研究：25年后，更多女性当上CEO

    去年夏天，琳恩•古德成当上了杜克能源（Duke Energy）的CEO。在她的领导下，这家250亿美元的公司实现了利润增长50%。作为前首席财务官，古德在过去一年带领杜克能源经历了与Progress Energy的艰难合并。

    古德是去年全球范围内出任大型公司CEO的少数女性之一。管理咨询公司Strategy&（前Booz & Company）的最新研究显示，全球2,500家大型上市公司中有332家新聘请了CEO，其中只有10位是女性。虽然全球范围内有大批女性接受了高等教育，进入了职场，但获得最高层管理职位的女性数量近年来没怎么变化。Strategy&公司的统计显示，过去十年，只有84位女性获得了全球大型公司的最高管理职位，而男性数量则为2,942位。

    Strategy&对企业高管性别失衡现象的初步调查结论或许不怎么让人鼓舞（甚至令人意外），但它对未来的预测却略为乐观一些。根据女性接受高等教育的趋势、职业女性比例以及社会观念的变迁，研究人员预计，到2040年，女性在新上任CEO中的比例将达到1/3。

    我们怎么才能在25年内从3%增加到33%？假设CEO的年龄中值53岁相对保持不变，今天进入职场的女性等到Strategy&预测的2040年将达到入职CEO的年龄。二十世纪七十年代年以来，全球进入大学学习的女性人数增速近乎是男性人数增速的两倍。美国2012年约40%的MBA学位攻读者是女性。今天，女性已占到全球就业人口的约40%。

    Strategy&高级合伙人、这项最新研究报告的作者肯•法沃若将我们看到的女性就业比例上升与女性高管比例停滞之间的脱节现象称为“数字游戏”。他解释称，今天进入职场的女性需要时间才能获得足够的经验问鼎公司里的领导职位。

    造成滞后的另一个原因或许更为微妙。

    “很多公司至少创立于50年前，当时没有工作女性，经营的公司数量也要少得多，”法沃若表示。“职场文化的变迁需要很长时间……这是文化滞后，但这种滞后随着时间的流逝将会减弱。

    法沃若解释称，美国和加拿大的公司文化进化最快，过去十年它们的女性CEO比例最高。虽然这个数字只有3%左右，但日本的总比例更低。过去十年，日本获得最高管理职位的女性比例还不到1%。

    法沃若和他的同事们有信心未来更多女性将成为CEO，但Strategy&的其他研究结论所显示的前景较为黯淡。女性CEO被辞退的可能性高于男性；过去十年，38%的女性CEO非主动离职，而男性CEO的这个比例只有27%。女性CEO更多是从外部聘请，法沃若认为，这可能导致与公司的内部关系较为薄弱。另外，法沃若还指出，总体上，聘请外部CEO往往出现在一家公司状况不佳的时候。

    可以印证上述结论的一位前女性CEO是雅虎（Yahoo）的卡罗尔•巴茨。巴茨在把欧特克（Autodesk）打造成了一家成功的公司后，2009年获聘成为雅虎的CEO，带领它重现辉煌。尽管降低了成本，但她没能改善收入增长，雅虎的广告收入流向了谷歌（Google）和Facebook。2011年，雅虎董事长打电话解雇了巴茨。

    “他们轰走了我，”巴茨在遭到解雇时这样告诉《财富》杂志(Fortune)。

    Strategy&的研究发现与巴茨的故事都支持玻璃悬崖理论，即女性提拔担任领导职务往往都是临危授命。这种理论最近受到了关注：通用汽车(GM)CEO玛丽•巴拉正在应对数百万辆汽车召回的后果。正如《财富》杂志的艾伦•斯隆日前指出，今年当巴拉成为通用汽车首位女性CEO时，她成为了某种符号，但现在她不得不应对早在自己上任前就已经存在的种种问题。

    法沃若表示，如果巴拉不是女性，或许我们不会在媒体中看到她受到如此这么多的批评。

    “我们第一次看到女性CEO的百分比时，我都惊呆了，”法沃若说。“玛丽•巴拉升任CEO时，很多人都惊呆了……我们之所以能看到这么多的报道，是因为（女性当上CEO）并不常见。它显然不是个传统。”（财富中文网）

    Last summer, Lynn Good became CEO of Duke Energy. Under her leadership, the $25 billion company experienced a 50% increase in profits. Formally the firm's chief financial officer, Good spent the year navigating Duke Energy (DUK) through a difficult merger with Progress Energy.

