What Dr. Aidan McKearney Just Got Right About Senior Diversity

Dr. Aidan McKearney is not a conference keynote circuit regular making the same tired argument with a new slide deck. He is a researcher who looked at the persistence of homogeneity in senior leadership — a problem that has absorbed billions in DEI spend over two decades — and arrived at a conclusion that most HR functions have been quietly avoiding: the pipeline was never the real obstacle.

His argument, published in Personnel Today (2025-06-01), is clean and uncomfortable in equal measure. The lack of diversity at senior levels is a progression problem, not a pipeline problem. Organisations have spent a generation recruiting diverse early-career talent, celebrating their intake numbers, and then watching representation erode at every subsequent promotion gate. McKearney's diagnosis names what the data has been showing for years without anyone drawing the obvious conclusion: if you fill the top of the funnel and the bottom of the leadership table still looks the same, the funnel is not the failure point.

That reframe matters more than it might appear. Most diversity initiatives are architecturally upstream — graduate schemes, diverse slates, blind CVs, university partnerships. They are, in McKearney's framing, investments in a problem that does not exist, or at least not as acutely as the one that does. The real friction is inside the organisation: in promotion decisions, sponsorship patterns, performance calibration sessions, and the informal networks that actually move people upward. These processes are largely invisible to external scrutiny and almost never subjected to the same rigour as recruitment.

The context McKearney is writing into matters. The labour market is not currently generous with alternatives. HR Dive (2025-05-30) confirms the US market remains in a "low hire, low fire" equilibrium — meaning organisations cannot rely on external talent flows to fix internal representation gaps. If your senior leadership cohort does not reflect the workforce you claim to value, you are not going to recruit your way out of it in this environment. McKearney's progression framing is, in that sense, strategically timely: the only lever organisations reliably control right now is internal mobility.

He is also writing against a backdrop of institutional erosion. HR Dive (2025-06-02) reports that nearly 4 in 10 workers do not trust HR to help them in toxic workplace situations. That number should sit uncomfortably alongside any diversity progress narrative. If the function charged with psychological safety and fair treatment is not trusted by 40% of employees to act on their behalf, the progression environment McKearney identifies as the real problem becomes even harder to audit honestly. You cannot fix promotion bias with a culture survey that people don't believe you'll act on.

So why should HR leaders care this week, specifically? Because the EU Pay Transparency Directive — detailed in HR Executive (2025-05-30) — is moving toward enforcement, and pay gaps at senior levels are about to become externally visible for any multinational operating in Europe. When those gaps surface, the instinct will be to point at the pipeline. McKearney's work gives you the analytical frame to resist that deflection in the board conversation: the gap is not upstream, it is inside. Naming the right problem is the first act of solving it — and now there will be regulatory pressure to solve it publicly.

The actionable takeaway from McKearney's work is not a programme to launch. It is an audit to commission. Pull your last three years of promotion data by level, function, and demographic cohort. Do not look at who applied — look at conversion rates between application and outcome, and then compare them across groups. If your organisation is typical, you will find that the pipeline is not empty; it is leaking at specific transition points that nobody has been formally accountable for fixing. McKearney's progression framing gives you the language to make those transition points the unit of analysis, and therefore the unit of accountability. That is a different conversation than the one most boards are having, and a more honest one. The question worth sitting with is this: who in your organisation is currently held responsible for promotion equity at the point of decision — and what happens to them if the numbers are wrong?