News Item
Forbes featured Haub Law Professor Darren Rosenblum new piece: "Citibank’s New Leader: Do Women On Boards Yield Diverse CEOs?"
News from Wall Street rocked the financial world: Citibank named Jane Fraser as its new CEO, making her the first woman to lead a major U.S. financial firm. While her ascension undoubtedly knocks at Wall Street’s glass ceiling, it doesn’t crack it open. It really means that in one firm, the stars aligned in one woman’s favor. To break the glass ceiling for CEOs, firms need more diverse boards.
One may think that hiring a woman CEO isn’t newsworthy–after all, women have been half of all higher education graduates for decades. But with this announcement, Fraser joins a very exclusive club of only 4% of public company CEOs, since men hold 96% of these top positions. More men named John, or even James, hold CEO positions than all women CEOs combined in the U.S.. Nearly all of them are white–only four CEOs among the top 500 firms are Black– and none is a Black woman.
For women in the leadership pipeline, their male colleagues will be 19 times more likely to attain a CEO position than they will. The cisgender men who run the corporate world exclude women and other sexes and genders from leadership. For Fraser, the CEO position isn’t winning the lottery, because she worked hard for it, but it seems nearly as unlikely. This is only truer for finance as a field, which historically has been one of the most male-dominated. None of the top banks have ever had a woman at the helm.
Fraser’s success matters because it offers a glimmer of hope to women who have been working hard to climb the corporate ladder. Many women drop out of the running because their firms put them on the mommy-track, even as they promote male parents. Additional challenges impede women of color. And as the #MeToo movement made apparent, corporate sexual harassment has chased many employees–mostly women–out of the leadership track.
