Female Business Leadership: Stats Around the World

The Wall Street Journal recently released an article stating the number of women in the United States as of December 2019, making women the majority of the workforce.  The article credited much of this shift to the growth of service industries such as healthcare, where females are employed in higher numbers.

While in the workforce in general women have the majority, the proportion of women in the workforce varies drastically by field as well as the level of leadership.  For example, women hold only a small fraction of leadership roles in the business field.

Of the Fortune Global 500 companies, .  That’s 2.8%.  However, female leadership varies by country.  For example, in Norway, women make up .  In Portugal, female .  In India and Australia, female board membership is at respectively.  Furthermore, female leadership varies by region in general, with females making up in Asia and Australia, and in Europe and the Americas.  The one commonality in all of these statistics is the percentage of women in leadership positions is smaller than the percentage of women in the business field in general.

Globally, the perception of the percent of women in business leadership positions varies greatly, but the number is .  For example, when people in 15 countries were asked the question “” respondents in each country overestimated in their answers.  In Mexico, the percentage guessed was  and in Turkey, .  Australian and South Korean respondents were slightly closer, with guesses at and , respectively.  The actual number, as stated earlier, is just .

Women face several obstacles when vying for leadership roles in business, such as the towards men, who people are used to seeing “at the top.”  Other obstacles include of women in the home as mothers and wives and a. Furthermore, women tend to underestimate their performance and therefore are for (while men tend to apply when they ).

There are a multitude of reasons to try to turn these stats around.  To put it simply, companies tend to perform better when women are involved in leadership and decision-making.  and women have .  Additionally, . The stats show that while women have a ways to go in finding representation in business leadership, closing this gap pays off.