Inside Masters of Scale Summit: Women Shaping Workplace Equity

Inside Masters of Scale Summit: Women Shaping Workplace Equity*

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Masters of Scale Summit, presented in alliance with Capital One Business, is the premier event for forward-thinking leaders seeking innovative ideas, inspiring perspectives, and genuine human connection. Returning to San Francisco October 7-9, 2025, Summit provides a unique opportunity to hear from the brightest minds in business, technology, and beyond. Attendees gain access to actionable insights and co-elevating moments that will accelerate their businesses and careers.

If you want to be first to hear about the upcoming Masters of Scale Summit, receive exclusive content from Summit 2024, and fast-track your application to attend, join the Summit 2025 priority access list.

This year, one of the standout sessions tackled one of the workplace's most polarizing debates: the gender gap. Moderated by Jessi Hempel, host of the Hello Monday podcast, the panel featured powerhouse leaders Rachel Thomas (CEO of Lean In), Maxine Williams (Chief Diversity Officer at Meta), and Reshma Saujani (founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First). Live on stage at Masters of Scale Summit, they delivered an unfiltered discussion on meritocracy in the workplace and who gets ahead, the persistent challenges in advancing equity, and how to navigate the growing pushback against DEI efforts.

JESSI HEMPEL: I'm going to start our conversation with you, Rachel. Lean In partnered with McKinsey to conduct the Women in the Workplace Survey. I would love you to set the stage for this conversation.

RACHEL THOMAS: So let me set the stage on the report first. Hopefully, many of you are already familiar with it, but this was our 10th annual, and over the last 10 years, we've collected data from over a thousand companies and surveyed over 480,000 employees. This is a big data set. The good news is we have seen progress for women at every level, and that matters, particularly in senior leadership.

This year, 29 percent of C-suite leaders are women. Back in 2015, when we started the report, that was 17 percent. But when you get underneath that, it is much more fragile than it appears on the face of it. I'll just give you one example. Most of that progress at the C-suite was driven by companies, on average, adding one staff role and putting a woman in it.

The other thing we see so clearly in the data is that early-career women are, by and large, being looked over too often. Women make up 59 percent of college degrees, but only 47 percent of entry-level hires are women. Then, at that first critical step up to manager, that first promotion, we see what we call the broken rung. For every 100 men promoted, only 81 women were promoted last year, and those numbers have hardly budged since 2018. They're stuck, and it's worse for Black women and worse for Latinas.

They're actually losing ground at that first critical step up. So this is a moment in time when we're seeing some progress, but we really need to keep our foot on the gas. The final thing I would say is lots of findings, I hope you go find the report and read it. The final thing is this year, for the first time in years, company commitment to gender and racial diversity is declining.

At that moment of momentum, we're at risk and are seeing signs in the workplace and in the zeitgeist that companies are pulling back.

HEMPEL: That piece in particular is really important to keep in mind as we have this conversation. Maxine, you are the one person sitting on this stage actually working in this field of industry right now at Meta. What does the world look like where you are?

WILLIAMS: We're so thankful to Lean In and McKinsey for the research you do, which is sound, useful, and practical.

We can build solutions based on what we know to be true. We, in some ways, were the beneficiaries of early research that you had done.

Having seen, for instance, that performance attribution bias was something impacting progression, we were able to address that. Now, let me just wind that back a little bit.

What we see reflected in reality is what is sort of instinctively understood, but you get a little bit of the why in it, which is this. You will hear people say, in 2024, as a nod to your mention of pulling back, other people might say backlash. You will hear people say, we need a return to meritocracy. Embedded in that is an assumption that we used to be a meritocracy, and things have gone too far.

Rachel just mentioned some progress. Women went from 17 percent of C-suite 10 years ago to 29 percent.

THOMAS: Twenty-nine, we should be 51, by my math.

WILLIAMS: Or 59. Depends on how you look at it.

So if you're going from 17 to 29, you say there's some progress. At Meta, we put in place some strategies that got us 10 years ago from 15 percent women in technical roles to 25 percent women in technical roles. This is during a period when the percentage of women who graduated with computer science degrees did not move from 18 percent.

