Marissa Mayer is rich and famous ... but she's also another woman brought in to head a company with problems.
Hey, ladies! Interested in hearing about one more way you're screwed?
Let's say you are one of the teeny tiny fraction of women who becomes a big-time corporate executive, and then you are one of the teeny tiny fraction of those executives who's hired as the CEO of a major company. Yeah, you're still worse off compared to male CEOs:
... the percentage of women at the helm of the largest companies may be staying relatively flat in recent years because female CEOs are more likely to be fired than men. Over the past decade, 38 percent of women were forced out of the chief executive role, compared to just 27 percent of men, a finding that is statistically significant.
Part of the problem may stem from the way they’re brought in in the first place. Female CEOs are more likely to be “outsiders,” or hired from outside of the company — 35 percent of them, versus 22 percent of male CEOs. These outsiders may be brought in when things go sour. Companies who force out CEOs over the lowest returns to shareholders most often hire outsiders as replacements, the report found.
This is the phenomenon dubbed the “glass cliff”: women are brought into top management roles just as things get bad in order to clean up the mess.
There's evidence the same thing happens to non-white executives, too. So basically, if you're not a white dude, your chances of becoming CEO of a major company are vanishingly small
and when you do become CEO, it'll be because things are going so badly that fixing them quickly enough to avoid being fired is insanely difficult.
On the bright side, it goes without saying that for you, being fired will be a lot more financially comfortable than being employed at the minimum wage is for the millions of women in that situation.