Female bosses get blamed more than their male counterparts for a company crisis
Ever thought Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer seems to get an awful lot of critical headlines compared to some of the male bosses out there?
Well, according to research by The Rockefeller Foundation, 80 per cent of news reports relating to female bosses dealing with corporate troubles suggested they were a source of blame. In similar situations for males at the top of the corporate tree, only 31 per cent of stories took the same attitude. And during a company crisis, articles were more favourable to the response by a male chief executive than a woman.
Read more: Female bosses make banks more stable, report shows
However, while analysing a range of news reports, The Rockefeller Foundation found men were more likely to face questions over their position. A third of articles about male chief execs in trouble speculated as to whether they would be able to keep hold of their job. That was true for 27 per cent of stories about female bosses.
There was also more focus on the gender of the business leader when it was a woman at the helm of a company. Just under half of articles on female bosses specifically mentioned their gender, though only four per cent of articles about a male leader focused on it. News stories were twice as likely to discuss a chief exec's personal life if they were female.
The research identified 20 leaders of firms in the Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000 or the tech industry and reviewed more than 100 news reports about their tenures.
It comes as the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 2016 Global Gender Gap report, revealing that economic disparity between women and men around the world is rising, even though the gap was closing on other measures like education.
Read more: Women in fintech: Four ways to close the gender gap
Looking at income and employment, the gender gap has widened in the past four years to 59 per cent. Last year, the WEF forecast it would take 118 years for economic parity to be achieved – now it's extended that prediction, saying the gender gap won't be closed until 2186, taking 170 years.
The Global Gender Gap ranks 144 countries to assess whether they are distributing their resources equally between women and men (irrespective of their overall income levels). Britain was 20th in the overall global rankings (it was 9th a decade ago), while the top four was made up of Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.