By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 13 years ago

It’s not the “year of the woman” in American business, either

What do Apple, Bed Bath & Beyond, Blockbuster, Citigroup, Comcast, Costco, Delta Airlines, Exxon Mobil, Intel, Kohl’s, Loews, McGraw-Hill, Pepsi Bottling, RadioShack, Sysco and Virgin Media all have in common?

None of these Fortune 500 companies has a single woman executive officer.

The list of companies with absolutely no women in the top ranks was released this week by Catalyst as part of the 2010 Catalyst Census. The Census tracks the number of women in executive and top earner positions. This year, 14.4% of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, up from 13.5% last year. Women now hold 7.6% of top-earning positions at these companies, an increase of 1.3% from last year.

The companies that have zero women executive officers account for 27.4% of all Fortune 500 companies. Thirty-two percent of Fortune 500 companies have only one female executive officer. Which means that if you work at a Fortune 500 company, there is a 60% chance that the small group of people making the big decisions about your company’s future contains one or no women.

Looks like 2010 wasn’t the year of the woman in American business any more than it was in American politics.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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