On Friday, February 6th 2020 Vanessa Fuhrmans of the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting article titled Where Are All the Women CEOs? It’s an interesting article that I would certainly recommend reading if possible, although it’s behind a paywall so unless you are a WSJ subscriber I don’t think you are able to view it, although they may have a limited number of views per month for non-subscribers. Here is my summary of the article, or feel free to skip below this section to hear my opinions.
Of the top 3000 companies in the USA, just 167 are led by females. According to the article, the main reason that less than 6% of the most successful companies have female leaders is that the funnel of jobs leading up to CEO are mainly filled with men. These types of positions are generally management positions with profit and loss responsibilities, either for a large division of the company or the entire company.
There are a good number of females in C-level roles, but most of them are not responsible for the company’s profit and loss. Legal, Human Resources, Marketing and Finance leadership positions are filled by women at a 25%-55% clip. Positions which have a responsibility for profit and loss such as COO, Head of Sales, and Head of a Company Division, are all under 10% females.
Several people interviewed for the article hypothesize that females tend to be pigeon-holed into specified roles because they are good at them, so have less opportunity to hold positions that work across the business and have P&L responsibility. Some interviewees believe that there is a misguided assumption that females don’t have ambition to move into the type of roles that get one ready to become a CEO.
At companies where employees feel there is a real effort to create a diverse leadership team, 85% of women say they are seeking a leadership position (compared to 87% of males). At companies who scored poorly on gender diversity, just 66% of women say they want to move into a leadership role.
Companies such as Chevron and Hershey Co place an emphasis on grooming females for leadership positions, and it works - they have great females in important, P&L focused leadership roles.
This article by Ms. Fuhrmans has a lot of information to digest. It comes as no surprise that women are under-represented in leadership roles. The huge positive news from this article comes from the success that companies who try to create diverse leadership have had in doing so. At least some of the reason that females and people of color are not getting leadership positions is because of faulty assumptions that they lack ambition for those type of roles, and believe that they will never become the CEO anyway so they don’t even try to get there. Seeing that women who want to become managers or leaders increases by nearly 1 in 5 (from 66% to 85%) at companies who score highly on gender and racial inclusivity shows that being thoughtful and inclusive results in real world positive impact.
While this article is not tech specific, there are a lot of similarities to our industry. The problem isn’t just that there are too few women CEOs - it goes down to the root problem, that there aren’t enough women in positions which prepare one to become a CEO. And even further to the core of the issue than that, women in poor work environments from an inclusivity perspective don’t feel welcome or able to move into leadership, and are content to just do their current job very well.
In tech, there are many companies openly state the desire to hire engineers who are female or non-white, which isn’t a bad thing on its own. But it doesn’t address the root issue - that many companies aren’t comfortable or welcoming to everyone. We should be creating companies that girls growing up see and think that they want to work there when they grow up. It’s not the most appealing to everyone if they see companies that look more or less like a frat house, and simply trying to hire females for specific positions doesn’t fix the root issues.
Gender and Racial inclusivity offer huge potential for improvement in the tech industry. There are more software engineering jobs than software engineers, and that problem isn’t helped by the fact that women and people of color look at the industry and feel it would be tough to fit in.
If you are interested in this topic, there is a fantastic meetup called No Hoodies Required that focuses on changing what tech looks like. It’s a very interesting group, and is obviously open and welcoming to everyone, so please sign up if you’d like to join the discussion at the next meetup on Wednesday 2/19/20.
Also, please feel free to chime in on this in the comments or contact me directly at kevin@code-talent.com. I’m not an expert, but am trying to learn. I’d love any thoughts on what I got right and what I got wrong from your perspective!