Written By: Deborah Cartisser
McKinsey & Company’s newly released Women in the Workplace 2025 report paints a clear and concerning picture. For the first time in a decade, progress for women has stalled. They found promotions are declining, sponsorship is shrinking and access to high-growth roles is narrowing.
And while these are workplace challenges, the financial implications for women are profound and long-lasting.
The Impact of Stalled Progress
When women are promoted at slower rates or overlooked entirely, their earning power is immediately affected. Lower current salaries translate into smaller bonuses, fewer opportunities to participate in high-impact projects, and significantly reduced access to roles that shape long-term financial stability.
Remote-working women face steeper declines in advancement, increasing pay and opportunity gaps. Without sponsors or mentors, they lose vital advocacy that unlocks higher pay and leadership roles.
When women are absent from frontier fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, they miss out on some of the highest-growth and highest-compensation roles of the next decade. What begins as a single missed promotion compounds the wealth gap, affecting retirement readiness, investment capacity, and long-term financial independence.
Creating a Space to Gain Financial Confidence
At Twelve Points Wealth Management and through the Twelve Points Center for Women, we see these challenges not as statistics but as lived realities in the financial lives of the women we serve. Our work focuses on closing these gaps by giving women the tools, clarity, and strategy they need to build lasting financial power.
We help women understand how career stagnation affects long term wealth and how to counteract it through intentional planning. We teach women business owners how to align their business and personal finances so earnings increase and stability grows. We provide education and guidance on investing, compensation negotiations, exit planning and the strategic financial decisions that create long term prosperity. Most importantly, we create a space where women gain not only financial literacy but financial confidence, something the data shows is a decisive factor in long term outcomes.
Financial Empowerment at Every Career Stage
The McKinsey report is a wake-up call.
Without targeted support, women risk losing economic ground that will take decades to recover. But with proper guidance and a community committed to their advancement, women can build wealth despite the system’s slow evolution.
At the Twelve Points Center for Women, our mission is simple: Equip women with the financial understanding, strategic insight, and partnership they need to rise. The workplace may not yet be designed to fully support women, but their financial futures can be.
When women are prepared, informed, and resourced, the wealth gap narrows, and the next generation rises with them. Let this report be a call to action for true financial empowerment at every career stage.
Connect with our team at Twelve Points Center for Women today.