The Rise of Female Leaders

Progress for women has proven substantial yet uneven. More women have assumed leadership of large and influential companies (GM, IBM, Lockheed Martin as examples) and global institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the European Central Bank). Thirty-seven of the companies on the Fortune 500 list currently have female CEOs (a record high, though still a low number). More women have also been elected to high office around the world. Since 1946, 64 countries have had a female head of state or government, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women’s Power Index. As of May 2020, 19 countries were being led by a woman.

At the same time, many women in companies large and small continue to remain stuck just below the VP level. Moreover, in PwC’s 2019 Annual Corporate Directors Survey, only 38 percent of directors said that gender diversity is very important to their board. This was down from 46 percent the year before and was the lowest figure reported since 2014.

Diversity in leadership is good for business. For example, a Harvard Business School report on the male-dominated venture capital industry found that “the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance”. In fact, firms that increased their proportion of female partner hires by 10% saw, on average, a 1.5% spike in overall fund returns each year and had 9.7% more profitable exits.

The survival of the planet requires new thinking and strategies. We are in a pitched battle between the present array of resources and attitudes and the future struggling to be born. Women get it; young people get it. They are creating a whole different mindset.

Ultimately, the problems we face are not technological, but human – the human system is broken. People should always be appointed on merit and the electorate must decide, but more still needs to be done to give all women the best possible chance of rising to the top. If that happens, then I’ll be the first to say that who’s in charge doesn’t matter a lot.