McKinsey & Co. has removed senior partner Chris Bradley from leadership roles, including his position at the McKinsey Global Institute, after reviewing LinkedIn comments that questioned the barriers women face in senior jobs. The decision creates a leadership consequence for remarks the firm said did not meet its standards.
Bradley remains a senior partner. McKinsey’s current public profile identifies him as a Sydney-based partner and former director of MGI, its business and economic research arm. His work has covered productivity, growth, demographics and corporate strategy.
McKinsey announced the outcome of its conduct review in a statement Sunday, October 11. Spokesman Taylor Burns said Bradley had been removed from leadership positions, including at MGI, and had also served on internal committees.
“His public comments fell well short of the standards we expect at our firm,” Burns said in the statement reported by Bloomberg.
The review followed an exchange last month involving Julia Carreon, a former Citigroup and Wells Fargo executive and co-author, with Shannon Nutter, of Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling.
The disagreement concerned the “glass cliff,” a research concept describing a tendency for women to receive leadership opportunities in organizations already facing crisis or poor performance. Such appointments can give a new leader less room to succeed than the job title suggests.
According to Fast Company’s account of the deleted posts, Bradley questioned whether the phenomenon existed and described it as an excuse to “always be a victim in the rain.” When Carreon encouraged him to examine the research, he said he did not consider the subject among the world’s top 1,000 problems.
Carreon told Fast Company that she initially thought the exchange was a joke before realizing Bradley appeared to regard the concept as something invented for her book.
McKinsey had already distanced itself from the exchange before completing its review. In an earlier statement to Fast Company, the firm said the remarks were made in a personal capacity, did not reflect its views and had been deleted.
Bradley could not immediately be reached for comment outside normal business hours for Bloomberg’s report.
The research behind the dispute predates the exchange by more than two decades. Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam’s 2005 study examined the performance of FTSE 100 companies before and after appointments of male and female board members.
During a period of stock-market decline, companies appointing women were more likely to have experienced consistently poor performance in the preceding five months than companies appointing men. The finding challenged the idea that weak company performance necessarily followed from bringing women into leadership.
The distinction is practical: a director inheriting a troubled business should not be evaluated as though the problems began on the day of her appointment.
Subsequent research has added qualifications. A 2020 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found evidence consistent with the glass cliff across three types of analysis, but described some effects as small and dependent on organizational setting or study design.
That supports treating the glass cliff as an empirically studied pattern, rather than assuming it explains every appointment of a woman to a difficult job.
For McKinsey, the episode also intersects with its own work on women’s careers. Its Women in the Workplace study, produced with LeanIn.Org, reached its 11th edition in 2025. That edition collected workforce data from 124 participating organizations employing roughly three million people.
The study found that 93 women were promoted to manager for every 100 men, while women held 29% of C-suite roles in participating companies. Those figures concern representation and promotion, rather than directly measuring glass-cliff appointments.
The report also identified senior-leader accountability and clear expectations about respectful behavior among practices more common at companies with stronger women’s representation.
McKinsey’s decision therefore concerns both an individual’s conduct and the standards expected of people holding institutional leadership roles. It does not establish a general rule governing all employees’ online speech.
The announced outcome is narrower and concrete: Bradley keeps his senior-partner title but loses leadership appointments. McKinsey has not announced a replacement for his MGI director role in the materials reviewed.
JBizNews Desk | Sydney
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