Women are being left behind again in the race up the corporate ladder, said The Economist. Women today vastly outnumber men on university campuses, and “their representation among the highest-paying professions, including medicine and law, has nearly tripled in America since 1980.” However, even with “the most highly qualified cohort of women in human history,” the share of those leading American corporations dropped last year for the first time in 20 years. Last month, Marianne Lake, one of the leading candidates to replace JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, “was relegated,” leaving “an unusually pale and male lineup” for the top job at the country’s biggest bank. Beyond Wall Street, the gender pay gap is widening again “after consistently closing for years.” And women’s eagerness to lead—which surged following the release of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 call to action, Lean In—seems to have has plateaued. In 2023, 80% of men and women were “keen on a promotion”; that number has since risen to 90% for men but remained static for women.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Beth Kowitt in Bloomberg. “These stats paint a grim picture.” The question used to be “how many years would it take for women to attain the corner office in significant numbers.” Now the question is “whether corporate America even thinks it’s important to get them there at all.” We know where the Trump administration stands on this issue, said Tanzina Vega in The Boston Globe. It has led a “war on working women,” in part by firing and replacing Democratic officials on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), two agencies that ensure employers don’t discriminate against women in the workplace. New EEOC chair Andrea Lucas said the agency “aims to pursue more discrimination lawsuits”—from white men. Fearing repercussions if they don’t go along with Trump’s agenda, fewer than half of companies today say they are “prioritizing women’s advancement,” threatening to undo “many of the economic and workplace gains of the past 50 years.”
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