Women experience a “gender tenure gap”, lasting in CEO roles at publicly listed companies for shorter periods than men, according to new research which may support the idea that female leaders are subject to a “glass cliff” where they are set up to fail.
Analysis of companies listed on 12 stock exchanges around the world, including the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250, shows that since 2018 women have lasted an average of 5.2 years as chief executives compared to 8.1 years for men.
Laura Sanderson, the UK head of Russell Reynolds, the executive search firm which conducted the research, said the tenure gap was explained partly because some men had been chief executives for decades, including one who had been in post for 39 years.
“While the sample size is too small to be significant, we also need to consider whether the data may support the glass cliff theory,” she said.
The concept of the glass cliff is that women are more likely to be appointed as leaders when an organisation is in a time of crisis, so that their position is seen as more precarious than male counterparts.
Researchers at the University of Exeter, Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam, found in 2005 that women were more likely to be appointed as board members after a company’s share price had performed badly.
Professor Ryan, who is now director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at the Australian National University in Canberra, told the Observer that the Russell Reynolds analysis was “robust and added to the body of work in this area”.
“If women are more likely to take on leadership roles in times of crisis, then it follows that their time is office is likely to be stressful, more heavily scrutinised and shorter in tenure,” she said.
“This reduced tenure could be for a number of reasons – because there is often higher turnover in times of crisis, because they are judged as not performing well, even though poor performance was in train before their appointment, or because when things start to turn around, men come back into leadership roles.”
Glass cliffs are not universal, she added, but further research has found evidence in other areas. For example, in 2010 researchers established that women standing for the Conservatives were more likely to contest seats held by other parties by a greater margin.
There are currently nine women who are chief executives of FTSE 100 companies. Denise Wilson, the chief executive of FTSE Women Leaders, which is seeking to increase the number of women on boards of companies in the FTSE 350 and 50 of the UK’s largest private companies, said that the gender tenure gap study was “an important piece of research”.
“From a UK perspective, we have made significant progress for women in almost every metric and measure,” she said. “But the CEO has been the stumbling block where we are struggling to make progress.”
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Chief executive roles have a very low turnover, she said, which makes progress harder.
“I think men can enjoy a greater followership – support within the organisation. They can suffer big setbacks and rise again. Women who have been CEOs tend to go off to an alternative career.
“People tend to line up very quickly under the boss, but when that person is no longer as secure as people thought, that can gather momentum.”
However, she said that there was cause for optimism. The number of women on FTSE 350 boards is now 41%, up from 9.5% in 2011, and appointing women is “now the norm”. Russell Reynolds also found in a survey of 1,500 leaders worldwide that there were no significant differences in how women and men were perceived by the people who worked for them, showing that they were equally effective as leaders, although women were seen as being better at coaching and development.
Sanderson said that more women had moved into CEO roles having been a non-executive director on the company’s board.
“It happens often with men,” she said. “It shows that getting more women on boards generally has been working in terms of also getting more women into the CEO succession. One of the things I say to clients is that if you can have a non-exec on your board who could be a potential successor, that’s just good succession planning.”
