Women Executives and Career Tracks

Washington Post, 2/20/18
n recent months, Corporate America's corner office has actually gotten a little less diverse -- not more -- when it comes to the number of African Americans.

World Economic Forum, 12/13/17
Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women know a thing or two about career success. The 50 businesswomen on the 2017 list have climbed up the ranks of corporates in a wide range of industries—including tech, energy, defense, and consumer goods—to C-level roles. Here’s the advice they have for women who want to follow in their footsteps.

News@Northeastern, 11/7/17
Maureen Chiquet, the former global CEO of Chanel, shared stories and lessons learned from her impressive career leading and launching global brands at Northeastern, as well as how she has gone beyond societal labels in her professional and personal life throughout her journey.

Entrepreneur, 10/12/17
While many women, for many different reasons, take a career off-ramp for a number of reasons, most don't want to be stuck in a cul-de-sac.

New York Times, 10/3/17
In part female entrepreneurship is on the rise because gender equality efforts in the workplace to address issues like the salary gap and advancement to positions on corporate boards have stalled.

Fortune, 9/28/17
Our latest data show slim representation of women in board seats (19%), and even lower numbers in key executive positions (4% of CEO roles globally and 11% of CFO roles). Even more starkly, half of the countries (22 of 44) we examined have no female CEOs or CFOs at all.

Financial Times, 8/15/17
The disparity between the number of men and women working in the industry is one of the highest in finance, according to a study by Northeastern University in 2015.

New York Times, 7/21/17
It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness,
competition and deeply rooted barriers.

Washington Post, 6/7/17
The percentage of women running companies in the Fortune 500 is still solidly in the single digits, but the proportion is slowly growing, and just reached an all-time high.

Kellogg Insight, 3/10/17
Past data predicts that at least 50 percent of the women graduating from top MBA programs in 2017 will exit the full-time US workforce within 10 years of graduating—either because they choose to step out or are “forced out.”

News.com.au, 2/27/17
Having a baby is actually great for a man’s career, while for women it’s the opposite.

The Mercury News, 1/30/17
Highly-skilled white women working in well-paid jobs suffer the greatest “motherhood penalty” when taking time off to raise children, according to a recent analysis.

Miami Herald, 12/7/16
We all go through rough patches at work, whether we are the employee, the manager or the business owner.

Los Angeles Times, 10/28/16
Therese Tucker CEO of Blackline Inc. is the first tech company in Los Angeles funded by venture capital to go public with a female CEO, according to research firm PitchBook.

Harvard Business Review, 9/13/16
50% of technical women, predominately in engineering and computer science, had switched to other fields; 20% of other women professionals had done the same.

Harvard Business Review, 6/8/16
The authors wanted to identify whether – and which – women were working full-time for years at a time, and which women were staying out of the paid workforce across adulthood.

Fortune, 5/31/16
In April, Swiss pharma giant Novartis made an unexpected announcement. Christi Shaw, the company’s U.S. country head and president, was stepping down “for personal and family reasons.”

Knowledge@Wharton, 4/8/16
Carol Sawdye, the vice chairman and chief financial officer of PwC, has been on an ascending career track precipitated in part by two major events in her life: the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Disease when she was 25 and experiencing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York up close.

INSEAD, 3/24/16
There has been a lot of discussion about the stereotypes contributing to the lack of women in the c-suite. But one of the biggest obstacles could be their own assumptions on what path they’re supposed to take.

Vanity Fair, February 2016
In 2012, after more than three decades producing hits such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List, Kathleen Kennedy was handpicked by George Lucas to head Lucasfilm. Now, with the smash success of The Force Awakens behind her, Kennedy sits down with Sarah Ellison to talk about her mentors, her sense of equality, and her vision for the Star Wars franchise.

Stanford News, 6/10/15
Stanford researcher Brooke Conroy Bass found that women were more likely than men to think and worry about how their career paths might align with future parenthood. Women also tended to downscale future career goals in anticipation of children.

Knowledge@Wharton, 12/29/14
In this new book, The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know, explores why women lack confidence and what it means for their careers.

USA Today, 11/17/14
Jana Rich is a 47-year-old headhunter with an uncanny skill for connecting. Her work is "touchy-feely," as she puts it — she doesn't hunt down coding whizzes but rather charismatic and public-facing leaders in the C-suite.

