Issue of the week: The disappearing female CEO

last updated 8 January 2015

The firing of two of the country’s few female executives last week highlights just “how little progress U.S. companies have made” in elevating women to top jobs, said Scott Malone in Reuters.com. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Silicon Valley’s most powerful woman, was unceremoniously fired over the phone, and Sallie Krawcheck, one of the top women on Wall Street, was pushed out of her job running wealth management at Bank of America. Regardless of the specifics of these two cases, it’s not hard to see “subtle forms of sexism” at play when women hold half of all white-collar jobs but lead just 3 percent of S&P 500 companies.

You could “practically set your watch” to the cries of sexism following Bartz’s firing by Yahoo, said Jeff Bercovici in Forbes.com. There were in fact good reasons for Yahoo to let the “polarizing’’ Bartz go: Yahoo’s “stock has been comatose” during her two-year tenure, and the company seemed to lack a clear strategy in an increasingly competitive digital world. Yet explanations for her abrupt dismissal focused on her “unusually sharp-tongued, sharp-elbowed” style and her “salty” language. (Shortly after her sacking, Bartz told Fortune that Yahoo’s board had “f---ed her over.”) It’s a simple fact that “there are a lot of male CEOs who are less than cuddly and don’t get dinged for it.” When men talk tough, it’s usually portrayed as a virtue. Both Bartz and Krawcheck have honestly said that “work-life balance” is virtually impossible for a woman who’s both a mother and “a hard-working executive,” said Rachel Emma Silverman in WSJ.com. So it was sad to see so many articles about Bartz’s firing point out that she has three children—“a fact that would rarely be mentioned if she were a man.”

Whether discrimination was at play in Krawcheck’s firing or not, her departure “is part of a broader trend,” said Nathaniel Popper in the Los Angeles Times. In the financial industry’s “boys-club environment,” women are “losing their jobs at a faster clip than men.” That means the already thinning ranks of females at the top are unlikely to be replenished by younger women climbing the corporate ladder. And that’s just “bad for business,” said Margie Warrell in Forbesâ€‹.com. Studies have shown that having women in decision-making roles “improves profitability.” But until women have more corporate role models and employers offer more flexibility in the tug-of-war between career and family, women will remain an endangered species in the nation’s executive suites.