This is a very interesting and telling graphic. However, a good amount of crisis conversation must also be donated to the notion that men continue in great numbers to avoid professions labeled 'women's work,' such as teaching.

A new system of gender relations and a more egalitarian form of sexual politics will not materialize until the limitations of both traditionally masculine and feminine professions are eradicated. It is just as feminist to say that more men should teach or become nurses as women should be corporate CEO's.

So something I wonder, what is the breakdown by industry. I would think that long standing established industries (or even just companies) would be slower to promote a woman to higher positions, where as a younger industry (theoretically with less established sexism) might be more likely.

Not sure if it's true or not, but just a thought.

I got a sort of "but what about the menz?" vibe from that article. Toward the second half, every statement about women was prefaced by "Of course underperformers should go!" It reminded me of all the discussions about how patriarchy hurts women that get derailed into discussions about how patriarchy hurts men. Yes, it does, but that's not what we're discussing right now. Here we had an article about how women are underrepresented in Wall Street getting derailed into the topic of how women can be bad workers, too. yes, they can, but that's not the topic at hand.

Why does the graph have 50.5% above 46.5%? And those levels aren't even vaguely proportionate.

Misleading graphs make Hulk mad!

Mad love for Jessica Wakeman! She spreads feminist fairydust where ever she goes. Since she went to Thestreet.com its become one of the few business sites that even acknowledges women, especially women investors. There's no coincidence there.

Can anyone explaion to me why women should hold a much greater percentage of corporate officer positions in fortune 500 companies? It only makes sense to me, what is the average tenure/experience of someone holding a corporate officer position in a fortune 500 company, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years? Anyone know? Id have to imagine it is 20 years or more for companies that size. If I roll back the clock 20 years, what percentage of people on the "track" for those positions were women? AI'd be willing to bet its a pretty small number. Of coure that was all due to discrimination and a ton of other horrible shit but that shit is changing and we can see it happening right before our eyes. Exactly how fast do we want to see 50/50? How fast is feasible? Where will the women come from with 20-30+ years of experience in the corporate world? We have made a ton of errors in our past and have a ton more work to do but again, in the end, these numbers just make sense to me.

I agree with Mance on that: Really terrible graph design.
I took the liberty of recreating that graph with correct proportions in a way that kind of makes sense.

Thank you for asking James. I used to think that way, too, and I was going to be the one to ask some of those questions if you had not done it first. But most important is "Of coure that was all due to discrimination . . . "

"Exactly how fast do we want to see 50/50?"

I have read some opinions (not here I guess) who expect near 50/50 everything now (like legislators) because that is how sexes are represented. It's not always that simple.

If women and men have comparable qualifications, and they are working in comparable numbers at comparable jobs (e.g., new guy in mailroom or female clerk =/= fresh out of college junior account executive or management trainee) and keep on the career track with an eye on the prize* (women and men who don't sacrifice too much for other priorities, like some of those 50% dads who have kneecapped their opportunities for advancement by putting their priority on family), then at most, it should be the average years of experience that those men in senior positions have, right? If it is 25-30, then that's an absolute upper limit. Differences would then be the result of some sort of connections, favoritism, or outright gender discrimination.

*You'd also need comparable numbers on track trying to be CEO, naturally. People satisfied as regional sales managers or retiring at 45 will throw the numbers off.

An interesting exercise is to break down where women show up in Wall Street type jobs.

For instance, I see a lot more women as analysts than as investment bankers, and a lot fewer women as traders than as operations people. There's a really interesting class/gender/race dynamic there, as operations -- which is the part where all the processing of trades gets done -- is skewed towards working class guys and women, whereas investment bankers are more ivy-league traditional types.

Trading and investment banking are "sexier" positions, in that they get you more money and into upper echelons faster because they are more visible.

Analysts, on the other hand, have to work at it a little more. As to the ops people.

Analysts also tend (I think) to be more open to people of differing backgrounds and the like. I am not sure why. But anecdotally when I look at a list of names and pictures it's a lot more diverse. Maybe because the job is a little more cerebral(?)

So, 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female. Fewer than 1% of auto mechanics are women, and I'd bet the same figures go for other skilled and unskilled blue collar jobs. That's where the real problem is. The 2/3 of women who don't have college degrees are locked into a narrow range of pink-collar jobs in the service sector.

The assumption is that women don't want those jobs. This is of course what people were saying about jobs in management and the professions a generation ago. There's ample evidence that if women could get those guy jobs, and knew they could, they'd go for them. During WWII when traditionally male factory jobs became available women went for them. Moreover, considering the wage gap, if you claim that women prefer pink-collar work you are claiming in effect that they are willing to pay thousands of dollars a year to avoid getting dirty or doing work that's physically taxing.

Sex segregation is almost complete at the low end of the job market. How many women have you seen recently driving tow trucks or repairing appliances, working as house painters, exterminators or mobile upholstery cleaners? Of course the educated upper middle class women who dominate the feminist movement don't worry about that because they can't imagine themselves, or their daughters, wanting those jobs to avoid pink-collar shit work. This completely ignores the reality for most women. We can't all be lawyers, managers of college professors. But the assumption seems to be that apart from the Good Jobs, all work is the same so sex segregation when it comes to Bad Jobs just doesn't matter.

