Articles & Interviews Sample Article 2
Mandy McGill followed the get-ahead playbook to the letter when she took an entry-level management job with Seattle-based general contractor Abbott Construction in January 2023. She worked her connections, sought out support from company management and made it known she was interested in moving into senior leadership.
But no matter how hard she tried to create valuable business relationships or how many times she asked for mentorship and advice, the door to advancement seemed to be bolted shut.
McGill said she was treated differently from the start, noting her male counterparts received input from their director while she was left with unanswered phone calls and emails along with a lingering sense that management was uncomfortable with the way she did business.
The feeling of defeat eventually became too much, and she quit after just seven months. Abbott representatives did not respond to Bisnow’s request for comment.
“I came in with the same amount of experience as their director of business development, if not even more,” said McGill, who left this past summer to devote herself full-time to her own CRE-related recruitment firm, Inspire Consulting. “I was meeting with all of the right people to make [connections] happen, and yet I still couldn’t find a sponsor within the organization who would support my efforts.”
McGill’s departure is an increasingly common story for an industry struggling with a crisis-level retention problem, especially among women in its early and middle ranks. Since 2020, an estimated 27% of women in CRE have left jobs in the industry.
Women in real estate now face the toughest climb to the top among all 19 sectors analyzed by the World Economic Forum’s most recent global gender gap report. Despite making up 45% of its workforce, women hold just 29% of leadership roles. Women in real estate also suffer the steepest “drop to the top” of any other industry, meaning their representation declines at every step up the career staircase, from entry-level to management to C-suite, in a way that’s wildly inverse to their numbers overall, the WEF report states.
A still-prevalent boys club mentality, discrimination toward mothers, unconscious bias and a lack of training and mentorship are among the factors cited for stymying women even before they get a few rungs up the ladder.
It all adds up to frustration that is already derailing careers, and it could throw a wrench into the industry’s fledgling but not insignificant attempts to boost gender parity, according to CRE leaders and women working in the field, including the nearly 200 women who completed a Bisnow’s survey on how they are feeling about their workplace prospects and their own companies’ efforts to even the playing field.
For years, CRE has focused on narrowing the gap in boardrooms and C-suites. But slight progress at the top masks a larger problem that is thwarting careers just as they are taking off, causing women to walk away and presaging a potential looming leadership vacuum.
“The reason you see so few women in the C-suite in CRE is because of the ‘missing middle,’” CREW Network CEO Wendy Mann said. “Companies do not groom and invest in the training that is needed for that mid-level manager, that director, to assume those higher level roles.”
Women hoping to rise in CRE are feeling that pain acutely. Bisnow’s new survey shows that almost 51% of women believe they or their counterparts are missing out on opportunities within their own organizations, and nearly 71% said they have lost opportunities like raises, promotions and key assignments for gender-based reasons at some point in their careers.
Contact Katharine Carlon at katharine.carlon@fakenews.com
See Also: EXCLUSIVE: ADIA Ends £350M Retail Sale As Shopping Centre Leasing Market Improves
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