Margot McShane and Hetty Pye are Co-Leaders of the firm’s Board & CEO Advisory Partners at Russell Reynolds Associates. This post is based on a Russell Reynolds memorandum by Ms. McShane, Ms. Pye, Tom Handcock, and Leah Christenson.
In March of 2024, S&P Global published an alarming report: for the first time in two decades, C-suite women lost seats in the S&P Total Market Index. In 2022, women held 12.2% of the ~15,000 C-suite positions across publicly traded U.S. firms. However, this regressed to just 11.8% by the end of 2023.
While the report offers an overview of C-suite gender diversity, it does not examine women’s representation within specific leadership roles. Understanding these nuances is key to moving past gender diversity generalizations toward a more substantive analysis of those with power and influence. Those listed as an organization’s top team provide a clearer indicator of where power truly resides within a company’s structure and hierarchy.
To better understand how women’s representation is changing within specific leadership roles across America’s largest public organizations, Russell Reynolds Associates analyzed the C-suites of the top 100 companies in the S&P 500 (referred to as the S&P 100 in this report). We learned that:
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