Yahoo Inc’s decision to fire Chief Executive Carol Bartz — by phone, no less — pointed out how few women had made it to the top of companies tracked in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
That roster dropped to 17, a little more than 3 percent of the total, after Bartz’s exit. The news came late on Tuesday, the same day that Bank of America Corp removed Sallie Krawcheck as head of its global wealth and investment management business.
“While the ouster of a number of top Wall Street women cannot necessarily be tied directly to the glass ceiling or sexism per se, the numbers aren’t good,” said Deborah Ancona, a professor of organization studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. “Women fill a minority of top leadership positions in corporate America.”
While women represent about half of the nation’s white-collar workers, their numbers thin as one looks up the organizational chart. They represent just 14.4 percent of executive officers at Fortune 500 companies, according to data from Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that advocates for women in business.
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