The drive for equality in the boardroom still has a long way to go. In the US, there are currently 37 female CEOs in the top 500 companies, while in the UK, there’s just six women in the top job of the leading 100 FTSE businesses. But some sectors are starting to buck this trend, with increasing numbers of women in business moving into senior management roles, opening up the doors for more women to follow. We give the lowdown on some of the best industries for women wanting to work their way to the top.
Engineering
Although the sector currently lags behind when it comes to women in the top board positions — with 13% of women compared to the FTSE 100 companies’ 24% — the well-documented skills shortage in the industry represents a huge opportunity for women considering engineering as a career.
The large international companies are specifically investing in getting more young women into engineering and the UK sector alone needs to train and recruit 1.8 people by 2025 to close the skills shortage gap.
Data analytics
We live in a data driven world and it is a world that doesn’t stand still — with an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every single day. And for global businesses this is a big deal, meaning they need the very best data analysts to make sense of all this information. And this has led to artificial intelligence and data analytics becoming two of the fastest growing professions in the world.
Although females currently only account for 30% of data science jobs, there are key women making huge strides into AI and data management, including Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Hanna Wallach, co-founder of the Women in Machine Learning Conference and former head of Data Science at eBay, Dr. Kira Radinsky.
Healthcare
According to Forbes magazine, one in four senior positions in US healthcare are held by women. And in the UK, women hold 46% of the most senior roles in the National Health Service, with work ongoing to increase this percentage even further, including a target of another 500 women on NHS boards by the end of 2020.
Across the private and public healthcare sector, women are also leading the way on significant and game-changing projects, from pioneering surgery to the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Retail
With a slow but steady rise in the number of women in the top retail jobs over recent years, the sector has cemented itself as one of the leading employers of women, from the shop floor to the boardroom. And some of the largest high street names — John Lewis, H&M and Selfridges, to name a few — have exceptional women in either the CEO or senior management chairs. And over in the US, the female CEOs of retailers Williams-Sonoma, Kohl’s and Best Buy have all made the 2020 Fortune top 500 CEO list. With retail, both on and offline, currently going through some significant challenges, the opportunities for women to make their mark at a senior management level are growing.
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