August 8, 2011 8:02 AM EDT
While some women have risen to the top of U.S. executive boardrooms in recent years – and have made substantial gains in the overall white-collar workforce – females still remain vastly under-represented among the highest ranks of business titans.
“There has been a significant increase in the number of women assuming leadership positions in the U.S. in the past 40 years,” said Anna N. Danielova, assistant professor of finance, DeGroote School of Business in Hamilton, Ont.
Danielova indicated that the percentage of management who were female in U.S. corporations climbed from 18 percent in 1972 to 45 percent in 2000, citing data from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Despite that number, the distribution of women in senior management and executive positions is still severely skewed in favor of men,” she said. “There has been some increase in past 10 years, but women in leadership positions are still statistically under-represented.”
According to Atul Gupta, professor of finance at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., only twelve of the companies in the S&P 500 index currently have women chief executives, down from 15 in 2010.
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Moreover, only 15.7 percent of board-members of corporations in the Fortune 500 are female.
In fact, women may actually be going backwards.
“Progress has slowed dramatically and in some areas [has] declined,” Gupta said.
Certain industries seem to favor women executives more than others.
“We find women on boards in every sector, demonstrating there are women available,” Gupta said.
“However, manufacturing, financial services and technology have lagged other sectors in appointing women since we started tracking in 2003. Interestingly, within the technology sector, women are doing well in software and within life sciences. Women are also doing well in pharmaceuticals and biotech, in contrast to medical devices.”
Indeed, Gupta notes, more than 10 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 have no women board-members whatsoever.
Moreover, 41 percent of the largest 100 companies have no women directors.
Intimately connected to this under-representation of top female executives is a gap in compensation between the genders.
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