Corporate North Americas Shame

 

In the year 2000 all but 2 of the Fortune 500 companies were headed by men.  Fast forward to 2021 and that number is now 41. We are only 209 short of parity!

At this rate, growth of about 2 per year, the Fortune 500 should reach gender equality by the year 2125…just a mere 105 years from now.

Sorry but I don’t have time for this nonsense to continue.  It’s not as if men have some superior ability to manoeuver companies through difficult times.  Hell, they often fail during good times.

Steve Easterbrook of McDonald’s was fired because of personal, not professional incompetence.  He was caught showing off his Big Mac to too many women in the company.

Dennis Muilenburg of Boeing decided it was more important to sell airplanes than to be certain that they could fly.

The CEO of a company named ‘Better’ fired 900 employees in early December on a Zoom call. Mr. Garg is now taking time off as the company ‘…performs a leadership and cultural assessment…’  They might want to consider a new name as well!

A PWC study (released in 2018) of 2500 companies around the world showed that the average tenure of a CEO was about 5 years.  That suggests that even if the rate of the Fortune 500 was double that average, there should be 50 positions becoming available every year. 

Why women are not placed in at least half of these suggests three things.

1.     Companies are doing an insufficient and ineffective mentoring process to identify and groom women in their succession planning processes.

2.     Boards of Directors are not moving away fast enough from the ‘old boy’s network’ for filling top positions. These Boards need to be replaced themselves.

3.     Search firms are not fulfilling their responsibilities by seeking out and recommending qualified women for these roles.  To rephrase a statement by G. K. Chesterton ‘…it’s not that female leadership has been tried and found wanting; rather, it has been perceived as threatening and therefore left untried…’  Search firms must become leaders and not followers in these matters or risk becoming as irrelevant as the Boards they purport to serve.

Institutional investors must likewise demand more diversity, for women and other visible minorities.  Activist firms have long demanded changes at the senior level when it suits their purposes.  There is simply no longer any valid excuse for making experience at a urinal a prerequisite for the corner office. 

My fear is that without a serious and concerted effort to demand changes, even the so called gains of the past 20 years will begin to erode.  There is clearly a movement against women’s and minority rights in the US.  Whether it is related to abortion or voting rights, historical rights are being overturned.  This cannot bode well for the expectation of fair treatment in Corporate America as companies fall in line with the rhetoric against these under-represented groups.

All companies in the Fortune 500 should have an equal number of male and female candidates in their succession plan.  I would also urge smaller companies to make similar efforts as effective leadership is becoming an increasingly critical component of future success. 

Denying yourself the consideration of and access to over half the population is about as intelligent as trying to catch a falling knife.  It only results in self-inflicted wounds.