“Why Are There Still So Few Women CEOs?” asks a recent headline in the Financial Times.”* Good question, for the numbers remain sobering though not surprising. In 2021 among the United Kingdom’s 100 largest (most highly capitalized) companies were 8 female CEOs. By 2025 this number had increased – to 9.
The reasons given for the paucity of women at the top were drearily familiar. They included failure of the executive pipeline, lack of sufficient relevant experience, bias against women, and lack of mentors. Add to this the backpedaling on diversity – which in the US is now rampant – and the likelihood of the numbers of women leaders significantly increasing is, for the indefinite future, low. Very low.
Those familiar with my work know that on this topic I long since concluded that the elephant in the room is the physical, and psychological, difference. The physical and psychological difference between the bodies of women and the bodies of men. (Below are links to some of my writings on this subject.) Yet for all the handwringing on the lack of women leaders, this difference, these differences, are nearly never addressed.
Ironically, there is another recent headline, this one also in a British publication, that directly pertains. It is titled, “Pregnant Women’s Brains Shed Grey Matter to Prime them for Motherhood.”** Suffice it here to note that the evidence that “pregnancy has a profound structural impact on brains…of mums-to-be” is increasing. So, why exactly is it that brain changes in women during and for some time after pregnancy are presumed irrelevant to the issue of women and leadership? Whatever the reasons, they escape me.
On this issue it does not help to continue to make believe year after year, decade after decade. To continue to make believe that the differences between women’s bodies and men’s bodies either do not exist or that they do not pertain.
Guess what though. Men will never raise the issue of menstruation, or of fertility, or of pregnancy, or of breast feeding, or of menopause. So, women must. For unless they do, nothing will change and they will stay stuck. They, we, will continue to be precluded from climbing to the top of the greasy pole in numbers meaningfully greater than what they, we, are now.
*https://www.ft.com/content/57ceb556-681f-471b-9f13-28fcdfd65193