Huffington Post, 4/11/14
DeAnne Aguirre is a senior partner with Strategy& based in San Francisco. She is the co leader of the global Katzenbach Center and an expert in culture, talent effectiveness, leadership, and change management. She advises senior executives globally on organizational topics.

Fast Company, 2/2014
For a talented and ambitious merchandiser like Ahrendts revitalizing Apple's enormous retail business might be the ultimate challenge.

Knowledge@Wharton, 1/13/14
In her book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Barnard College president Debora Spar argues that women have come very far in the struggle for power but now face the tyranny of hyper-perfect images of working mothers and romantic notions of “having it all.”

New York Times, 12/7/13
The number of women in finance with stay-at-home spouses has climbed nearly tenfold since 1980, according to an analysis of census data, and some of the most successful women in the field are among them.

Stanford Business News, 10/28/13
Mariam Naficy (MBA '98) is a serial entrepreneur whose latest venture is Minted.com, which she calls “a crowd-sourced business” that sells designer stationery, art prints, and party decor.

New York Times, 10/12/13
Author talks to four women executives he had interviewed previously to ask them to share stories about headwinds they have navigated over the years, and advice they would offer other women about succeeding at work.

New York Times, 7/7/13
Sara Uttech has not spent much of her career so far worrying about “leaning in.” Instead, she has mostly been hanging on, trying to find ways to get her career to accommodate her family life, rather than the other way around.

Research news@Vanderbilt, 4/8/13
Though past studies have found little evidence that women are opting out of the workforce in general, first-of-its-kind research by Joni Hersch shows that female graduates of elite undergraduate universities are working much fewer hours than their counterparts from less selective institutions.

Harvard Business Review, 3/28/13
In the aftermath of the publication of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, two things are becoming clear. One: we are in the midst of a powerful new feminist movement. And two: the backlash has already begun.

The Atlantic, 3/19/13
There is much to admire in Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. It is full of funny stories about her brilliant career and helpful advice for workplace success.

Knowledge@Wharton, 2/13/13
In an interview for Knowledge@Wharton with Stewart Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management and director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, Slaughter shares what it was like to draw back the curtain on her life as someone perceived to "have it all".

Knowledge@Wharton, 11/7/12
At a time when issues like gender inequality in the boardroom and the dearth of women in corporate America continue to make headlines, it is worth asking: How important is the role of a supportive spouse in the lives of high-powered female executives?

Huffingtonpost.com, 9/13/12
Amy Cole might never have made it to Instagram had it not been for two pairs of hot pink pants.

The Atlantic, July/August 2012
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

New York Times, 6/9/12
A small group of women is proving that it’s possible to start a high-growth technology company and have children at the same time.

New York Times, 1/14/12
Anne M. Finucane is Bank of America's global strategy and marketing officer, but the title only hints at her influence within the bank, on Wall Street and beyond.

New York Times, 10/25/11
The selection of Ms. Rometty for the top job at I.B.M. will make her one of the most prominent women executives in corporate America, joining a small group of chiefs that includes Ursula Burns of Xerox, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Ellen J. Kullman of DuPont and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard.

Stanford Magazine, Sept/Oct 2011
The world's highest-ranking woman carmaker wants to build vehicles that skimp on fuel—while they surge with style.

The New Yorker, 7/11/11
Can Sheryl Sandberg upend Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture?

WSJ, 4/12/11
What is holding women back in the workplace? And how can those restraints be broken? Vikram Malhotra, chairman of the Americas at McKinsey & Co., told the Women in the Economy conference what insights into those questions his company discovered in its latest research.

Knowledge@Wharton, 3/2/11
This is a tale of two women in business, and how each found her way to the top. One became the head of a national lingerie chain by following her passion. The other wrote a recipe for success, and served it with soup.

Forbes, 3/2/11
The White House released a report entitled Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being, a statistical portrait showing how women are faring in the United States today and how their lives have changed over time.

The Local, 2/8/11
Chancellor Angela Merkel called the dearth of women executives at German companies a “scandal” on Tuesday, as she oversaw the signing of a charter aimed at improving “family-friendly” working conditions.

WSJ, 1/4/11
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg on why we have too few women leaders.

Browse insights and publications from Stanford GSB about women in business.