Center for American Progress
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Using new data, this fact sheet update shows that women make up a majority of the U.S. population, but they lag substantially behind men when it comes to their representation in leadership positions.
Women make up a majority of the U.S. population
Women are 50.8 percent of the U.S. population.
They earn almost 60 percent of undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of all master’s degrees.
They earn 47 percent of all law degrees and 48 percent of all medical degrees.
They earn more than 38 percent of master’s degrees in business and management, including 36 percent of MBAs, and 47 percent of specialized master’s degrees.
They account for 47 percent of the U.S. labor force and 49 percent of the college-educated workforce.
And yet…
Although they hold almost 52 percent of all professional-level jobs, American women lag substantially behind men when it comes to their representation in leadership positions.
While they are 45 percent of the overall S&P 500 labor force and 37 percent of first or mid-level officials and managers in those companies, they are only 25 percent of executive- and senior-level officials and managers, hold only 19 percent of board seats, and are only 4.6 percent of CEOs.
At S&P 500 companies in the financial services industry, they make up 54 percent of the labor force but are only 19 percent of board directors and 2 percent of CEOs.
In the legal field, they are 45 percent of associates but only 20 percent of partners and 17 percent of equity partners.
In medicine, they comprise 35.5 percent of all physicians and surgeons11 but only 16 percent of permanent medical school deans.
In academia, they are only 30 percent of full professors and 26 percent of college presidents.
They are only 6 percent of partners in venture capital firms—down from 10 percent in 1999.
In 2014, their representation in technology jobs at nine major Silicon Valley companies ranged from a low of 10 percent at Twitter to a high of 27 percent at Intuit. As recently as spring 2014, nearly 47 percent of the 150 highest-earning public companies in Silicon Valley had no female executive officers at all.
Women of color face an even wider gap
The representation of women of color in corporate leadership roles is worse still. Women of color were 38 percent of the nation’s female population and 19 percent of the entire U.S. population in 2014. In 2013, they made up 36 percent of the female labor force and 17 percent of the total labor force and are currently 16.5 percent of workers in S&P 500 companies.
And yet…
Women of color are only 3.9 percent of executive- or senior-level officials and managers in those companies.
Women of color hold only 3.1 percent of the board seats of Fortune 500 companies—a number that exaggerates their actual presence, as fully one-quarter of the board members who are women of color serve on multiple boards.
As recently as 2013, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies had no women of color as board directors at all.
Access the full fact sheet here.
NOTE: This fact sheet is an updated version of “The Women’s Leadership Gap,” published on March 7, 2014. In the intervening period, Catalyst—the source of most of the data on women’s representation on boards and in executive positions in the United States—began to chart women’s representation in Standard&Poor’s 500 companies rather than Fortune 500 companies. Readers should be aware of this shift when comparing the statistics here to those reported last year.
