Why only 2 women made this top CEO list
Skim Harvard Business Review’s list of “Best-Performing CEOs in the World” released this November, and you’ll notice most of the chief executives have one big thing in common — they’re men.
Of the 100 CEOs chosen, just two of them are women: Ventas (VTR) CEO Debra Cafaro and Marillyn Hewson, chief executive at Lockheed Martin (LMT).
“That’s a problem,” acknowledged Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief at Harvard Business Review, during a panel this week at the 2016 Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs, Calif., which was live streamed on Yahoo Finance. “All I can say is it tracks to the percentage of women who are in CEO roles. Then people criticize me that we must be doing the formula wrong. We take those criticisms, and then we think about it.”
The lack of gender diversity on Harvard Business Review’s list is unsurprising given the diversity issues faced in many industries, including tech. For example, the number of women in tech could fall from 24% today to 22% by 2025 if nothing is done to encourage more women to study computer science, according to research released this October from Accenture and Girls Who Code.
Indeed, just 18% of female students majored in computer science in 2014, down from 35% in 1985 — a downward trend that continues, White House CTO Megan Smith recently acknowledged in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
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