"There's ample evidence that if women could get those guy jobs, and knew they could, they'd go for them."

I've yet to see that evidence.

I work as a project manager at a pharmaceutical firm, supervising capital construction projects. From my discussions with our contractors, I learned that they see very few women if any want who want to work in the construction trades. We're talking pipefitters, ironworkers, electricians, laborers, etc. The few women I do see on the jobsite do a great job, and I was told about one woman in her 50's who was an insulator and ran rings around some of the male workers.

But they're extremely rare, and personally I don't believe it's due to discrimination. Again, I'd love to see the evidence.

Anyway, I'll waste time worrying about gender distribution in the corporate boardroom as soon as I see 50/50 male/female sewer workers, garbage collectors, or any other job shown on Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" program.

Every year on the way home from church on Christmas Eve, it's usually dark, cold, and sleeting. And we'll pass by a city water department crew fixing a broken water main. At midnite on Christmas Eve. In the freezing rain. Do you know how cold water is in those conditions? And how many women do you suppose I see on those crews?

"Don't apply" isn't the same as "don't want." Women don't apply for those jobs because (1) it doesn't occur to them--it rarely occurs to anyone to do anything out of the ordinary--and (2) because if it does, they assume that they won't be considered for those jobs and will just feel like fools applying.

I've tried for guy jobs--dishwashing, and operating a sweeping machine to clean a factory floor. When I called about the sweeping job, the guy at the other end asked me if it was for myself. When I said it was he excused himself, there was a muffled conversation in the background, and then he got back on the phone and told me that the job was no longer available. When I applied for the dishwashing job, the guy said "this is no job for you, it's lifting heavy trays." When I said I was willing and able, he said, ok, leave me your name and number and I'll get back to you--which of course he didn't. Now, that was a while ago, and maybe things have changed. But, if so, most women don't know that they have. No one wants this kind of embarrassment.

That's anecdotal, but here's evidence. See Maureen Honey The Making of Rosie the Riveter. During WWII, before feminism, women in large numbers took male-identified factory jobs. It didn't take much persuading to get they to take on those jobs: there were just ads published in women's magazines and the like saying in effect that women were now being hired for these jobs, so women applied. This wasn't self-sacrificial patriotism. In a survey conducted by the Women's Bureau after the war over 80% of the women who'd done these Rosie the Riveter jobs, who were let go to make room for returning GIs, said that if they'd been allowed to keep those jobs, they would. There's other evidence I could cite, but this by itself seems pretty compelling.

Of course lots of these jobs are dirty, uncomfortable and strenuous. But traditional pink-collar jobs are miserable in their own way--typically they involve being confined to a small space, doing very repetitious tasks, or being exposed to the public. When it comes to misery, you choose the misery you can best tolerate, and that tolerance for different kinds of misery varies widely amongst women, as well as amongst men. Anyway, I think the evidence I cited is compelling. It isn't that guy jobs are some how better than traditionally female jobs--it's just that different people have different tastes. I for one can't imagine wanting to be a manager, or wanting to be a partner in a law firm, so I find it personally hard to get excited about the business of breaking glass ceilings. De gustibus.

"Of course the educated upper middle class women who dominate the feminist movement don't worry about that because they can't imagine themselves, or their daughters, wanting those jobs to avoid pink-collar shit work."

Let's not get into what "educated upper middle class" people consider "those" jobs or "shit work," or even if it is the title of the famous show, "dirty" jobs.

Please. It's honest work that puts food on people's tables. And many such people have NO choice, be it gender discrimination or otherwise. Also consider the other billions of humans who are not as privileged as you are.

I am going into MBA school this fall, and so am very interested in this graph.

At least I was until I read the comments. Thanks for derailing the actual topic! This is not about lower paying jobs in the blue collar sector, but about leadership roles in large corporations. Please don't derail a perfectly good conversation.

As for the executive level positions, I think the real divide is in education. When the top career tracks require a professional business degree, and when business schools have about 30% women in them on average, then it comes as no surprise that executive women hover at 15%.

I don't believe it's about what happened 15 or 20 years ago, because even in the 80s then there were women on the professional track to higher level jobs. It's that these women are weeded out systematically on every level like education, mommy-tracking, etc. Being comfortable with a managerial position over being the CEO is something that's expected of women, not men.

As attitudes gradually change regarding females working in male-dominated fields, you would have expected the penetration rate into the upper ranks to have changed by more.

I think its a combination of societal attitudes AND female choices. After all, females are 50% of all medical students now, yet make up less than 10% of engineering graduate students. Is engineering really taht much more discriminatory against women than medicine? I highly doubt it, which means that females are just generally more interested in pursuing medical studies over engineering. It doenst explain the ENTIRE discrepancy, but I think it explains a good amount of it.

You guys need to remember that medicine was the ultimate boys club, yet women have now successfully achieved a full 50% share--something that has not happened in engineering. I think to suggest that discrepancy is ENTIRELY made up of discrimination or societal attitudes about women in engineering is too simplistic.

But that's my point. These are unpleasant jobs. People who do them because they have to are admirable--working to make a living and support their families. It's honest work.

The goal however is to see to it that people have more choices.