John Coughlan and Maggie Grega co-authored an article in Seattle Business magazine’s July 2016 issue titled “Women in the C-Suite: It’s Good Business.” In the article, Coughlan and Grega discussed the underrepresentation of women on boards of directors in the C-Suite and how companies paving the way to equal gender representation are currently reaping the rewards of their forward-looking hiring practices.
The underrepresentation of women on boards of directors and in the C-suite is astounding in a world driven by analytics aimed at increasing the bottom line. Of the nearly 22,000 companies examined in a 2014 study conducted by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, approximately 60 percent had no female board members, more than half had no women holding executive-level positions and fewer than 5 percent had a female CEO. Aside from the imbalance posed by these statistics, a growing body of literature posits that the business community has yet to fully embrace the financial impact associated with increased female representation within the highest levels of company management.