Why There Are So Few Women CEOs
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Here's your Money Briefing. I'm J.R. Whelan at The Wall Street Journal in New York. Less than 6% of the nation's top companies are led by a woman. And while the number of female CEOs has doubled in the past decade, the figures aren't expected to improve much more anytime soon.
Men are predominantly in the roles that are these operational roles, these mission-critical roles that do lead to the CEO spot. Women, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly in roles that are considered as support roles. These are important roles, but they're like the chief marketing officer, the chief HR officer, the general counsel.
That's Wall Street Journal reporter Vanessa Furman. She'll explain what's keeping women out of those pivotal executive jobs that often act as stepping stones to the top and what some companies are doing to change that. That's next.
Women earn most of the college degrees in the U.S. and make up half the workforce, but relatively few hold top corporate jobs. So what's holding women back? Wall Street Journal reporter Vanessa Furmans is here with us to explain. So Vanessa, what are the current numbers in the S&P 500 with regard to female CEOs?
Well, they don't look that great. When you look at the entire S&P 500, you have at the moment 29 women leading companies. That's just about 5%.
And those numbers really haven't improved.
Well, if you just take a look at last year, you can see why it is taking so long. I mean, last year, well, actually, over the last two years, we had six women who were appointed to CEO positions in the S&P 500, which might look like some reasonable progress. But at the same time, we had seven women step down or be ousted from their jobs. So really, we took a step back in that two-year period.
But women do hold executive positions at these companies, right?
They do. And companies have made progress in elevating women to the C-suite and to the senior level positions. The issue is many of those women, you could even argue most of those women, are not moving up into the positions that really matter, the ones with power.
And those are known as profit and loss or P&L positions?
Right. They are essentially the roles that involve somebody running a business, a business unit, a brand, a department, something like that. Anything that has responsibility for generating a profit and being responsible for all the parts of the business within that division.
And that was the topic of a Wall Street Journal analysis of the largest 3,000 companies in the U.S.,
Yes, we really wanted to take a step back look at what is happening on the broader corporate landscape. So we collected the data on the country's 3,000 biggest publicly traded companies by market value. And that's essentially the Russell 3000 Index. And we looked at the top executives at each of those companies and what roles they were in and what gender they were. And what you saw and what you continue to see is that Men are predominantly in the roles that are these operational roles, these mission-critical roles that do lead to the CEO spot. Women, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly in roles that are considered as support roles. These are important roles, but they're like the chief marketing officer, the chief HR officer, the general counsel.
They're all very important roles, but they aren't the stepping stones to the CEO job.
And some companies are making inroads. Hershey, for example, has done a lot to move women along the path to top executive roles.
In a word, you could say it's because of strategic talent planning. Under the previous CEO, a man, JP Bilbrey, the company really started much more systematically building a female pipeline to the C-suite. And their current CEO, Michelle Buck, who is the first woman to run that company, is, you could say, a product of that effort. And she continues that tradition today. She and her executive team meet several times a year. They discuss the 70 or so top roles of the company. And they look at the men and women who make up those roles and the people right below them.
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