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Category: women

Happy International Women’s Day!

womens-day

 

Did you know that 24% of senior management roles globally are filled by women, but the G7 group of nations, which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, reached only 21%? A new Catalyst report called Women in the World, published today showed that:

  • There are, however, bright spots where positive movement is evident:  Developing markets sometimes had much higher levels of women in senior management roles, including in Brazil, India, Russia, and China (BRIC economies at 28%), Southeast Asia (32%) and the Baltic states (40%).
  • The annual per capita growth of countries that did not close gender education gaps were held back by almost 1% a year.
  •  In 89% of the country economies (127 out of 143) researched it is legal for a potential employer to ask about family status during a job interview, potentially limiting women’s employment opportunities if employers refuse to hire mothers or women who might become mothers.
  • In 15 of the economies husbands can prevent their wives from accepting jobs.
  • The world’s population is aging e.g. people over 60 years old will constitute 21% of the world’s population by 2050.
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Progress for GM, None for Fortune 500

1958 general motors firebird iii

This morning, I was delighted to read that General Motors would be gaining a new CEO, it’s first woman. But yesterday, the diversity research group Catalyst published the results of its annual census that showed that Fortune 500 companies were making no progress over the last few years in terms of gender diversity.

A couple of its greatest findings were:

Women held only 16.9% of corporate board seats in 2013, indicating no significant year-over-year uptick for the 8th straight year. And only 14.6% of Executive Officer positions were held by women—the 4th consecutive year of no year-over-year growth. 

The auto industry needed a facelift, anyway, although some at GM say that her appointment was not meant to explicitly make a statement about diversity or women.

I say that this appointment could signal a trend in male-dominated industries to promote women to the top, but I may just be overly optimistic.

Or maybe I’m on to something. There might be a structural buoy within GM that retains and rewards high-performing female employees. In the NY Times article that read this morning, the reporters make reference to a few other high-ranking female executives at GM. This car company makes gender diversity at the highest levels the norm, not the exception.

(photo via Brian Shorey)

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