but recognize that you are compensating for a missing input, not repairing a flaw.
What to do next
Make your wanting explicit and hard to ignore. Put it on paper and send it to your manager: "I would like to be considered for the next director-level opening." What would you need to see from me to put my name forward?" Then ask one senior leader outside your reporting line, perhaps through a Louisville networking group such as CREW Louisville, Lean In Louisville or NAWBO Kentucky, to serve as a reference when the slate is drawn. You will have built, by hand, the support men get by default.
In your own company, who advocates for you when you are not in the room?