Megan McConnell

Megan McConnell is a Partner in McKinsey & Company's Washington, DC office, where she works in the firm's People and Organizational Performance practice. She advises executives and public sector leaders on large-scale organizational transformations, operational performance improvements, and human capital strategy, and has been a lead author of the Women in the Workplace report, produced annually with LeanIn.Org, for several years.

Uncovering the "Ambition Gap" and the "Support Gap"

Megan led the 2025 edition of Women in the Workplace, the largest study of women's experiences in corporate America, surveying roughly 10,000 respondents across 125 participating companies along with in-depth CHRO interviews. That year's report surfaced something the study hadn't measured before: an "ambition gap," with women overall six percentage points less likely than men to want their next promotion, rising to eleven points at the entry level. Rather than stopping at the number, her team traced it to a "support gap": once men and women receive equal levels of sponsorship, stretch opportunities, and career support, the ambition gap disappears statistically. She has also tracked how burnout disproportionately affects senior-level women (60 percent report feeling burnt out in the past few months) and how men are currently more likely than women to be encouraged by managers to use AI, a gap she argues could compound existing inequities if left unaddressed.

Topics Megan speaks on

• The "ambition gap" and the "support gap" behind it
• Sponsorship as a distinct, measurable driver of career advancement
• Burnout and job security among senior-level women
• Gender gaps in AI encouragement and adoption at work
• Women in the Workplace: a decade-plus of data on gender parity

Sessions with Achieve

Megan is a featured guest on the Achieve webcast "2026 Workplace Trends to Watch" (February 24, 2026), presented in partnership with Workhuman and moderated by Naomi Dishington, alongside colleague Drew Goldstein. In it, she walks through the ambition gap and support gap findings from the 2025 Women in the Workplace report in detail, and discusses the sponsorship gap that widens at both the entry level and the most senior ranks.

Connect

• Megan McConnell on LinkedIn
• Megan McConnell at McKinsey & Company

Want more on what the research actually says closes the ambition gap? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.