WOMEN IN THE top ranks of business have broken three important records of late. The number of female bosses at the helm of Fortune 500 companies in America reached an all-time high of 41. In 2021 CVS Health, the country’s fourth-biggest firm by revenue, became the largest to be run by a woman. And for the first time, two of America’s largest businesses—Walgreens Boots Alliance, another chain of chemists, and TIAA, a financial-services firm—are run by black women.

In America and other well-off places women are making strides in business, according to The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, an annual snapshot of female empowerment. The share of women on corporate boards, for example, is rising in most places (though it has dipped in progressive Sweden since 2019). Some of this is down to mandatory quotas; female boardroom representation surged in the Netherlands and Germany after those countries introduced such rules. But laws aren’t everything. Voluntary targets set by the British government have also boosted the share of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies, from 12.5% a decade ago to nearly 40%. Investors targeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly pressing firms to treat male and female employees equally.

Still, businesswomen have a long way to go before they catch up with their male counterparts, especially in the upper reaches of corporate hierarchies, and in some respects trail their female colleagues in politics (see chart). Men still occupy more than two in three boardroom seats in America. In South Korea, they hog more than nine in ten. Women still earn less than male colleagues (never mind that girls outperform boys at school across the OECD club of rich countries). In America outcomes are worse for women of colour, who make less than white women and are even more underrepresented in senior roles.

More troubling still, more women are dropping off the corporate ladder altogether. Although pandemic-era remote work made it easier for some women to combine work with family chores (still performed mostly by mothers and wives), covid-19 has pushed a disproportionate number of them out of the labour force. Women’s labour-force participation in OECD countries declined from 65% before covid-19 first hit to 63.8% a year later. Stymying female advancement may be yet another insidious consequence of the virus.

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