Women are spinning their wheels when it comes to equality in leadership positions

Women are spinning their wheels when it comes to equality in leadership positions

by digby

This is why I'm still very doubtful that we'll see a woman president in my lifetime:

The research organization Catalyst released its 2012 Census today, which tracks the number of women in executive officer and board director positions. Women held just over 14 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies this year and 16.6 percent of board seats at the same. Adding insult to injury, an even smaller percent of those female executive officers are counted among the highest earners—less than 8 percent of the top earner positions were held by women. Meanwhile, a full quarter of these companies simply had no women executive officers at all and one-tenth had no women directors on their boards.

But as in the Senate, progress may be slow and even small percentages can be victories. Did this year represent a step forward? Not even close. Women’s share of these positions went up by a mere half of a percentage point or less last year. Even worse, 2012 was the seventh consecutive year in which we haven’t seen any growth in board seats and the third year of stagnation in the C-suite. Meanwhile, women may hold the majority of the jobs in growing sectors such as retail, healthcare and food service, but of the executive officers in those industries they represent less than 18 percent, under 16 percent and just 15.5 percent, respectively.

I'd be happy to be wrong about this, but when you look at those statistics, I think it's clear that this country is a long way from gender equality in any sense but particularly when it comes to seeing us in leadership roles.

And while the boomlet for Hillary Clinton seems to be all the vogue at the moment, experience tells me that the usual sexist crapola would begin immediately upon her announcement to run. And anyway, I still believe that for Nixon-goes-to-China reasons, the first woman president will have to be a Republican. That would be the only situation in which the Republicans wouldn't let their misogynist freak flags fly and they'd police their opponents so hard with their phony, situational feminism, the lefty sexists couldn't get any traction.

Perhaps I'm too cynical. But let's just say that the fact we've recently held a big victory party because women will now make up all of 1/5th of the government in 2013, doesn't speak well for our alleged progress. (You'd think 92 years of universal suffrage would have been long enough for such an exceptional country as ours to have evened things out a bit better than that.) Those statistics above bear this out and it's clearly no longer because women haven't been in the workplace long enough to work their way up to the top. There have been a couple of generations now of women with the education, experience and ambition and it's still not happening. It's not even growing.


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