The long road to gender parity in senior leadership positions

The effort in pursuing a more gender equal society must be collective and undertaken in many domains. A number of countries are now adopting targets in an attempt to improve representation among directors of listed companies, one such example is the 2022 European Parliament “Women on Boards”’ directive, which addresses the need for transparency in the hiring procedures of listed companies, and sets a goal of attributing at least 40% of non-executive director posts (or 33% of all director posts) to women, but took over a decade to conclude and has an implementation target of June 2026. Furthermore, if the rate of progress found by MSCI in recent years continues it will take over a decade to achieve this target globally.

The OECD and the UN Statistics Division recently launched the Multinational Enterprise Information Platform (MEIP), a multipurpose platform filling an informational gap on the largest 500 global companies. The platform includes multiple unique identifiers for each MNE, which users can match with other data sources. When paired with data from the commercial database Orbis, which details information on senior leadership, it is possible to create indicators on the progress individual MNEs are making on gender diversity. The resulting dataset allows for breakdowns by industry, country of incorporation, age and position.

The average firm within the OECD-UNSD Multinational Enterprise Information Platform has 24.9% of senior leadership roles held by women, which, albeit below the desired threshold, represents an improvement from previous years.

Looking at industries, as classified by the Refinitiv Business Classification (TRBC) system, the highest share of women is in the healthcare (29.7%). Of note, there is a persistent under-representation of women in the energy industry (18.5%), the lowest across all industries covered, an industry historically male-dominated as also detailed in the IEA gender employment gap.

Focussing on countries, Australia, France, the United Kingdom and Canada all show a share of women in senior leadership roles of above 30%. However, rates are far lower in India (14.2%), China (11.7%) and Japan (9.5%). Seven companies within the sample also have no women in senior leadership positions, with those companies in China (4), Japan (1), the United Arab Emirates (1) and Saudi Arabia (1).

Whilst the average share of women lies at 24.9%, as the seniority of the role increases participation rates tend to drop. This is clear in particular for prominent roles such as President and Vice-President roles within the Board of Directors where the rate plummets to 9.3%, showing that there is an additional glass ceiling to access the more prominent leadership roles.

The figure below shows the share of roles held by women by decade of birth. Whilst there is a persistent under-representativeness of women across all decade cohorts, those born more recently are seeing a picture which is closer to parity. For example, 34.5% of those holding a board role born in the 90s are women, whereas this reduces to 21.6% for those born in the 50s. Although, a portion of this trend could also be explained by the “motherhood penalty”, when career advancements differ when women start having children.

The data-driven insights provided by MEIP combined with board member data from Orbis reveal that further steps are still necessary to achieve gender parity within some of the largest companies. Not one single industry or country on aggregate has exceeded a representation of above 40%, with the more senior roles being even less diverse. There are signs of improvement within younger cohorts, and with time as these cohorts make up a larger share of senior leadership positions the representation of women will increase – however even the 90s cohort has an aggregate representation below 40% showing more action is necessary.