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Is the lot of female executives improving?

Our glass-ceiling index shows some progress in some places. But not enough

WALL STREET’S glass ceiling cracked at last on March 1st, as Jane Fraser took charge of
Citigroup, becoming the first woman to head a big American bank. That cracking sound
has also been echoing across the rest of America Inc. Last year Carol Tomé became boss
of UPS, a package-delivery giant. In January Rosalind Brewer became only the third
black woman ever to run a Fortune 500 company (Walgreens Boots Alliance, a pharmacy
chain). A month later Thasunda Brown Duckett was picked to run TIAA, a big pension
fund.

Yet despite progress for women in the workplace, America still has a long way to go
according to The Economist’s latest glass-ceiling index, which ranks conditions for
working women across 29 countries. As usual, Nordic countries performed best overall
in our ranking, with Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway taking the top four spots. At
the bottom is South Korea, which scored just 25 out of 100 on our index, less than half
the average for the OECD club of industrialised countries.

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America received poor marks on parental leave and political representation. But it has a
high share of women in management (41%) and on company boards (28%). In both
cases America outpaces egalitarian Germany, which in January enacted a quota for
female board members (and where the shares for management and board​rooms are
29% and 25%, respectively).

On average, just one in three managerial positions across the OECD’s 37 members is
occupied by a woman. A recent study by SIA Partners, a consultancy, found that in
Britain bias against women in senior corporate hiring remains systemic, with job ads
for high-ranking positions using more “masculine” words that make them less
appealing to women.

At least signs of progress can be seen even in traditional laggards like Japan. Mori
Yoshiro had to resign as chief of the Tokyo Olympics in February after he complained
that women talked too much in meetings. A woman replaced him.
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