Outsell’s Third Annual Gender Diversity Study: Flat-Lining
With barely a pulse, the heartbeat to improved gender diversity in our industry’s executive ranks is imperceptible. We expect companies to compete on gender diversity as the best talent decides to pick up and go elsewhere.
Important Details
Outsell recently completed our third annual gender diversity survey of the leading companies across the data, information, and analytics industry. This year’s results show that women now comprise 25% of C-suite / exec team positions, compared to 23% in 2018 and 22% in 2017. At this rate, it will take until approximately 2035 for women to comprise at least 40% of the industry’s top executive teams.
The status of gender diversity is even worse in the corner office: Female CEOs represent just 8.2% of the total across the industry. That’s less than half a percentage point up from 2018 (7.8%) and little more than a percentage point over 2017 (6.8%). At that rate of change, a half-century will pass before women comprise approximately one-third of our industry’s CEOs.
This year, we expanded our benchmarking efforts to include a view of our own clients. Interestingly, they fared better, with female executives accounting for 28% of client companies within this same sample and a full 14% being run by female CEOs. While we can’t prove causation, those reading this post likely work for companies that rate better than the industry average when it comes to gender diversity.
In a recent blog post, Outsell Co-founder & CEO Anthea Stratigos discussed how companies in the UK are increasingly being required to report pay metrics, and the data there looks equally grim. With a pay disparity appearing across gender lines for every company in the industry we examined in a recent UK data release, work remains to be done.
Dig a little deeper, and the significance of the differences in pay and executive diversity becomes even more apparent. Over 10% of the companies have no women on their executive teams, and some of the observed differences in pay were as high as 35%. Yet this isn’t the case for all. The industry does have companies with a healthy balance across their executive teams: 44 companies in our survey keep the balance between 40% and 60%, and 13 of those also have a female CEO. That’s nearly a third of the balanced companies and indicates clearly that change comes from the top.
In the United States, there is new legislation covering women board seats in California, and presidential candidates are advocating penalties for companies with pay disparity between the sexes. But the fact remains that progress is slow.
Why This Matters
Promoting gender diversity isn’t just the right thing to do from an ethical perspective: It is the wise thing to do for a company’s bottom line. With unemployment at nearly historic lows across the US and much of Europe, excluding any candidate for a position based on any criteria other than ability and cultural fit is unwise.
We repeatedly hear of individuals who leave companies when they look up through the glass ceiling and see a slate of officers that look nothing like them. Actions speak louder than words, and when folks see that those above them are not like them, the logical conclusion is that their career progress doesn’t matter or that few care. They will do what any self-respecting individual would: walk. They choose a different place where they feel their career prospects are better.
In this period of very low employment, talent is the lament of almost every CEO we speak with. It’s essential to put momentum into D&I programs and to make a difference in meaningful ways.
As more and more data reaches the public realm, it’s a fair bet to expect that women (and some men) entering and moving within the workforce will pay attention to a company’s performance along these lines. With all else “equal,” a newly minted female graduate will certainly take an offer where she sees a clearer path to growth.
Here at Outsell, we intend to do our part by continuing to expose this data every year. Two of our other blog posts show the companies with the best and worstdiversity metrics in 2018. Join us at the Outsell Women’s Conference to see this year’s list of winners — and those who have work to do. We will keep ranking and measuring and shedding light on the stats, given our belief that what gets measured, gets managed.
It is not just data alone that will solve this problem, though. Women need mentors on their journeys to the executive suite, and that’s a big driver in our organizing the second annual Outsell Women’s Conference. These mentors don’t always need to be other women: Companies that are predominantly led by men today will only transition if they focus on change from within. The time to act is now — before one’s competitors start effortlessly securing half of all the best talent for themselves, or women leave to start their own companies and drop out of corporate to play by rules they can establish and live by. With men having 92% of our industry’s top CEO positions, they are the solution. Otherwise, the dearth of talent will be a gap that only widens, and no CEO we know can afford that. It’s time to kick things up a notch.