Female executives soar in aerospace industry
The already small roster of Fortune 500 companies led by women will shrink even further after Pepsico Inc. Chief Executive Indra Nooyi steps down from her role this year. But in one sector that has been maledominated, gender balance seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
By next year, three of the top U.S. defense firms — Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and most recently, Northrop Grumman Corp. — will have a female CEO. And Boeing Co. has had a woman at the helm of its $21 billion defense, space and security business since 2016.
While industry officials and observers have cheered the progress, many also say the corner office moves don’t reflect sweeping change in the overall industry. A survey released last year by trade publication Aviation Week found that only 24 percent of the aerospace and defense workforce is female. That number is down from 26 percent 10 years earlier.
Women made up only 3.2 percent of the logging industry, 9.1 percent of the construction workforce and 23.5 percent of the transportation and utilities industry, according to a report published last year by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that supports women in the workplace.
“Half of the population in the world today is women,” said Leanne Caret, chief executive of Boeing’s defense, space and security sector. “If we want to take full advantage and be the company we can ... then we need to have full access and availability to the talent globally. And why would we ever want to limit ourselves to a portion of the population?”
Northrop Grumman is the latest defense company to name its first female CEO, announcing last month that company President Kathy Warden will move into the top job next year. She will join CEOS Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin and Phebe Novakovic of General Dynamics.
Hewson, Novakovic and Caret were all named to Fortune’s list of most powerful women in business last year. Nooyi of Pepsico also made the list, as well as Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors Co., and Denise Morrison, then-ceo of Campbell Soup Co.
“It’s a lot of the larger companies and heavier industry today where the meritocracy reigns supreme again,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean and a professor in the practice of management at the Yale School of Management.
Warden, like Hewson, Caret and Novakovic, has steadily ascended the ranks of her company over the years since joining Northrop Grumman in 2008 as vice president of strategic intelligence initiative. In the last 10 years, she served as president of the company’s software-focused mission systems sector and chief operating officer.
That kind of upward trajectory into various leadership positions is important if women are to advance within these companies, industry observers said. And the growing number of female CEOS across the defense industry indicates that the pool of women engineers that joined the workforce decades ago has finally reached senior positions that are eligible for higher promotion.