The White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women's Leadership

The White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women's Leadership is unique in that it looks at 10 sectors and gives concrete solutions from experts in each sector for improving women's leadership. While other reports narrowly focus on specific sectors, Benchmarking Women's Leadership looks at ten sectors across American culture (politics, business, law, sports, academia, journalism, religion, film/tv, nonprofit, and military) and offers concrete, implementable solutions from experts in each sector on how to advance women's leadership to get to a critical mass.

Benchmarks refutes the myth that because women participate in the workforce in record numbers, there is not a crisis in women's leadership. Even though the majority of Americans are comfortable with women leading in all sectors, the reality is that women's leadership numbers are static at an average of 18% across all ten sectors we examined.

The public perception is that women are already leading in significant numbers but we're not - we're only at 18 percent ( low of 11 percent in the military and high of 23% in academia). And in areas, like non-profits where our overall numbers are larger only 21 % of CEOs with budgets of $25 million or more. Women of color are leading in much fewer numbers.

Change will not occur until there is a commitment from top leadership to significantly increase the representation of women in top positions. Unless we are prepared to hold ourselves, our companies, and our governments accountable for setting a target of reaching a critical mass or greater of women in leadership positions, we will not make progress.