All C-Suite People
Only one out of ten people in the C-Suite is a woman.
“Suddenly it strikes me. I’m the only woman in the room.” Ida Auken, MP, Parliament of Denmark. Photo World Economic Forum 2015
According to the Boston Globe in 2019, referencing a Pew Research study, “just ten percent of the top executive positions” (defined by Pew as CEO, CFO and the next three highest paid execs in a company) “in the 1,500 largest publicly traded companies in the US are held by women.”
The Globe identifies a number of tangible measures that some companies are doing to increase gender diversity in their top ranks: Some pledge to “interview women for every high-level position.” Others award higher bonuses to execs who increase female leadership in their departments. Some track diversity numbers “obsessively.”
The Globe further lauds an “initiative launched in 2017 by the nonprofit Parity.org.” Called the Parity Pledge, it asks companies to interview at least one woman for every VP level (or above) opening. To date, 400 companies have signed the pledge, including Adobe, AmEx Business Travel, Ancestry, BestBuy, Cisco, Lyft, Nasdaq, Oracle, Overstock, Qualtrics, Ralph Lauren, SoFi, and Vivint.
In related moves, Goldman Sachs pledged in March 2019 that 50% of all new hires of analysts and entry-level employees would be women, while Accenture consulting is planning a 50/50 gender balanced workforce by 2025 and achieving 24% of managing directors being women by 2020.
According to Catalyst, women make up 45% of total employees in S&P 500 companies, yet their numbers drop off at every level up the pyramid:
Catalyst, Pyramid: Women in S&P 500 Companies (May 1, 2019).
The Boston Globe further cites a report by ADP Research Institute, which analyzed payroll data from 13 million corporate employees and found that “women actually get promoted more quickly than men but lose ground” as they move up the ladder.
What will it take for women to get into the Power Percentage of the C-Suite of the Fortune 500?