Why it’s wrong: The speeding up of women’s advancement stops when there are enough women for the firm to look good – but nothing has changed structurally, so numbers will start slipping rather than growing.
If you dig into the career progression of women in the highest executive roles of your average Fortune 100 company, you will indeed see that they have been catapulted into those roles earlier in their careers (relative to similarly qualified men). But, far from creating a pattern of reverse discrimination, the speeding up of women’s promotion to senior roles stops once companies have more than one high-ranking female executive. This is what researchers from IE Business School (Madrid) and the Wharton School (Philadelphia) revealed in their analysis of 10 years of data on the advancement of women into executive roles in Fortune 100 companies.
Of greater concern is that this quick-fix approach to solving a corporate image problem fails to address the deep structural reasons obstructing a more natural progression of women into management and executive roles. Absent structural changes, companies that resort to such shortcuts to elevate women into top executive roles are continuously at risk of seeing their numbers slip.
How to fix it: Look for talented and qualified women in lower positions frequently, not just in times of executive promotions. Candidate pools for all positions should include talented women from inside and outside the organization.
Organizations must become more inclusive and diverse to thrive in the future: the business case is as a compelling as the moral imperative. How can executives foster inclusion to unlock the power of diversity, while recognizing and tackling inequity and discrimination? In the June issue of I by IMD, we explore how leaders can build organizations and design products and services that are truly inclusive.
Why it’s wrong: If your top female executive does not highlight gender disparities, it could be because she feels like a token in the C-suite and avoids calling attention to gender. Powerful but isolated, women sometimes believe that advocating for other women may cause them to lose legitimacy. Consequently, they can distance themselves from promoting other women to draw less attention to their gender. Alternatively, given their success in achieving a top executive role, they may be less aware of other women’s struggles climbing up the corporate ladder.
This is the pattern that emerged from an analysis of 2,345 CEOs and 12,965 top executives of S&P 1500 firms. In the years the study covered (2011 to 2017), women chief executive officers were less likely than men to have women on their top management team. They also found that the reluctance of isolated women CEOs to advocate for bringing more women onto their executive team shrunk when circumstances rendered their legitimacy less likely to be questioned (e.g., when the firm was doing well financially).
How to fix it: Organizations can be highly effective in addressing gender biases when women occupy top roles. If you want to enlist your female executives in gender equity initiatives, avoid making gender a salient feature of your executive team, for example, by tokenizing women. Squash unnecessary questioning and delegitimizing of top female executives and review your organization for systemic biases and gender disparities. Women executives and senior managers are more likely to advocate and participate in inclusive organizations that have less gender biases to begin with.
Why it’s wrong: Female CEOs are dismissed at higher rates than male CEOs, especially when the firm is performing well. Female CEOs have a larger presence in industry than ever before but are 45% more likely than male CEOs to be dismissed, according to a study jointly published by researchers at University of Alabama, University of Memphis, Clemson University, and University of Missouri.
By analyzing the dismissal patterns at 2,390 companies over a 15-year period, the researchers found that high performance helped men CEOs avert dismissal but failed to protect women from being disproportionately fired. It could be, the authors suggest, that boards make different attributions of a firm’s high performance, depending on whether it is led by a man or a woman: for example, directors may be less likely to believe that a firm’s high performance is due to women CEOs’ leadership experience and capabilities.
How to fix it: Given these disparities, it is important to ensure that board assessments of CEOs are bias-free. Gender-sensitivity training for new and current board members could help create awareness of implicit and explicit biases in CEO hiring decisions and evaluation.
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