The gender gap in CEO tenure robs female executives of time to make their mark

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Former Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler unveils her new space startup, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny vows to take his place, and Fortune‘s Lila MacLellan examines a gender gap in CEO tenure. Have a wonderful Wednesday.

- Crop cuts. Making one’s mark as a leader takes talent—and time. But the latter is a luxury that’s not guaranteed for women who run the largest U.S. companies. At least not compared to their male counterparts.

Last year, the average tenure for women running Fortune 500 companies was 4.5 years, according to data from Equilar shared exclusively with Fortune. For men, it was 7.2 years.

In fact, charting women’s stints against men’s for the past 10 years reveals a persistent gender tenure gap; it has narrowed only slightly since 2014, when men averaged nearly eight years as Fortune 500 CEOs and women lasted about three.

To be sure, our data for women’s time as CEO is drawn from a small sample size—the very problem that makes tenures and chief executive churn relevant. However, as I reported in a piece published yesterday, other organizations have crunched the numbers, too, looking at the Russell 3000 and index companies around the world. Those analyses often faced the same limitations, but they also spotted the same contrast in tenures.

Regular readers of this newsletter may already be sighing: “That glass cliff.” And they’re right. Women are too often invited to become CEO when a company is already struggling to survive or recovering from self-inflicted injuries at the hands of a ruinous former chief executive. But other gender-based inequities impact how long women thrive in a leadership role, too. For example, activist hedge funds have been found to disproportionately target women CEOs, and some experts believe that women leaders who face relentless sexism voluntarily step down.

Rusty O’Kelley, a consultant who leads the boards practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, finds fault with what you might call the last mile to the corner office. Top-performing companies with good governance tend to have orderly succession plans and a strong preference for internal candidates, he explains. And CEOs who are promoted internally also tend to have long tenures, partially because they’re usually not taking over during a time of crisis. But the privilege of becoming CEO under such ideal circumstances mainly goes to men because they still dominate the roles that groom chief executives and give boards a view into how a candidate might help a business grow and compete. Right now, women are making the most headway in C-suite positions that typically don’t require critical profit-and-loss oversight.

In other words, companies need to not only stop hiring women for glass cliff jobs; they also have to guide rising-star female executives to the most solid and promising ground.

Read my full piece here.

Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com