This essay originally published in the Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
“When will women get to the top?” Anne B. Fisher posed that question in a September 1992 Fortune article. And more than 30 years later, we still don’t have a definitive answer.
We’re just over a week away from an election that may or may not give America its first female president, and in the corporate world, many women are still staring up at that same old glass ceiling. Of the 2024 Fortune 500 companies, just 50 had female CEOs—much more than the 1992 total of three, but slow progress over the course of three decades.
Back then, less than 5% of senior management roles in companies Fortune surveyed were held by women. But it was obvious that there was no shortage of talented women in the workforce. The CEOs surveyed were quite clear that it was men who were the problem. “I’m not sure there’s a lot that women can do about it,” Sara Lee CEO John H. Bryan told the surveyors. “They’re already working hard and are very qualified. It shouldn’t be this way, but too many senior managers, and particularly CEOs, tend to want to pass their jobs along to someone who’s the image and likeness of themselves.”
In her piece, Fisher highlighted several women who had beaten the odds to score high-level jobs, such as Carol Bartz, then the software company Autodesk’s CEO and chairman. Bartz stressed the importance of networking for women in business, and her sense of “responsibility to help pave the way for others—including my daughter, who’s 4.” After a 14-year run as chief exec of Autodesk, Bartz would go on to become CEO of Yahoo, where she took the reins from cofounder Jerry Yang in 2009.
Hazel O’Leary, then an executive vice president at a Minneapolis power company, acknowledged that fitting in with the boys’ club in top leadership sometimes required personal compromises. She described taking golf lessons, despite having no affinity for the sport, in order to “be part of the prevailing corporate culture.” Just months after the article was published, O’Leary would become the first woman and the first Black U.S. Secretary of Energy—appointed by the newly elected President Bill Clinton, an avid golfer.
Several of the women featured in the 1992 Fortune article remained power players in corporate America for decades: Irene Rosenfeld, then an executive vice president at Kraft-General Foods, became chairwoman and CEO of Frito-Lay in 2004, then of Kraft Foods in 2006. Jill Barad, then president and COO of the toymaker Mattel, had risen through the ranks in part by turning around sales of the troubled Barbie dolls division. She went on to serve as the company’s CEO from 1997 to 2000. (One wonders what she thought of the Mattel CEO character depicted by Will Ferrell in last year’s Barbie film.)
As we wait to find out whether U.S. voters will shatter the ultimate glass ceiling by electing a woman president, Fisher’s piece serves as a window into how much has changed for women in business in 30 years—and how much hasn’t.
