Where Are the Women?

For the fourth straight year, Harvard Business Review presents its list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs. And for the fourth straight year, there is a dispiriting absence of women. Our goal with the list is to measure CEOs on their long-term performance. Our formula looks at adjusted total shareholder return and increase in market capitalization over a chief executive’s entire tenure. We also factor in two separate ratings of corporate ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance, to ensure that we’re evaluating executives on more than just their companies’ share price. The results are in, and only two women made this year’s top 100: Debra Cafaro of Ventas and Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin. But the results aren’t an indication that women underperform men as executives; rather, they reflect the fact that there are simply too few women in global CEO roles. Among the 886 companies we studied to produce our list, just 28—or 3%—were led by female executives. Why are women so scarce at the top? Research suggests that some qualified women are essentially taking themselves out of the running (they aren’t “leaning in,” as Sheryl Sandberg would put it) to focus on other parts of their lives. But a bigger aspect, surely, is gender bias. Board members tend to hire white men for leadership roles, perhaps because they conform to a status quo perception that those candidates represent the “safer” choice. Some HBR readers have argued that the lack of women on our list shows that we’re measuring the wrong things in compiling our ranking. That argument may have some merit. But the list does reflect reality in the business world, which hasn’t evolved as rapidly as one might have expected. To change things, all of us need to question the biases that lead, repeatedly, to a men’s club at the top.

Where Are the Women?

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