So we go from 15 to 25. That gain is seen as a loss by people for whom there was not a meritocracy, but they were the beneficiaries of performance attribution bias. That means that if before it was easier for you to get ahead based on your potential, or how much somebody liked you, as opposed to actual merit, then you see these gains as losses.

We've tried to develop strategies based on people understanding, everybody understanding, that it is better for us to have a true meritocracy. That means addressing bias in the systems that were giving people undeserved advantages. So if we consider the strategies in that context, where there's something in it for everyone to have the best talent, and build the best products, people are more likely to engage, to sign on, and to want it to happen.

HEMPEL: Reshma, I want to bring you into this conversation now.

You have done so many things, but the first time I became familiar with your work was around Girls Who Code. I think many people here are familiar with Girls Who Code and I am very curious if you believe that there is a DEI backlash.

SAUJANI: I'll be honest. I have been enormously saddened by what I've seen the past year and feel like, as I spent over a decade of my life building that pipeline of talent, I just feel like I understand now the sisters and the women whose shoulders we've stood on since the 1900s about how progress is dismantled.

I understand it. I see it. And it's so sad to me that the attack on progress is happening here in Silicon Valley, the place that's supposed to believe in a meritocracy.

WILLIAMS: One of the statistics in the study, which I thought was most telling, was about where young men are. Young men are two times as likely now as they were six or seven years ago to believe that their gender is holding them back from getting an opportunity, a raise, or a chance.

Older men overestimate the progress that has been made and they're like, everything's good for women now, right?

SAUJANI: A, this is such a powerful point.

WILLIAMS: Yes, and it is about competition. And by the way, those numbers, and it's not just Lean In who's done work on this. I've seen work in the European Union across 27 countries finding the same results. It is more acute among young men who are unemployed or young men in lower socioeconomic brackets.

This is where the threat of competition is greater.

SAUJANI: And look, I want to give some truth to that. The status of men in this country has shifted.

If you are a manager at Walmart, or you're like, "What are you talking about? My boss is a woman," but when you are working at Meta or elsewhere, it looks different. So it's like, we have to approach this in a very different way than we've been.

HEMPEL: I'll ask, does this need to be binary?

I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you, do men have to do worse for women to get what they need out of the world? Is this the right framework for this conversation?

THOMAS: The right framework is all ships rise. The data on diversity is super clear, and if you look back, happier employees, more innovation, better business results.

But senior-level men do show up as having a notably rosy view of what's happening in the workplace. Both the progress that women have made, the representation of women in leadership, and how good and effective DEI efforts have been. I think that's because their view of the workplace is different, their perch in the workplace is different, which matters so much in a moment when there is a backlash on DEI, which means it's a backlash on fighting bias and equity, which is just heartbreaking.

We need our senior-level men, who often are driving an organization's priorities, to be with us and that means they need to see the workplace clearly.

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In addition to this powerful conversation on accelerating equity in the workplace, the recent Masters of Scale Summit also featured insightful sessions on crucial topics like how AI will transform the way entrepreneurs innovate (with Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman), the most critical considerations for solving the climate crisis (with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla), how to think about trust, privacy, and surveillance (with Signal’s Meredith Whittaker), and more.

The inaugural Masters of Scale Summit featured similarly transformative talks, including lessons on creativity from leaders at Pixar, insights on brand-building from entrepreneur and model Tyra Banks, and lessons on how to scale successfully with Stripe’s Patrick Collison. Now, as Masters of Scale Summit gears up to return for a third year, the event is poised to be even more impactful.

Ahead of Masters of Scale Summit 2025 (in San Francisco Oct. 7-9), the team is opening up priority access for impact-driven leaders to get on the list. This is a unique opportunity to engage with leading voices, connect with other fast-scaling leaders, and gain actionable insights on how to elevate and accelerate your business.

Don't miss your chance to be part of a community of innovators.

*Sponsored by Masters of Scale Summit.

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