Redheads Unfairly Overrepresented In Senior Leadership Roles
My last article, Stop Blaming the Ceiling, hit a nerve. A few people reached out to tell me I was wrong. Good. That means it landed. This is my compassionately confrontational response.
Redheads make up less than 2% of the global population. Yet a study of the UK's FTSE 500 found them significantly overrepresented in CEO roles. This is not coincidence. This is systemic. This is a blight on the equality of every brunette who has ever been passed over for a leadership role through no fault of their own.
Where is the outrage?
And that's just the beginning. Because once you start looking, the data is genuinely harrowing.
58% of Fortune 500 CEOs are at least six feet tall. Barely 3% of the global population clears that mark. If you are standing at five-foot-ten reading this, I am sorry. The boardroom was not built for you. We are losing an entire generation of five-foot-ten talent and nobody is convening a summit about it.
Firstborn children are 30% more likely to reach top management than their younger siblings. Thirty percent. If you came second, third, or God forbid fourth, the system was rigged before you drew your first breath. The middle children of this country deserve better.
Left-handers represent 10% of the population but up to 20% of US presidents have been left-handed. Here in Australia, nobody has even bothered to check. Which is arguably worse. The right-handed majority has been quietly shut out of the highest office in the land for two centuries and we have apparently decided this is fine.
If you were born in March or April, congratulations. Research shows you are twice as likely to become a CEO as someone born in June or July. You had no input into the decision. A maternity ward, not a boardroom, set your career trajectory - and we have built no program to address it.
48% of female S&P 500 CEOs are blonde. Blonde hair occurs naturally in 2% of the world's population. That is a 2400% overrepresentation. The brunettes we were worried about at the start of this article are, it turns out, the least of our problems. Has anyone gone back to check whether they were actively discouraged from applying, or are we just going to let this one slide?
We spend enormous energy focused on the attributes that appear to skew careers - attributes you can do absolutely nothing about. You cannot change your height. You cannot change the hand you naturally and legibly write with. You did not choose your natural hair colour, your birth order, or the month you were born.
So once you have finished being outraged about the things you cannot change, what are you doing about the one thing you can?
Influence is not inherited. It is not correlated with height, hair colour, the month you were born, whether you arrived first, or which hand you write with. Yes, some people get a head start - wealth, connections, social standing. It opens doors. Just like being six-foot-five, red-headed, born in March, and the firstborn left-hander in the family. They are all just attributes. None of them are the thing itself. Influence is built - deliberately, through specific behaviours, over time - by people who understand that the gap between where they are and where they want to be is not a discrimination problem. It is a visibility problem. A positioning problem. A story problem.
The leaders who break through ceilings - real ones, not statistical ones - are not the ones who waited for the demographic conditions to improve. They are the ones who developed enough influence that the organisation's existing picture of a leader had to update itself.
That is the work. Less comfortable than a good statistic. Considerably more useful.
