Marissa Mayer is not representative and not a trend.
Women make up a pitifully low percentage of board members and top executives at Fortune 500 companies. But that's not the only problem. Equally disturbing is that
things just aren't getting better:
- 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.
- Women of color continued to fare particularly poorly, holding just 3.2% of all board seats.
- 10% of companies had no women serving on their boards; more than 2/3 of companies had no women of color directors.
- Women held only 8.1% of top earner slots—again no change from prior year.
A few high-profile CEOs like Yahoo's Marissa Mayer or incoming GM CEO Mary Barra do not equality make. And while of course the United States government is not going to do anything to encourage equality (or anything else corporations don't want to do), as other countries have done, you might think that if this wasn't actively, intentionally discriminatory, things might change a little faster.
After all, as Bryce Covert points out:
Increasing gender diversity doesn’t just guarantee more equality for women in the workplace. It is also a smart business move. Multiple studies have shown that having more women on boards leads to better value and performance.
But even stock prices and the like, usually cited as the ultimate goal of every corporation over any other possible value, aren't enough to budge these numbers.