    Good is one of just a handful of women -- in the world -- who became CEO of a large company last year. While 332 of the 2,500 biggest publicly traded companies globally brought in a new executive officer, women filled just 10 of those positions, according to a new study from management consulting firm Strategy&, formerly Booz & Company. Despite droves of women entering higher education and the global work force, the number of women filling top executive roles hasn't budged for some time. In the past 10 years, 84 women have taken over the top role at the world's largest firms compared with 2,942 men, according to Strategy&.

    Strategy&'s initial findings on gender imbalance in the C-suite may not be encouraging (or surprising), but its projection for the future is slightly brighter. Citing trends in women going on to higher education, the share of women in the workforce and shifting social norms, researchers claim as much as a third of the incoming CEO class will be made up of women by 2040.

    So how do we get from 3% to 33% in 25 years? Assuming that the median age of 53 for a CEO stays relatively the same, the women entering the workforce today will be eligible for CEO status in their careers by Strategy&'s projected 2040. Since 1970, the number of women enrolling in colleges worldwide has grown nearly twice as fast as the number of men. In the U.S., roughly 40% of all MBA candidates were women in 2012 and today women make up about 40% of the global work force.

    Ken Favaro, Strategy& senior partner and author of the study, described the disconnect we see between the growing percentage of women going into business and the stagnating percentage reaching the executive level as a "numbers game." It takes time for women entering business today to get enough experience to become eligible for leadership roles within their firms, he explained.

    The other reason for the delay is, perhaps, more nuanced.

    "A lot of these companies were started at least 50 years ago when there were no women in the workforce, much less running companies," Favaro said. "It takes a long time for work culture to change ... It is a cultural drag, but it is a drag that will decline over time."

    Companies in the U.S. and Canada, where Favaro explained the culture is advancing at the fastest rate, have garnered the highest percentage of women CEOs for the past decade. Although that figure comes in at only about 3%, Japan's total is much smaller as less than 1% of women took on the top executive role over the last 10 years.

    Favaro and his colleagues are confident that more women will become CEOs with time, yet other Strategy& findings paint a bleak picture for the future. Female CEOs are more likely to be forced out of their jobs than men; during the past decade, 38% of women CEOs left involuntarily compared with just 27% of their male peers. Women are also more often hired externally, a finding Favaro explained could lead to weaker internal relationships within their firms. Outsider CEOs, in general, also tend to get hired more frequently when a company isn't performing well, according to Favaro.

    One such former female CEO that fits the researchers' findings is Yahoo's Carol Bartz. After building Autodesk into a successful company, Bartz was hired to in 2009 to bring Yahoo back to its heyday. Despite reducing costs, she failed to improve revenue growth just as Yahoo was losing the advertisement dollars game to Google and Facebook. In 2011, a Yahoo (YHOO) chairman fired Bartz -- over the phone.

    "These people f---ed me over," Bartz told Fortune at the time of her dismissal.

    Strategy&'s findings and Bartz's story both support the theory of the glass cliff, which claims that women are more often promoted into leadership roles in times of crisis. The concept has come into focus recently as GM CEO Mary Barra deals with the fallout of a recall of millions of vehicles. As Fortune's Allan Sloan recently pointed out, Barra became an icon of sorts when she became GM's (GM) first female CEO this year, but now is forced to deal with problems that started well before her tenure.

    If Barra weren't a woman, perhaps we wouldn't be seeing her name criticized so heavily in the media, Favaro said.

    "When we first looked at the percentage of women CEOs coming in, I was shocked," Favaro said. "When Mary Barra got promoted to GM, it was all over the place ... And the reason we were reading about it so much was because [women become CEO] so infrequently. It definitely isn't old hat."