WP: Percentage of women in executive-level roles declined from 12.2% to 11.8% in 2023

[quesaisje]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/04/03/women-csuite-research-gender-parity/

Female executives lost roughly 60 “C-suite” roles last year, a reversal after several years of slow but persistent growth, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Women now claim 11.8 percent of 15,000 chief executives, financial officers and other top roles at publicly traded U.S. companies, down from 12.2 percent the previous year, S&P said. It’s the first decline in that percentage since S&P started tracking this data in 2006.

The report, from S&P Global Market Intelligence is here. They say that this is the first drop in their study period, which goes back to 2005. They also report that publicly-traded firms are spending less on diversity and inclusion based on "Natural Language Processing of earnings call transcripts."

[quesaisje]

One suspicion is that organizations are reducing the number of senior leadership positions and that the positions getting cut are disproportionately occupied by women, but I didn't see anything about this in the report. The Post mentions Chief Diversity Officers, but it's not as if that's the only trendy C-suite title in the mix. What caught my attention more than anything is that the year-over-year difference amounts to a few dozen positions nationwide.

[quesaisje]

I doubt this is statistically significant? 

Regardless, the modern American left has become way to focused on ensuring equal odds of entering the elite (if such a thing is even possible given family connections/lack thereof) vs. improving average people's lives as they are today. 

They're not using a sample; they're calculating the actual total from regulatory filings. It amounts to about sixty positions. So it does tell us something about those organizations, especially as the decrease is a break from a consistent trend.

What it doesn't provide is strong evidence for making broader inferences about how American society is changing. Which very much does not fit with either how the Washington Post covered the report or how the discussion has proceeded in this thread.

I thought that putting "12.2% to 11.8%" in the subject line would make this clear, but this thread proceeded as  if I had thrown raw meat into a cage despite this. At least I learned something interesting about alewives.

[quesaisje]

By the way I am trying to find it, but IIRC there are some studies showing that total fertility rate actually starts to rise again at the right most end of the income bell curve for family income.  If it is true that once people feel 100% secure in all aspects of their financial security they are willing to actually have more kids then unless the parents want to nanny raise their kids fully that would require one parent to drop out from the career ladder at least somewhat. Even assuming both parents were very egalitarian in their beliefs the mom still would have a few weeks at the very least taken out for pregnancy and birth.

Guessing it's this one:

Data source is ACS.