The number of women CEOs at Australia’s largest companies has gone backwards, according to new data.
Chief Executive Women (CEW) has released its annual tracker of women in leadership positions at ASX300 companies — the 300 largest companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
Despite incremental improvements over recent years, CEW said progress for women’s representation in executive roles stagnated in the 2023/24 financial year.
As at 1 July 2024, 91% of ASX300 CEOs were men. 25 ASX300 bosses were women CEOs in Australia, down from 26 in the 2022/23 financial year.
Executive positions
Women hold three in 10 executive leadership positions in ASX300 companies. This includes CEOs and managing directors, chief operating officers and chief financial officers, as well as some legal, HR and strategy roles.
One in eight people appointed to a CEO ASX300 role in 2023/24 was a woman, down from one in four the previous year.
Pipeline roles
All ASX300 CEOs appointed in the last year previously held ‘pipeline roles’. These are feeder roles (like CFO and COO) that often lead to a person becoming a CEO.
Women hold 12% of these pipeline roles. This figure has not changed since the previous CEW report. 46% of ASX300 companies have no women in CEO pipeline roles.
CEW said this “stagnation” will “continue to bottleneck gender equality in Australia’s top jobs.”
CEW President Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz said: “At the current pace of change, it could take another 54 years to achieve gender parity in CEO roles and 16 years to achieve gender parity in Executive Leadership Teams.”
