Gender balance in the Fortune 100 - Building Gender Balanced Business

Macy’s and Johnson & Johnson lead our survey of the Fortune 100 companies that have the most equal balance of men and women on their executive leadership teams.

The companies have been ranked by the percentage of women corporate officers on the Executive Committees (EC) of the Fortune 100 companies.

• Three companies in the top 10 – WellPoint, PepsiCo and Kraft Foods – are all run by women CEOs, which suggests that women do tend to be successful in advancing women to senior management positions. (An article discussing this trend in more detail can be accessed here.)

• A smaller proportion of women at the top executive level in the Fortune 100 are in operational roles running business units.

• 69% of the 253 women corporate officers are responsible for functions embracing HR, marketing, communications, finance, technology, legal, governance and risk management.

• Only 12 of the women executives work in the technology sphere. They are listed in a separate article.

• 31% of the women corporate officers have direct responsibility for businesses within their Groups or have a role in strategic planning. Six of them are Group CEOs.

• 23 Fortune 100 companies have 25% or more of their Executive Committees represented by women members.

• 77 Fortune 100 companies have less than 25% women corporate officers represented on their Executive Committees.

• Six of the Fortune 100 companies have a zero percentage of women on their Executive Committees.

Angela Braly, WellPoint

Ellen Kullman, Dupont
(President currently and CEO effective from January 2009)

Lynn Laverty Eisenhans, Sunoco

Indra Nooyi, Pepsico

Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft Foods

Patricia Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland

Click here for an article on Women CEOs in the Fortune 1000.

The data below shows how the 253 women top executives in the Fortune 100 companies (2008) split according to job role.

We use the following definition to refer to the Executive Committee (EC), quoted from Johnson & Johnson’s corporate website: “The Executive Committee is the principal management group responsible for the operations and allocation of the resources of the Company.”

Many companies fail to make a clear distinction between their senior executive officers who make up the equivalent of their Executive Committee, and the next level of senior corporate officers. As a consequence, compiling the data for this survey was not always a comparison of like with like. In some cases, the number of “corporate officers” exceeded fifty individuals, whereas the number of executives on an EC is typically less than fifteen.

We have ranked companies according to the percentage of women on the leadership team and not the quantity to ensure it as fair a comparison as possible.

The information was collected from corporate websites in December 2008 and checked with the press offices of some of the companies.