This thread is probably going to make me sound like a chauvinistic pig, but I was just randomly wondering: Are there any good female CEOs out there for publicly traded companies?

Here are the ones that I can think of:
- Rometty at IBM (bad)
- Marissa Mayer (bad to terribad)
- Carly Fiorina (ex CEO, but undeniably terribad)
- Meg Whitman (decent, but let's be honest: basically a man)
- Irene Rosenfeld (who Warren Buffett basically called an idiot, and that's coming from Warren motherf*cking Buffett, who is quite possibly the nicest human being alive)

Are there any good ones that I'm forgetting? I would think there would have to be some pretty good ones in retail, but nothing is really coming to mind.

Does Jessica Alba count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honest_Company

http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500

http://m.nasdaq.com/article/girl-pow...-ceos-cm101171

Pepsi was a sweet CEO.

Barra at GM is solid.

Took over a screwed up company and has turned it around. Investments in Lyft and that autonomus tech company from SV. Seems like she has a vision for the future.

Mayer, Rometty and Whitman all have taken over companies that were past the growth phase. Not sure how much better those situations could have been.

http://fortune.com/2015/03/03/women-...an-the-sp-500/

They all should be women if they don't have a science/engineering degree. They are honest and generally put the stockholders on the same ground as themselves.

Fiorina at HP can still be debated. When she left every division was growing double digits. Virtually every tech company at that time were lucky not to lose money as they were not real stocks. They were designed to enrich the management with excessive stock options. I still put her onbad girls naughty list because she paid herself excessively while there. A real CEO would decline pay and all stock options.

So if you do believe that women just aren't capable of holding leadership positions as you're obviously suggesting how do you come to terms with the fact that so many get put there? Do you think the men in senior positions who choose them are morons? Or is it an elaborate ruse to get the women of the world to believe in themselves so they'll be motivated to work harder?

Abbaddabba, quite a bit of it is affirmative action. That said, I think there are many talented female executives. Women have better multitasking skills on average, to name one advantage.

Donald Trump has more female executives than males in his company, and he says they are better than the men, including construction (he said this before his candidacy). He pays for performance and the women on average earn more than the men. There's a data point for female executives.

There's quite obviously a smaller pool of talented executive women vs talented executive men. Part of it is that female interests aren't generally aligned with strategy as much as men's are. Another part of it is that women have babies, which interrupts their focus and career and learning paths (and that's not sexism - if say 20% of men got pregnant, those 20% would badly underperform in the labor pool).

The above cuts down the potential talent pool, probably by more than 50%. In an egalitarian system, assuming they are equal, men will always outnumber women for executive positions by quite a lot.

not CEO, but
Ruth Porat (google CFO)
and
Sheryl Sandberg (facebook COO)

are pretty damn good...


also, marissa mayer one of the worst ceo, can't believe how overrated she is among laymen.

and now i leave you with this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Q6PbschQI

Carol Meyrowitz !!!

I won't argue that there're more women CEOs than you would expect based on the pool of potential talent - i'm responding to the original post that suggests that they're all basically sh.t except for the one who is 'basically a man' (ironic since she seems a lot more feminine to me than a lot of others on the list).

There likely is some preference given on the basis of being a woman because of the symbolism, but if you believe that it's entirely about the symbolism, and that the women who're chosen are being paid multi million dollar salaries just to send the 'anything is possible!' message - that's a bit different.

I'd never heard of her, but good example. Just read a Fortune article on her and it seems like she was very successful.

Also, agree with Barra at GM, haven't really followed the company too much aside from occasionally reading a news article, but she seems solid.

Don't know too much about Pepsi's CEO, but over 4 years both revenue and net income have gone down. Then again, sugary drinks are probably on the way out overall, so it's not clear how much she has to do with that.

And for the record: I'm not saying (or implying) that women are incapable of being good CEOs. Just that the ones that I was aware of prior to making this post haven't been particularly good.

Rometty has been very underwhelming. The market that IBM competes in certainly isn't mature. It's just dynamic, and IBM hasn't done a very good job of competing.

And I don't think it's really arguable that Mayer has been horrible, and has had a materially negative impact on shareholder value. She's been bailed out by Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, which happened well before she ever arrived. What's somewhat ironic about that is that Mayer is almost certainly one of the smartest CEOs around, at least going by mathematical aptitude.

Good writeup in Wired about a month ago on Barra and GM competing with Tesla in the EV space. Long feature.

I'm not all that familiar with Mayer's decisions but she is the CEO of a 20th century internet company. Who under 55 even goes to Yahoo? It's just not an easy company to run IMO.

Reminds me of when people said Fiorina was terrible, between PC margins were getting squeezed and tech bubble, all those companies struggled mightily during that time. Not saying Fiorina is some genius, but the hand you are dealt is a big deal with these things. People are too results oriented.

i guess soon enough, it will be a "woman's world," they're beasts

What does that even mean?

You have basically just set up a no true scotsman

Since when are outcomes a direct measure of the quality of decisions? There's so much uncertainty and chance involved. The only thing I'm confident in is that the interview process by the board of directors of a fortune 500 company is a bit more nuanced than a math test.

Trump wouldn't understand this, but this is actually an admission of a statistical bias against hiring women in his company. If there were no bias in the hiring process, the women on average would perform equally with the men, rather than outperforming. He's basically saying that in order to be hired as a woman, one needs to be measurably superior to a man who wants the same job. If there were no bias, the female candidates wouldn't need to perform better on average in order to reach those positions.

I'm talking out of my ass here, but I'm guessing female CEOs are less likely to have risen to the top based on bombast and personality.

There are probably more male CEOs who bull**** their way up and then perform terribly, bringing down the average.

Might also explain why it's tough to name successful female CEOs off the top of your head even though some of these studies show they perform better overall. They may be more understated.

Also Amy Hood msft cfo is pretty awesome.

The queen of women CEOs Tomoko Namba - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoko_Namba

Founded a startup with $200k of her own money and zero venture funding in that entrepreneurial wasteland that is Japan and turned it into a multi billion dollar e-commerce company. I doubt that there is a better example.

Linda Hasenfratz Linamar
Linda McCurdy K Bro
Marillyn Hewson Lockheed

If you were right, a smaller percentage of female applications would be hired, and in order to over-index in frequency lots more women than men would need to be applying. So its probably not that.

Yeah, it's some pretty tortured logic to say that a company with more women than average in execute positions, who outperform in terms of pay, has a statistical bias against hiring women.

So many unsupported assumptions needed for that twisted conclusion I didn't even bother to reply.

In case that's not immediately obvious, consider the following: What if the company had 9900 women (99%), and they outperformed the 100 men? By the same logic, in Janabis' world, a company with 99% women has a statistical bias against hiring women, because:

Not quite. A smaller percentage of female applicants of average performance would be hired, which happens to be the case (according to Trump).

Actually, yes. In fact, your example is precisely what we observe when an affirmative action program is in place. A minority group that is selected despite underperforming the majority is evidence of a selection bias in favor of that minority. Funny how that works, isn't it? I'm afraid it's back to Stats 101 for you Tooth.