New 2025 data: women want the promotion as much as men do, once they get the same support
Roughly four in five women report that they are hoping to be promoted. Across men, that share climbs to 86 percent. According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn, that six-point difference vanishes once women receive the same backing men already get.
For years, the standard explanation for why women grow scarce above the director level was that they simply want it less. They step back. They put family first. They are "less ambitious," a label that has surfaced in more talent discussions than anyone would ever repeat under oath. The numbers now point elsewhere. Women's ambition sits at nearly the same level as men's, and what remains is not a personal trait. It is a reaction to what they encounter.
Where the numbers originate in Baltimore
Since 2015, McKinsey and LeanIn have jointly run the Women in the Workplace study, which follows American companies and their employees every year. The 2025 report first asked women and men whether they wanted to advance, and afterward looked at the other traits shared by those who said yes. The headline is the six-point gap. Beneath it sits the finding that, among employees who report equal support from their manager, sponsorship and encouragement, the gap disappears. Because this is a survey and not a controlled experiment, it cannot establish that backing causes ambition. It does show the two tend to occur together, and that the claim "women want it less" falls apart once women get what men receive. The study also found 31 percent of entry-level women have a sponsor, compared with 45 percent of men. The gap in support is real, and it opens early.
How it plays out in a Baltimore meeting room
Imagine a talent review in an office downtown, perhaps near the Inner Harbor or in Towson. You are a vice president, and the shortlist for an open SVP role has three names, two of them men. A colleague in a Towson conference room comments that the woman on the list "hasn't really raised her hand," though you know that isn't so. She has spoken up about advancing twice already, both times in one-on-one meetings where her manager simply nodded and changed the subject. The men did not need to raise theirs. Mentors in Towson and Columbia championed their cause in meetings much like this one. Her drive is the same. The advocacy is not. By the close of the meeting, her name carries a question mark, and that mark attaches to her rather than to the manager who never carried her interest upward.
How this affects you in Essex and Dundalk
If someone has ever told you to "want it more," you were handed the wrong diagnosis, most likely by a person whose own desire was never doubted. What closes the gap is not something you lack inside yourself. It is a manager who names you when you are absent, a sponsor who places you on the shortlist, and encouragement offered before you have to ask. An organization either supplies these or it does not. You can go looking for them, but recognize that you are making up for a missing input, not repairing a flaw in yourself.
Next steps to take
State your ambition clearly and make it difficult to overlook. Write to your manager: "I want 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 to serve as a reference when the shortlist is drawn. You will have built, through your own effort, the support men tend to receive automatically.
In your Columbia or Owings Mills office, who is willing to say your name when you aren't there to hear it?