Male executives own 99 times more S&P shares than women: report

Male executives on Wall Street own 99 times more shares in S&P 500 companies than their female counterparts even though women make up around a quarter of C-suite leadership in the firms listed on the index, according to a report.

A survey conducted by Swedish gender data firm ExecuShe found that men held around $770 billion worth of S&P 500 companies in 2020 compared to just $9 billion for female executives.

Andreas Hoepner, a finance professor at the University of Dublin, told Bloomberg News that the ratio would have been even more lopsided if the study took into account outliers such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest executive in the world.

“We found a giant gender power gap,” Hoepner said. 

The #MeToo movement focused renewed attention on the gender pay gap.

In 2020, the average woman who worked full-time all year earned 83 cents on the dollar compared with a male colleague doing the same work, according to the federal government.

The gap is even bigger for black and Native American women and Latinas.

The issue also impacts women later in life. A 2020 Brookings Institution study on women’s retirement found Social Security benefits for women are, on average, 80% of those for men.

Among corporate leaders, women who help run S&P 500 companies earned just 75% of male executives in 2020 — the widest disparity in nine years, according to the analysis firm Morningstar Inc.

Women tend to earn less than men because they are generally shoehorned into executive roles at human resources and marketing departments, where equity ownership levels aren’t as high as parallel roles in technology and finance, according to Bloomberg News.

Women are also at a numerical disadvantage when it comes to the position of chief executive officer.

Earlier this year, a report by executive recruiting firm Crist Kolder Associates found that the number of women in the C-suite ticked slightly higher in the year prior.

The report looked at 682 companies comprised of firms in the S&P 500 index and in the Fortune 500.

For the third consecutive year, there was an increase in the number of women who were hired as CEOs — though the hiring has been gradual. Women also make up 15% of company finance chiefs, according to the study.

In 2021, 47 companies were led by a woman CEO — a slight rise over the year before, when there were 44 women in that position.

One marker of change is the number of women CFOs, which rose to its highest ever, according to Crist Kolder.

Last year, 101 firms employed a woman CFO — up from 90 in 2020, the study found. In 2010, there were just 55 women CFOs among the top companies in corporate America.

Eli Lilly, Exxon Mobil Corp., and Charter Communications all hired a woman as CFO in 2021.

The private sector stepped up diversity initiatives in earnest following the May 2020 police-involved death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and riots.

In December 2020, the Nasdaq, whose index is comprised largely of tech stocks, said that it would require corporate boards to disclose diversity data or risk public shaming.