50 Women CEOs Now… and Counting?
Back in 1972, Katharine Graham became the first female CEO at a Fortune 500 firm when she took over The Washington Post. As recently as 2017, there were only 32 women running the nation’s biggest firms.
On January 1, five more women became CEOs, bringing the number of female top bosses to 53. As of this month—more than fifty years after Graham’s ascent—women run at least 10% of the country’s biggest firms. Experts say the milestone is worth celebrating, but not an end point. “Women as CEOs isn’t an oddity anymore. But their numbers need to be at least doubled,” says Jane Stevenson, global leader of Korn Ferry’s CEO Succession practice.
Experts say a confluence of factors over the last couple of years has helped push the number above 10%. For one, there are considerably more women on boards than there were just five years ago. Women now hold 28% of the corporate board seats at the country’s 3,000 largest publicly traded companies, up from 18% in 2018. “Women on boards have a visual line of sight to high-potential women in the pipeline,” Stevenson says.