Corporate America's Empty Gender Promise
Is this a temporary blip or part of a broader and more sinister backlash against feminism?
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A few months ago I wrote about research showing that the proportion of women in the American c-suite fell last year for the first time in about a decade. I’ve been thinking a lot about this statistic. It is—of course—just one imperfect and crude metric by which to measure what’s going on with women in the economy. But I’d also argue that it’s an important one, and indicative of something bigger.
Companies have for years been touting their commitments to creating workplaces in which gender is not a barrier to success. Indeed, McKinsey’'s much-cited annual Women in the Workplace report recently showed that almost three quarters of HR leaders now say that DEI initiatives are critical to their companies' future success. Many of these leaders especially place an emphasis on gender balance at the very top. Power is concentrated at the highest echelons of corporations, so if change happens there, that can be a promising catalyst for change to happen elsewhere too.
But then there’s this research by S&P that was published in March that tells an entirely different story.
According to S&P’s findings, women last year held just 11.8% of the approximately 15,000 C-suite roles examined. That was a decrease from the 12.2% of those jobs a year earlier. In fact, the growth in women's representation among all senior leadership positions in the US dropped to the lowest rate in more than a decade in 2023. And across all c-Suite positions, women lost seats for the first time since S&P started collecting data in 2005.
Crucially, the analysis by S&P also found that executives at publicly traded firms spent less time talking about diversity and inclusion while on earnings calls with shareholders. In 2023 mentions of the topic fell to multi-year lows.
I’ve spent the last few months thinking about and reporting on this disconnect: why it’s happening and what we can do about—whether this is a blip or part of a broader and more sinister backlash against feminism. I’ve not come up with a definitive answer, but some of the theories I’ve stumbled across have been enlightening and somewhat difficult to stomach.
Michael Smets, a professor of management at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, told me that we may well be seeing the gender equivalent of “greenwashing”, which he characterizes as "getting stakeholders off your back by making bold public claims without necessarily walking the talk". He said that we might also be witnessing some "gender equity fatigue." Everyone knows that it’s really tough work implementing effective DEI initiatives. It’s not in any way comfortable. It requires addressing ugly, inconvenient things, like entrenched biases, stereotypes and ways of working. And because of this, some organizations might just be losing patience and focus.
Others, including Heejung Chung, a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Kent in the UK, told me that the dissonance could also be the result of the nature and dynamics of the labor market. Specifically, she explained, the extent to which women are struggling to climb up the ladder amid untenable return-to-work mandates. “This return back to the office work culture […] may have limited many women from reaching or taking up senior leadership roles,” she said.
What she’s alluding to here is that companies are publicly committing to achieving more gender diversity at the top, but the parameters of the working day and workplace mean that some women—and particularly women of color, as the research shows—feel they have no option other than to quit. As you probably guessed, this whittles down the pipeline of women candidates for the very top spots.
There's also evidence that DEI initiatives are frequently first on the chopping block when the economy is uncertain. One working paper based on data from LinkedIn found that "when labor conditions worsen, a smaller share of new hires into leadership are women."
And then there are some experts who I spoke to who did, as mentioned, take a more sinister view. Nicholas Pearce, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who focuses on DEI, said that what we’re dealing with here is an "escalating war on DEI", which is built on a "patently false yet increasingly widespread belief that DEI [initiatives] inherently discriminate against and disadvantage white males".
"Many organizations are reversing course on DEI to avoid becoming legal and political targets," he explained. "The short-run impact of this fear-motivated strategic shift is fewer women and persons of color being advanced into positions of corporate leadership."
All of these theories seem highly plausible. I can’t help thinking of how close we are to squandering the hard-fought progress from the past few decades. It’s a cliché, but this truly feels like an inflection point. More to come in the weeks and months ahead…
Really, BBC?
Elsewhere last week I wrote for The Persistent about the BBC’s decision to add Nick Kyrgios to its commentator roster for Wimbledon.
Here’s an excerpt:
Kyrgios, a 29-year old Australian, has been a mainstay of the top-tier tennis circuit since turning professional just over a decade ago. He made a name for himself beating the best men in the sport: Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. But what’s perhaps most remarkable about him has nothing to do with his victory record or serve speed.
Writing in the New Yorker in 2017, Louisa Thomas—perhaps somewhat charitably—described him as having an “unusually aggressive game.” The Guardian has labeled him “one of the most combustible characters in tennis.” Others have called him “mercurial,” “unsportsmanlike” and a “bad boy.”
Kyrgios has been fined tens of thousands of dollars for swearing and spitting during matches. In 2019, he was handed a suspended 16-week playing ban for “aggravated behavior” after verbally abusing officials and spectators.
Last year Kyrgios pleaded guilty to shoving his former girlfriend to the floor (but was spared a criminal record as the incident was deemed “a single act of stupidity or frustration.”) And in 2022, he was quoted in the online publication Tennis World as saying that he “low-key loves” Andrew Tate. (As a reminder, Tate, an online influencer, has made vitriolic misogyny integral to his personal brand. Since 2022, Tate and his brother Tristan have been battling human trafficking charges in Romania. In a separate case, Tate is facing allegations of “sexual aggression.”)
Kyrgios’s brushes with the law, impulsive eruptions, and his affection for one of social media’s most prominent bigots haven’t exactly created a headwind for his career. The message sent to the world is clear: Even today, bad behavior—violent outbursts, casual misogyny and acts of abuse—can be brushed off as inconvenient (and perhaps even funny) as long as it's perpetrated by the right person.
I argue in the piece that “glossing over Kyrgios’s track record is normalizing casual misogyny,” which is profoundly irresponsible and damaging at any time, but particularly at a time (like now) when violence against women is on the rise and, in some places, rampant already.
In Kyrgios’s home country of Australia, for example, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently declared that violence against women had become a “national crisis.” A woman is killed by a man every three days in the U.K., and one in four women in the U.K. will experience some form of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to the United Nations. In the U.S. the picture is similar: One in three women experiences sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner within their lifetimes.
Read the full piece and subscribe to The Persistent here. (And as you do, please also check out this brilliant interview that Emma Haslett conducted with journalist Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on why the way in which the mainstream media covers missing women is racist.)
WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Book
After several months of lots and lots of book related events, I’m into a bit of a quiet period.
Next week, I’ll be doing a few corporate events. I’ve not got any public events scheduled over the next few weeks but let me know if you think I should be talking at a specific event or conference!
In case you missed it, here’s an interview I recently did with CNBC about WOMEN MONEY POWER. And here’s a video of a recent fireside chat I did at the Groundbreaking Women Summit.
One nice thing that happened in May was that I won an Earphones Award for my audiobook narration of WOMEN MONEY POWER. Here’s what the judges wrote:
A business journalist combines flawless narration with intelligent writing to explain how cultural and institutional barriers have blocked U.S. women's access to financial independence and the power that comes with it. Josie Cox's mature-sounding performance and British accent add dignity to her careful research and writing.
You can read the full review here.
As ever, one final, shameless request. If you’ve read the book or listened to the audiobook, I would massively appreciate it if you could take just thirty seconds to post a review or rate it on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great, and you can leave a review or rating here. Thank you so much for your support!