Origin stories

Why are there so few female CEOs? That was the question Terrance Fitzsimmons, a lecturer in organisational leadership at The University of Queensland Business School, tried to answer when he embarked on his PhD back in 2007.

He didn’t arrive at an answer but he did stumble on extraordinary insights into the backgrounds of the women who make it to the top rung of the corporate ladder.

At the time of his research, there were only 45 female CEOs out of around 1500 ASX-listed companies; 31 agreed to an in-depth interview.

What Fitzsimmons found stunned him – of the 31 women he talked to, 28 had a background in small business.

“They came from families where their father was self-employed and their mother was either actively involved in the business or employed in other positions. In either case, their mother was still identified as primarily responsible for maintaining the household,” he wrote in his thesis.

The small-business background was a feature unique to female CEOs; the male CEOs he interviewed came from professional families.

Fitzsimmons’ research also uncovered three additional key traits of female CEOs: they were from large families; had suffered a trauma in childhood, such as forced migration or the loss of a parent; and had a non-traditional female role model who wasn’t their mother.

“These findings weren’t intentional,” Fitzsimmons says. “We were looking at life narrative and pivotal moments. It was during capstone questions, such as things that might have predicted that person becoming a CEO, that these stories came out.”