#GAReads | Why Are There So Few Women CEOs?
Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, at the Fortune Most Powerful Women 2017 Summit. Photo credit: Fortune Conferences [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr.
“Why are There So Few Women CEOs?”:
Women comprise about 47% of the U.S. workforce, yet they make up barely a quarter of all senior executives at large U.S. public companies. Even worse, only about 5% of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies have female CEOs.
Moreover, women who become CEOs are often appointed to companies that are in crisis or are performing poorly, as in the cases of Mary Barra at General Motors, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett Packard and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo!
To better understand why women are so poorly represented at the highest levels of corporate America, several colleagues and I studied differences between the careers of male and female CEOs. Our research paints a grim picture.