New U.S. Women in Business Statistics Released by Catalyst

After reviewing these statistics a thoughtful person must conclude that either women are inadequate to the task of business leadership, or this is the result of bias – whether accidental or purposeful, it really doesn’t matter. I’m a physicist, and I look at the data to decide what is going on. This data tells me that the playing field for women is far from level. Research on selection of orchestra members, reported in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink”, demonstrated that equal numbers of women and men are selected when the judges don’t know whether the musicians playing are men or women. When they DO know, men are preferentially selected. Let’s not delude ourselves, women have a higher hill to climb than men to get to the top. That’s part of the reason women are starting their own businesses. No one can stop us from being the CEO of our own business! Stay Scrappy!

It seems the best way for women to get ahead is to start at the top. More and more women are starting their own companies, and succeeding. The business world may soon look like the college campus with more women than men running their own companies.

[...] that women are still hugely under-represented at the most senior levels of most organizations. A study released by Catalyst last year noted that only 2.2% of the Fortune 1000 have women CEOs.  That’s 22 out of 1000.  And [...]

[...] this is so, how come there are only 12 Fortune 500 companies run by women? This number makes up only 2.4 percent of our multi-trillion dollar industry [...]