This Barbie Wants to be in the C-Suite: Continued Gender Disparity in Executive Positions

In the 2023 box-office hit movie Barbie, one key scene shows the film’s namesake and her beloved sidekick Ken exploring the human world, which they find to be highly different from their own “Barbieland” (Gerwig, 2023). For one thing, the real world seems to be run by men: Ken is awed by the power of the “patriarchy” as he discovers that men hold all of the top positions. The film even includes some tongue-in-cheek humor as it depicts Mattel’s board of directors as being entirely composed of men despite their clamoring that the company is “literally made of women” (Gerwig, 2023). Of course, Barbie has received backlash from many right-wing commentators describing it as “woke” or “anti-man” (Placido, 2023). One critic mocked the film’s portrayal of the real world by noting that, in reality, Mattel’s board of directors comprises six men and five women (sarcastically implying that “clear patriarchal domination” in the workplace is fictitious) (Shapiro, 2023).

While Barbie’s portrayal of gender disparity in top executive positions may be a facetious exaggeration, the dismissal of this issue as a nonexistent problem is empirically unsupported. Economist Marianne Bertrand describes the “glass ceiling” as the phenomenon of women remaining underrepresented in higher sections of the earnings distribution, particularly in sectors like business and finance (Bertrand, 2018). A study conducted in 2020 found that the average share of female executives over the past quarter century was just 6.2%, which grew to 10% by 2017 (the end of the sample period) (Keller et al., 2020). The sample in question contained 240,000 observations spanning 26 years and examined about 3,500 firms and 45,000 executives. The study also found that the share of women typically fell as the job in question became more prestigious, with women making up an average of only 2.7% of the chief executive officers (CEOs) in the sample (Keller et al., 2020). More recent studies have found encouraging evidence that female representation in the C-suite (i.e. executive-level positions such as CEO, chief financial officer, or chief operating officer) has risen to 28% since 2015 (Field et al., 2023). In addition, the 2023 Fortune report listed 10% of the 500 largest companies in the United States as being led by women, the highest percentage in the list’s 68-year history (Hinchliffe, 2023). Despite this positive progress, it is undeniable that gender disparity in corporate leadership positions still pervades businesses to this day.

As Bertrand notes, discussion of the glass ceiling typically frames the problem as solely dependent upon biased or unfair treatment of women in the workforce, but the problem is much more complex. In their book Good Economics for Hard Times, Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo describe the sociological phenomenon of “homophily,” which can be summarized as the fact that people generally tend to associate with others like themselves (Banerjee & Duflo, 2020). The authors note that this tendency need not be evidence of intense prejudice but of a mild preference for people to build connections with those who share their tendencies and experiences. Homophily has been used to explain gender bias in firm-to-firm transactions: A 2023 study found that firms run by CEOs of the same gender were more likely to trade with each other compared to CEOs of the opposite gender, creating a barrier for minority female executives to engage in business networks and grow their firm performance (Izumi et al., 2023). However, as Banerjee and Duflo note, this tendency does not necessarily indicate targeted bias against women on the part of male CEOs. This homophily could easily arise from social barriers that impede CEOs of the opposite gender from connecting, such as the long-established “old boys’ club” that allows men to network over smoking or golf — practices that unfortunately tend to exclude their female counterparts (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2019). The problem is not as simple as intentional misogynistic tendencies: It reflects several deep-rooted social assumptions that have yet to be fully shifted.

Many studies have attempted to more closely examine other potential causal factors in corporate gender disparities, including differences in education, psychology, demand for non-market labor (e.g. childcare), and even the lingering of conservative gender norms and expectations (Bertrand, 2018). However, a Science article published in 2022 highlighted one particularly striking phenomenon with the potential to contribute to the glass ceiling. This study surveyed more than 500,000 students in 72 countries and found that, compared to their male counterparts, female students were more likely to attribute their failings to a lack of innate talent (Napp & Breda, 2022). This finding was particularly fascinating because the gender gap was larger among high-ability students: The fear of lacking talent after failure strongly correlated with increasing performance for women — a phenomenon commonly known as “imposter syndrome.” The study ultimately noted that this discrepancy could provide an explanation for certain self-selection patterns by girls away from competitive or prestigious careers, indicating the importance of this issue for long-term corporate gender disparities.

When interviewed about the work of Claudia Goldin, who received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her study of women’s participation in the labor market, economist Ylva Backström expressed her hope that Goldin’s award would help “reframe gender equality as one of opportunities and benefits, rather than viewing it only as a problem” (O’Grady, 2023). Indeed, Bertrand examines the challenges conferred by the glass ceiling as an efficiency problem: If an economy is only searching for its corporate leaders in a limited pool of men, the outcomes will be worse than if women had the same opportunity of making it to the top of the earnings distribution (Bertrand, 2018). Of course, Bertrand also notes that this conclusion depends on the key assumption that innate talent is equally distributed between men and women. Since we know that women tend to hold a skewed perception of their innate talent, the lack of consensus about this assumption (however subconscious) could potentially help explain why corporate gender disparities continue to persist. As a college campus, Emory University has the unique opportunity to address problems like imposter syndrome and potentially influence the perceptions that female students hold as they consider themselves, their talent, and their future potential. After all, as Backström succinctly summarizes, “Inequality is not simply a social injustice — it is bad business.”

Edited by Justin Hahm

References

Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2020). Good economics for hard times: Better answers to our biggest problems. https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BC03022846

Bertrand, M. (2018). Coase Lecture – The Glass Ceiling. Economica, 85(338), 205–231. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12264

Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2019). The Old Boys’ Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap (w26530; p. w26530). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26530

Field, E., Krivkovich, A., Kügele, S., Robinson, N., & Yee, L. (2023). Women in the Workplace 2023. In McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-work place

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Hinchliffe, E. (2023, June 5). Women CEOs run 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies. A quarter of the 52 leaders became CEO in the last year. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2023/06/05/fortune-500-companies-2023-women-10-percent/

Izumi, Y., Shigeoka, H., & Yagasaki, M. (2023). CEO Gender Bias in the Formation of Firm-to-Firm Transactions(w31616; p. w31616). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31616

Keller, W., Molina, T., & Olney, W. (2020). The Gender Gap Among Top Business Executives (w28216; p. w28216). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w28216

Napp, C., & Breda, T. (2022). The stereotype that girls lack talent: A worldwide investigation. Science Advances, 8(10), eabm3689. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm3689

O’Grady, C. (2023, October 9). Gender pay gap research wins economics Nobel. Science | AAAS. https://www.science.org/content/article/gender-pay-gap-research-wins-economics-nobel? utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ScienceAdviser&utm_content= distillation&et_rid=989313569&et_cid=4934898

Placido, D. D. (2023, July 31). Anti-woke “Barbie” backlash failed miserably. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/07/25/right-wing-backlash-against-barb ie-is-just-sad/?sh=77d6951c2607

Shapiro, B. (2023, July 22). Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynU-wVdesr0