Janet Yellen may soon become the first woman to lead the Treasury Department, about six years after shattering another glass ceiling at the top of the Federal Reserve.
She’s not alone in breaking down barriers in President-elect Joe Biden’s proposed new Cabinet. Michele Flournoy is the favorite to lead the Pentagon, while Biden named Avril Haines to be his director of national intelligence – if confirmed, they would be the first women in either of those positions. And that’s not to mention Kamala Harris, who on Jan. 20 will become the first woman vice president in U.S. history.
There’s often an expectation that busting these barriers – as women have been doing for many decades – will eventually lead to the kinds of systemic changes that will finally yield parity between men and women in leadership roles in government, the corporate world and beyond.
To understand these dynamics better, we analyzed the connections among the elites who govern many of the world’s most powerful companies and organizations. We wanted to see how many women and people of color had found their way to the center of these networks, which is a signal of how influential they are.
Our results show it’s still largely a boys club.
Despite notable achievements, such as at the International Monetary Fund, where both the present and previous heads have been women, the worlds of finance and business remain highly male-dominated.
Why are so few women breaking through?
We thought the answer might lie in looking at global elites. These leaders have power not only because they run organizations but because they often have many connections to other elites.
We examined the racial and gender diversity among the elite leaders who govern about 100 of the most powerful organizations and companies in the world based on global rankings and size.
For each organization, we focused on the individuals who sat on their governing boards. These are the folks who make an organization’s most important decisions. We assembled a list of about 1,600 people who were on these boards in 2018. We then analyzed their ties to one another in terms of belonging to the same boards across organizations.
In all, we found about 9,000 ties that connected these leaders, creating a massively complex global network. By adding up these ties, we were able to reveal a snapshot of how leaders relate to one another and which leaders were at the periphery of the network and which were at its center.
We found that women made up about 25% of leaders in the network – but only 6% were women of color. Men of color made up about 21%. The other leaders were all white men, who made up over half of those in the network.
What was most striking to us was how few women and people of color penetrated the highly interconnected inner circle. Just 15% were women and 10% were men of color. Very few were women of color.
It’s not enough for women and people of color to make it to leadership positions; they also need to be able to tap into the center of power networks to ensure the progress represented by Yellen, Harris and Biden’s other Cabinet picks continues. n
Kevin L. Young is an associate professor in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Tuggi Chuluun is Travelers Scholar and associate professor of finance at Loyola University Maryland. Distributed by The Associated Press.
