Gender equality remains elusive, even among the best management systems

The accepted message on gender disparity in the workplace has for the past 10 to 15 years been one of acknowledgment and reassurance: Yes, women represent just three percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and less than 15 per cent of corporate executives at top companies worldwide, but give it time. It’ll change.

After all, women also make up 40 percent of the global workforce, with double-digit growth in certain countries.

They’re earning advanced professional degrees in record numbers and in some areas surpassing men.

Companies have implemented programmes to fix structural biases against women and support their full participation in leadership.

Women are finally poised to make it to the top, the argument goes. Not yet, but soon.

If only that were true. New research by our firm, Catalyst, shows that among graduates of elite MBA programmes around the world — the high potentials on whom companies are counting to navigate the turbulent global economy over the next decade— women continue to lag men at every single career stage, right from their first professional jobs.

Reports of progress in advancement, compensation, and career satisfaction are at best overstated, at worst just plain wrong.

“Frankly, the fact that the pipeline is not as healthy as we’d thought is both surprising and disappointing,” says Jim Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young, a sponsor of the research, which tracked more than 4,100 MBA students who graduated between 1996 and 2007.

“Companies have been working on this, and I thought we’d seen progress. The last decade was supposed to be the “promised one”’ and it turns out that it wasn’t. This is a wake-up call for corporations.”

It’s especially disconcerting that, after a decade of aggressive efforts to create opportunities for women, inequity remains entrenched.

Companies must acknowledge their failure on this front, learn why they haven’t succeeded, and come up with better programmes to help talented women advance.

Even after adjusting for years of work experience, industry, and region, Catalyst found that men started their careers at higher levels than women.

And that isn’t because women don’t aspire to the top —the finding holds when you include only women and men who say they’re aiming for senior executive positions.

It’s not a matter of parenthood slowing women’s careers, either.

Among women and men without children living at home, men still started at higher levels.