Gender diversity in the workplace is good for women and good for a company’s bottom line. In fact, companies with more women in top management have been found to outperform and deliver greater returns than companies without them.
Still, few women to make it to the corner office of most businesses.
A new report by Weber Shandwick found that the issue has nothing do with reputation. When it comes to a company having a strong reputation, the CEO’s gender makes no difference.
The report, “The Female CEO Reputation Premium? Differences & Similarities,” found that having a female CEO in no way hinders a company from developing and maintaining a strong reputation.
That’s largely because male and female CEOs share many of the same leadership traits, including being competitive, innovative, decisive, collaborative, honest, ethical, inspiring and motivating.
The report was part of a larger study on CEO reputations conducted online of more than 1,750 non-CEO executives in mid- to large-size companies in 19 countries. Globally, male executives represented 62% of the sample and female executives represented 38%.
Major differences between male and female CEOs are relatively few, the report found. The only characteristic that was significantly higher for male CEOs than female CEOs was leadership in having a specific vision for the company.
In general, male CEOs excel in areas such as crisis management, having a global business outlook and winning awards. Women, by contrast, are stronger in areas of being open and accessible and caring toward others.
Despite improvements in gender disparity, there are still a shortage of women in the C-Suite. In Fortune 1000 companies in the U.S., just 5% of CEOs are female. Globally, just 12% of businesses have women as their top executives, according to the Grant Thornton International Business Report survey.
Interestingly, many of the executives surveyed did not know about these statistics. When given the chance to estimate the percentage of large companies worldwide with women as CEOs, the average respondent said 23%. Notably, women overestimated to an even higher degree, saying 25% of companies are led by females.
So are women eager to shatter the glass ceiling? Not exactly.
Only 23% of the women surveyed said they wanted to be CEO one day yes, compared with one-third of the men. That number rose to 29% among women when the person worked for a female CEO, showing the importance of preparing the next generation of female leaders.
