Women in the workplace – it’s something we’ve all heard talked about before. Whether we want to talk about gender pay gaps, pregnancy discrimination, gender bias, or just the general treatment of women, we continue to talk about it because they are still problems that women face in the workplace.

Current women in the workplace know it and so do young women – just like me.

Young women preparing to enter the workforce have concerns about what their experiences in the workplace will look like, future leadership opportunities in their careers, and how they will manage a career and a family.

This is the state of the labor force: it suffered from a loss of women in 2020. The women’s labor force participation rate dropped to 54.6% during the COVID-19 pandemic – a low it hasn’t reached since 1985, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Still falling short of the pre-pandemic rate, the women’s labor force participation rate rests at 57.1%, compared to 68.4% for men as of March 2023, FRED data said.

Even with fewer women working or looking for work, women still enroll in and graduate from college at higher rates than men, Pew Research said. But in corporate America, women are still seriously underrepresented and to an even greater extent for women of color, The 2022 Women in the Workplace (WWP) report said. The issues that persist in the workplace make the goal of gender equality virtually impossible and some young graduates are apprehensive about their futures a part of it.

“Disparities are glaring, and they affect your work, your livelihood, your whole life, and this is a concern,” University of Southern California senior Dara Udobong said.

Women in the workplace are more likely to experience microaggressions at work where they are looked down upon or questioned for their intellectual abilities, the McKinsey & Company and Lean In WWP report said. But when women are more assertive, they often face criticism.

“When men are outspoken, they’re considered influential,” graduating senior Arielle Chen said. “When women are outspoken, they’re considered bossy.”

So, what do you want from us? This “likeability penalty” often leads women to a scenario where they can’t always win – if we’re nice, we’re less capable, but if we’re confident, we’re not likable. “That's kind of this tightrope that women have to walk, that men don't,” Lean In Senior Research Writer Kate Urban said. While trying to do their jobs, women are fighting to be seen as “competent, a good colleague, and a good person to work with,” Urban said.

These struggles are common for women across industries, but they are especially prevalent in the technical and engineering sectors. Women in technical roles report experiencing higher rates of bias, are more likely to have their judgment questioned than women in other industries, and are more likely to say their gender was the reason for being passed over in advancement opportunities, the WWP study said.

“People tend to look towards men to lead groups, and women often feel less empowered to speak up due to existing gender biases,” Chen said, who is interested in product management roles in the future.

The fact that “32% of women in technical and engineering roles are often the only woman in the room at work” may explain why women in technology are having these experiences, the WWP report said. But in all industries, even when there are more women in the room at work, there is still a major shortage of women in leadership.

In promotion, women tend to face a “glass ceiling in which they are not promoted up past certain ranks,” said Summer Jackson, assistant professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. In the pipeline for women, what can occur as women progress upward is that they hit this ceiling or outside constraints lead them to take a step back. Women are then sometimes placed on a track with less managerial responsibility, which often prevents them from rising into higher leadership roles, Jackson said.

“I'm also afraid of stagnancy,” Udobong said.

The concerns women have about career progression are well-founded. Advancing in leadership roles at upper levels of the pipeline is not where the problem really begins. Women actually get promoted at fairly equal rates and even at higher rates in some of the upper organizational levels. The problem is the “disconnect going from entry-level to manager, where men are moving up much more quickly,” Urban said.

This is called the “broken rung.”

“For every 100 men who are promoted from entry-level to manager, only 87 women are promoted, and only 82 women of color are promoted,” according to the WWP report. At the beginning of 2022, women comprised 48% of all entry-level positions at corporate firms but only made up 40% of all manager positions, the WWP report said. And as you move further up the corporate ladder, the divide only gets worse.

“I can’t help but think that it will be more difficult for me than men to get promoted to manager and that I will have to work twice as hard to get there,” graduating senior Tatiana Kasakian said.

At the very first step, women are already behind – making catching up at the top of the chain an impossible goal and gender disparities in the workplace a persisting problem. For those women who do make it past this stage, the problems don’t end there.

Women leaders are more likely to report that their denial of a raise, promotion, or opportunity was impacted by their gender or parental status, the WWP report said.

Many women face maternal bias in the workplace, the strongest form of gender bias, simply because they have or may want children.

“Existing research shows that as a woman in the workplace, you can be penalized because you're viewed as at risk for pregnancy, you can be penalized when you actually do have children, and you can be penalized when you don't have children,” Jackson said.

Assumptions about what women may choose to do in their personal lives not only affects the experiences that women have in the workplace but also the trajectory of their careers. But these decisions aren’t being made with women – they’re made for them.

“That's something that we really see can derail a lot of women's careers even when they're equally ambitious and contributes I think a lot to the gaps in representation,” Urban said.

Companies risk losing more women leaders if they don’t take action. The next generation of women leaders want and expect a more encouraging and welcoming environment, the WWP report said.

“Women live a dual life between taking care of their family and excelling in work, so I think the workplace needs to have more mercy for women coworkers and leaders who are dealing with a lot of different emotional and mental burdens,” USC Annenberg student Seeran Ajemian said.

By investing in women’s advancement and women’s acceleration in leadership, companies will benefit too. “Empirically we know that organizations that have better gender diversity are more creative, are more innovative, boards that have more women on them commit less fraud, and have higher share price values,” Jackson said.

Through company commitment and the work of women’s advancement organizations like Lean In, better inclusion for women in the workplace is possible. From connecting women together through small support circles to original research and campaigns, Lean In encourages women in the workplace and collaborates with organizations to create more inclusive workplace environments.

Even though concerns about gender equality in the workplace still linger, young women are not looking to back down. Over two-thirds of women under 30 have goals of reaching senior leadership, and most of them say that upward mobility in their careers has become important to them in the past two years, according to the WWP report.

And just like in corporate America, the fears of the unknown are changing in positive ways for graduating seniors. Since I spoke with these women, Gutierrez accepted a full-time job at Allegro MicroSystems as a Product Marketing Rotation Engineer, and Chen has applied to the Data Science master’s program within the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC.

I will be pursuing a Graduate Fellowship with the Judicial Council of California at Los Angeles Superior Court, where I will be working with self-represented litigants in their family law cases.

If you had told me months ago that my life would have changed like this, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. I think our fears about the future make us uneasy at times. But the opportunity for it all to change, especially when you aren’t sure how it will, makes the outcome that much more exciting.

I don’t know what the years to come will look like for me or women in the workplace. But I do know that I am eager to see it – and to be a part of it.