Half Your Leadership Team Should Be Female

If your company is committed to hiring the best talent, then half your leadership team should be female. Do you agree? Before you answer, let me break down that statement...

In the United States, roughly half the people in management and professional occupations are female, so unless you believe that women are substantially inferior to men, then half the leadership talent in the workforce should be female.

But that's not the current reality. According to Catalyst, women currently hold 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions and 4.9 percent of Fortune 1000 CEO positions. The New York Times observed that women make up only 16 percent of directors at Fortune 500 companies and 10 percent of chief financial officers at S.& P. 500 companies.

Some argue that because women give birth, there are biological reasons that push them out of the workforce or that slow their ascents to senior management. In fact, most of the obstacles are imaginary, created by men to perpetuate the status quo. In our culture, taking two or three pregnancy leaves is often perceived as a negative. It shows that a woman "isn't serious" about her career.

No one says this, of course, but it's what male executives often think.

The dominant reason why women abandon their ascent to senior management is not biological, it is because the status quo stacks the deck against them. It's just too hard to deal with systemic bias month after month, year after year. "Ah-ha!" skeptics might say, "That proves women aren't tough enough to be leaders."

That is nonsense. Set up a system to treat everyone named Tom, Dick and Harry like companies treat women, and you will find that many of these men hit a brick wall, too.

There is so much bias in the system that business executives cannot even see it. In many industries, female executives tend to make less than their male counterparts... but there are always "reasons" why this is the case. "Well, Joe did a stint overseas in 2003 and blab blah blah blah..."

Nine times out of ten, Joe makes more because he's a man.

You don't need a formal quota system. If 49 of your 100 top executives are female, you don't need to give the next opening to a woman.

But, in general, roughly half of your leaders should be women.

The good news is that you don't have to wait for the whole system to change. All you need do is focus on your own company. If your firm is committed to hiring the best talent, then you need to escape the trap of having just 5 to 16 percent of your leaders be women.

Am I being too simplistic? What do YOU think?

UPDATE (June 4, 7 a.m. EST): Thanks for your comments so far. I intended this article to be deliberately simplistic, because this subject gets very hazy as soon as you get into the details. People start talking about training women to be better leaders, about why many women don't really want to be leaders, about why quotas are a bad idea (I agree), yadda yadda yadda. It is only when you look at the stark reality that the problem is clear: the percentage of business leaders who are women is shockingly low.

Bruce Kasanoff is a ghostwriter for entrepreneurs and executives. Learn more at Kasanoff.com. He is the author of How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk.

Top Image: Michigan Municipal League/Flickr. Bottom image: Catalyst. Pyramid: U.S. Women in Business. New York: Catalyst, June 1, 2014.