The Crisis in Women’s Leadership
The gender leadership gap refers to the lack of women in senior leadership positions. From corporate boardrooms to the hallowed halls of local, state, and national government, the higher up you look in the US, the fewer women you see. Although women constitute nearly half of the professional workforce, they are only 14.6% of executive officers, 8.1% of top earners, and only 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs.”[1] And this discrepancy is not for lack of trying. Since 1981, women have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men, and in 2019, there were more college-educated women in the workforce than men. Clearly, women have the skill and credentials to make it to the top.
The data tells a clear story. Women start out on equal footing with men, and they tend to be promoted to management positions at a similar rate to their male colleagues, but that is where their numbers start to dwindle. For a long time, the solution to the problem was to let the problem correct itself. Senior executives reasoned that it would only be a matter of time until women started reaching the top, and during the 1980s and 1990s, that perspective made sense. Women made tremendous gains in the 1980s and 1990s after they started entering the workforce, but then they got stuck in middle management and haven’t made much progress since, and the pandemic has exacerbated the already brewing crisis in women’s leadership.
Equal representation in senior leadership needs to be top priority, for more reasons than one. First, there is the obvious matter of fairness. If women make up more than half of the college-educated workforce, then they clearly have the talent to excel. It is difficult to defend the idea that they are getting stuck in middle management because they are less capable than their male peers. Catalyst.org puts the imbalance in striking quantitative perspective: “If first-level women managers were hired and promoted like men, there would be 1 million more women in management over the next five years.”[2]
Second, recent studies show that gender diversity is good for the bottom line. In a 2016 study, the Peterson Institute for International Economics survey of 21,980 firms from 91 countries found that moving from “no female leaders to 30% representation is correlated with a 15% increase in net revenue margin.”[3] Our failure to leverage the talent of emerging women leaders is not only unfair to them, but also, bad for business. Very rarely in life are the right things to do also the profitable things to do, so gender equality in leadership is a win-win.
Finally, the absence of women in senior leadership positions is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What message are we sending to young girls and boys when they don’t see women in leadership positions? One of the main reasons we don’t see more women in leadership positions is that women often don’t see themselves as leaders. Take a look at the CEOs, Presidents, and other notable figures in our society. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why women doubt their suitability for senior leadership.
So how can you fix it? This website is devoted to identifying the root causes of the gender leadership gap, many of which are outside the control of any single person. Nevertheless, there are things that each one of us can do to move closer to gender equality in leadership.
Know the facts. Many people are unaware of how extreme the gender leadership gap is. Make a commitment to learning more about the gender leadership gap in your industry and find the facts to back you up. You can have more effective (and impactful) conversations about how to change the gender leadership gap if you start with the facts. I will be sharing important facts about the gender leadership gap, and I hope you will share what you know with me and your peers.
Pay attention to leaders in gender equality in your industry. Who is doing well in your industry? Ask yourself and your colleagues what they are doing differently and use these conversations as launching points into how your organization can improve leadership equality.
Think globally. There are countries that are rocking it when it comes to gender equality. All too often, we limit our focus to the US because of the mistaken belief that the US is a unique case. Just because we have certain cultural traditions doesn’t mean that we can’t learn what works (and what doesn’t) in other countries.
According to the 2021 Global Gender Gap Index report, it will take 154 years for the US to reach gender equality under the current conditions. Do you feel comfortable looking your daughter in the face and telling her that maybe her great-great-great grandchildren will live in a gender equal world? I didn’t think so.
[1] Catalyst.org
[2] Catalyst.org
[3] Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016, “Is Gender Diversity Profitable? Evidence from a Global Survey,” Working Paper 16-3.
