“Chairman” is increasingly seen as an outdated job title, its popularity eclipsed by the gender-neutral “chair” or "chairperson."
Unfortunately, in practice, the old label is still almost always accurate.
Although women comprise 27% of board directors at Russell 3000 companies, only 7% of board chairs and 13% of lead directors are female, according to data from the latest Inside the Public Company Boardroom report by the National Association of Corporate Directors. Slip down a notch, and the figures are more encouraging: Women now lead 26% of audit, 25% of compensation, and 32% of governance committees, having made strong gains over the past few years.
A long history of gender discrimination in the boardroom partly explains why we’re seeing slow progress for women in the top jobs. Because fewer women have been appointed to boards in years past, even fewer women are seen as having enough experience to lead, says Cari Dominguez, chair of the NACD’s Center for Inclusive Governance and former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. There has also been less churn in the chair role since the pandemic began, while tenures have increased.
Still, unspoken rules and preferences about who makes an effective chair or lead director must be examined, says Dominguez, who has also served on several corporate boards and is a former assistant secretary of labor. In the latter role, she launched The Glass Ceiling Initiative in 1989. The groundbreaking work revealed men tend to get promoted because of their potential, whereas women are rewarded for their performance. The same dynamic plays out on boards, forcing women to prove themselves, says Dominguez. “It’s like, ‘Let's not move on to this board chairship yet. Let's see how she does,’” she explains. “With men, maybe because they're serving on each other's boards or because they go to the same associations of CEOs, there's greater familiarity.”
There are also fewer female CEOs, and boards have generally defaulted to choosing former chief executives as chairs or lead directors, limiting women’s movement, Dominguez adds. But forward-thinking boards ought to start looking at where a company is going—ask who’s ready to deal with technological change or a fast-growing diverse population—to find their next chair, rather than assume a former CEO is most qualified.
What’s more, Dominguez argues, succession planning at the board level needs to be rigorous; it should ensure that women and candidates from diverse backgrounds are being positioned to lead.
Tiffany Trzebiatowski, assistant professor of management at Colorado State University, who studies the experiences of women in male-dominated workplaces, also believes that boards should expand their definition of an ideal chair candidate. In the meantime, she finds that female directors often try to get around the unwritten requirement that chairs be CEOs by taking extra board training at a university or institute. “Some women in our sample loved those [programs] because it gave them extra knowledge about how to run board meetings effectively or participate in board meetings,” she explains. But others worry that women now face a gendered expectation that to ascend to a chairship, they must seek extra education. For men, that remains optional.
Could time alone help fix these inequities? The NACD reports that women comprised 41% of new director appointments in 2022 and 17% of outgoing board members. Perhaps as more women join and remain on boards, a larger share of women will finally become chairs and lead directors.
However, Trzebiatowski says it’s also possible that women are landing committee head roles instead of becoming chairs. At some companies, committee leadership assignments may not be stepping stones but tools for virtue signaling, particularly when corporate boards promote diverse candidates in response to social pressure rather than their own convictions.
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
@lilamaclellan
