Meritocracy myth? America's severely under-represented women in C-suite jobs should raise eyebrows

What concerns me even more is that the number, while tied with last year’s record, did not move an inch. If corporate America was the meritocracy that everybody claims to want, women—who make up about half the labour force and earn most college degrees—would not remain so dramatically and stubbornly underrepresented in its most important role.

Taken alone, you could argue the stagnation is just a blip and not a broader sign that the hard-fought gains for women in business are stalling. That does not appear to be what is happening. When you look at other gauges of progress, it becomes clear that in many cases we are seeing not just a flatlining but a full-on backslide: For the second year in a row, the gender pay gap has widened—the first consecutive increase in the gap since the 1960s.

In the boardroom last year, Caucasian men made up the majority of new directors at S&P 500 companies for the first time since 2017; women took on about a third of new seats, down from a high of 44% in 2022. The decline in non-Caucasian directors was even steeper, dropping 24 percentage points in four years to 20%. The employment rate for African-American women is experiencing one of its steepest declines in the last 25 years.

For at least a decade now, women have been underrepresented at every level of the corporate ladder, especially the most senior roles where they made up just 29% of C-suite jobs.

The ambition gap between men and women is the largest in the 11-year history of McKinsey and women’s advocacy non-profit Lean In’s annual survey on the state of female white-collar workers. Researchers found a six-percentage point spread between female and male workers who say they want to be promoted.

I am not going to sugarcoat it. These statistics paint a grim picture. And there is no single factor that has led to the declines that can magically be reversed and make everything better. Rather, they are the consequences of a web of cultural, political and policy shifts.

It is the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes propelled and inspired by the Trump administration and anti-woke activists. It is the curtailing of flexible works arrangements—the kinds that research has shown in some cases did more to diversify corporate American than many formal DEI programs. It is demanding workers return to the office five days a week and give more hours. It is scaling back or cutting paid leave. It is calling for more “masculine energy” in the workplace.

It is not as though 2008 was a real moment of advancement for women in business either. But back then, CEOs would at least say out loud that the dearth of women in leadership was a problem—even if they did not plan to do anything about it. Now, the message coming from the top is that these declines in progress do not really matter all that much.

The big bosses are saying it explicitly when one out of five companies admits they place little or no priority on women’s career advancement—a figure that jumps to about 30% when it comes to women of colour. And they are saying it implicitly in the kind of statistics they track: the share of S&P 500 companies disclosing data on women in management dropped last year by 16%, while those reporting the overall share of women in their workforces fell 14%.

When I started tracking female CEOs almost 20 years ago, the question for me was always how many years would it take for women to attain the corner office in significant numbers.

Today, the more pressing issue may be whether corporate America even thinks it is important to get them there at all. Amid this landscape, targeting 100 years may be overly ambitious. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America.