Weekend Reads | The Number of Women in Senior Corporate Roles Has Dipped

A new study says there are fewer women in senior and C-suite positions since 2021.

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is a new research report from S&P Global on gender parity in U.S. corporations. And the news is not encouraging.

For the first time in about 20 years, there were fewer women in "C-suite" jobs (CEO, COO, CFO, etc.) in 2023 than in the previous year. The number of women in all senior positions still grew last year, but since hitting a peak in 2021, the growth rate has dropped dramatically.

As the report points out, one year's numbers are not as important as the long-term trend. The drop in the number of women in C-suite positions may be a one-year blip, but the trend for women in senior positions (which made enormous progress in the 2010s) appears to be flattening out — and at a level well below parity. As of last year, women hold just over 22% of senior corporate positions, and slightly under 12% of C-suite jobs.

By their calculations, we will achieve gender parity in senior corporate roles no earlier than 2033 and more likely around 2042. For C-suite positions, the story is much worse: gender parity no earlier than 2055 and more likely around 2072.

We can follow the trends further upstream. According to the World Economic Forum, as of 2022, women held only 6.8% of corporate CEO positions; those CEOs decide who will fill the rest of the C-suite positions. CEOs are chosen in turn by the company's board of directors, and in 2022, only about 20% of board seats were held by women.

Here's why this dramatic gender imbalance should be so upsetting: Women significantly outnumber men among college students. In 2021, 57.7% of U.S. undergraduate students were women. If this were a recent demographic shift, then perhaps we could understand why gender parity hasn't yet reached the upper levels of corporate America. But women have been the majority of undergraduate students in the United States for over four decades — since 1980. After 44 years of women being overrepresented in the college-educated workforce, we're still nowhere even close to gender parity in corporate senior management.

The (slightly) good news is that there has been some progress in breaking through the glass ceiling that has kept women out of senior positions in corporate America — more than doubling their share between 2013 and 2023. The bad news is that in the face of demographics that should favor women, the glass ceiling is still very much present and the limited progress in removing it is in danger of stalling out.

Elusive Parity: Key Gender Parity Metric Falls for First Time in 2 Decades

Featured image via Ground Picture/Shutterstock.com.