How Female CEOs Are Like Shark Attacks

Emily Peck of HuffPo points out that, like shark attacks, female CEOs are rare but so well covered by the media that people tend to think they are much more common than they are.

Executives vastly overestimated the number of women who are chief executive officers in a recent survey of 1,700 C-suite leaders around the world. The media relations firm Weber Shandwick worked with KRC Research to conduct the study, which did not survey CEOs themselves.

On average, respondents guessed that 23 percent of large companies around the world have female leaders. Women executives were even more misinformed — guessing that 25 percent had female CEOs, on average.

Everyone was so far off the mark, you kind of wonder how these people even got promoted in the first place. There are only 23 female CEOs of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies — not even 5 percent.

Peck is being slightly disingenuous here. When you factor in all companies, not merely the biggest ones, the number of US companies headed by women rises to 27%, according to the University of Washington. Still, maybe female CEOs need their own equivalent of Shark Week? Raising awareness, generating excitement? Because the situation right now is grim:

There are so few women CEOs that if you do a Google image search for “CEO,” the first woman to pop up is CEO Barbie, a fictitious doll that The Onion invented in its article “CEO Barbie Criticized For Promoting Unrealistic Career Images.”

T.C. Sottek on the Verge originally pointed that out a few months ago; he tried that Google image search and declared, “I haven’t seen this many white men in suits since the last time I was in church.”

Via The Verge

There’s CEO Barbie, all the way down in the bottom corner! And remember, that’s not a real Mattel doll; that’s Onion satire.

Here’s Peck again:

Executives were also pretty optimistic about the future for women CEOs. In 10 years, survey respondents said that they expect that 30 percent of companies will be run by women.

Yet a girl born today will be 81 years old before she has the same chance as a man to be a CEO, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, said in March.

If that’s not depressing enough, read the comments:

Thanks, men. As always, we value your contributions to the discourse.

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