CEOs who are fathers help shatter the q glass ceiling!
This isn’t your grandma’s boardroom, but it could be your daughter’s! The upper rungs of big companies are still filled with mostly men, but top CEOs are starting to be inspired by their own daughters to shatter those C-suite glass ceilings. This generation of top executives, many of whom entered their respective fields when female leadership was rare, has seen diversity spread through the workforce at the lower and midlevel rungs—but not much change is happening up top. As women leave men in the dust with a 10-point lead in college enrollment numbers and search for opportunities for employment, it’s become clear for fathers of young girls that equality in pay and promotion is vital for their daughters’ future. This is especially apparent to fathers of the executive breed. “It used to be: Do we really have a problem here? Now it’s clear we have a problem. Just look at the numbers. They haven’t changed in 20 years. The issue now is: How do we solve it?” says Fritzi Woods, the CEO of Women’s Foodservice Forum. Many executives can rattle off their company’s programs to promote and foster female leadership, but for those with daughters, the issue becomes intimate: ensuring their kids will have the same opportunity they had to get into top management. “I think there’s an aha moment that a lot of men have, particularly when they have daughters,” Woods says. “Now men hear their children speak about discrimination or barriers they’re running into simply because they’re a woman.”
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