We Interviewed 57 Female CEOs to Find Out How More Women Can Get to the Top

How can more women make it to the top? With a goal of seeing 100 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 by 2025, the Rockefeller Foundation provided a grant to Korn Ferry to design and execute research geared to developing action-oriented initiatives to create a sustainable pipeline of female CEOs. To crack the code of women’s success — and to help organizations better identify and leverage their highest-potential women leaders — the Korn Ferry team conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 57 female CEOs, delving into pivotal experiences in their personal history an career progression, and key personality traits and drivers that had an impact on their paths to the top. The researchers compared this data with the Korn Ferry best-in-class CEO benchmark, which comprises typical scores for CEOs (virtually all male) who are in the 99th percentile of work engagement. Among the top findings: Women could be ready for the CEO role sooner; backgrounds in STEM and finance (but not HR) are launchpads; and specific traits such as risk-taking, resilience, and managing ambiguity are critical to women’s success.