ADP Research Institute – 2019 State of the Workforce Report – “The first annual State of the Workforce Report provides decision makers with organizational benchmarks to compare against their own internal HR statistics. Employers and decision makers can gain a better understanding of the hierarchical structure of organizations, pay levels, how pay and promotions are connected and how employers retain workers throughout their organizations.

• Males and females show significant disparities across pay and organizational hierarchies – Gender differences across hierarchy levels show that the proportion of women in senior level positions is significantly lower than that of men. This pattern was evident across all industries and intensifies up the corporate ladder. A “glass ceiling” was evident at the 4th hierarchy level which showed the steepest decline in the representation of women across the levels….
• A comparison of promotion rates over a one-year period against the proportion of new hires reveals that firms are more confident in promoting from within versus hiring externally for management positions. At the supervisory levels, firms promoted more internally than they hired externally—17.2 percent of managers are promoted, while 15.6 percent are new hires. The disparity becomes even more apparent at the highest rankings within an organization, where 21.5 percent were internally promoted and only 12.5 percent were new hires…”