In 2021, the number of women business leaders is still bafflingly — appallingly — low. This despite mountains of evidence accumulated over years of research that women make better leaders than men.
According to the Women CEOs in America Report published by the Women Business Collaborative, C200, and Catalyst, the number of women CEOs rose by 2% in 2020 to a historic high, which shouldn’t be all that surprising given that women are more likely to lead better through adversity than their male counterparts.
In December 2019, women held 30 (6%) of CEO positions in S&P 500 companies. At the start of 2020, the number was 6.7%, and at the close of 2020, women held 7.8% of those CEO positions.
“We expect women CEOs to constitute 8.2% of CEOs by February 2021 and 15% of Fortune 500 and S&P roles by 2025, with 10% of those being women of color,” the report said.
While the growth in women leaders is laudable, the glacial pace at which it’s occurring is not.
Research conducted in 2012 by Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy, and updated in 2019 shows women are perceived by their managers — particularly their male managers — to be more effective than men at every hierarchical level and in virtually every functional area of an organization. That includes the traditional male bastions of IT, operations, and law.
“Women were rated as excelling in taking initiative, acting with resilience, practicing self-development, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty,” Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote for Harvard Business Review in 2019. “In fact, they were thought to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that we most frequently measure.
“According to our updated data, men were rated as being better on two capabilities — ‘develops strategic perspective’ and ‘technical or professional expertise.’”
Put another way, “humility, self-awareness, self-control, moral sensitivity, social skills, emotional intelligence, kindness, a prosocial and moral orientation, are all more likely to be found in women than men,” Forbes contributor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote earlier this year. “Women also outperform men in educational settings, while men score higher than women on dark side personality traits, such as aggression (especially unprovoked), narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which account for much of the toxic and destructive behaviors displayed by powerful men.”
While there’s no one reason why more women haven’t been elevated into leadership roles sooner, much of it comes down to a lack of opportunity. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that women are humbler than men in their experiences and are less likely to try for jobs where they don’t meet most or all the criteria, but that’s a lazy argument.
Plenty of men, myself included, would love an opportunity to obtain a leadership role, but I don’t deserve it more than anyone else, and women, frankly, probably deserve it more, according to the research.
Men in corporate positions of power need to recognize the business benefits of more women leaders. According to McKinsey, the world’s GDP is $12 trillion lower today than it would be if we advanced toward gender equality. According to the World Bank, gender inequality is costing us $23,620 per person in lost earnings, and $160 trillion in human capital loss — twice the global GDP.
Men clearly aren’t perfect business leaders. So, next time you’re hiring a leader, maybe make it a woman?
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