The CEO Is to Blame for a Company in
Crisis—But Only If She's a Woman
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Valentina Zarya
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@valzarya
OCTOBER 26, 2016, 12:47 PM EDT
At least according to the media
When a company is in trouble, the buck stops with the CEO, right?
Not necessarily. According to a new study, 80% of press reports about female CEOs
involved in a crisis cited the chief as the source of the problem. But when a man was
at the helm, only 31% of stories blamed the CEO for the company’s issues. The audit,
which was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Global
Strategy Group, included 100 articles about 20 Fortune500, Fortune 1000, and
major tech company CEOs.
“I asked for this analysis to be done because my impression was that women were
treated more unfavorably in the media,” says Rockefeller Foundation president
Judith Rodin.
The blame placed at the feet of female chiefs can have long-reaching consequences,
adds Rodin. Fortune‘s Jennifer Reingold dug into those implications in a September
feature that revealed that, since 2004, not a single female Fortune 500 chief who has
been fired from her job ever got another CEO position. What’s more, just two women
have held more than one Fortune 500 CEO role during that time period: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman(formerly the CEO of eBay) and Reynolds
American chief Susan Cameron, who held the same post twice.
The fact that women leaders are more likely to be blamed in times of crisis than their
male counterparts is likely related to the fact that they are also more likely to take the
helm at troubled companies—the phenomenon referred to as the “glass cliff.”
According to research cited in Reingold’s piece, 42% of female CEOs were appointed
during times of crisis, compared with 22% of men in the same period.
Unsurprisingly, women were more likely than men to be forced out of their jobs: 38%
vs. 27%.
The study also found that the media is far more likely to focus on a CEO’s family if
she’s a woman. According to the researchers, three out of four stories that mentioned
female CEOs’ personal lives talked about the women’s families. Not a single story
about a male chief referenced his family.
Rodin experienced this phenomenon firsthand when she was appointed the first
female president of the University of Pennsylvania. “There was so much written
about my age, my family, my personal description. I looked back at [prior media
coverage] of male presidents and it was nothing like that,” she recalls. “I found it
unnerving.”
Rodin doesn’t doubt that corporate hiring practices are a major factor in the paucity
of female chiefs (just 4.2% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women), but she also believes
that the media has an important role to play. At the end of the day, she says, “people
believe what they read in the news.”
http://fortune.com/2016/10/26/ceo-blame-woman-crisis/