What Country Has the Most Women Leaders?

Despite recent advancements, women remain grossly underrepresented in leadership positions in the US. In the corporate sector, women constitute only 10.9% of Fortune 500 CEOS (a recent jump from 5%) and 25% of C-suite leaders.  For the first time in its 248 year history, the US has a female Vice-President, but this development is overshadowed by the fact that only 25% of Senators and 28.5% of House Representatives are women. In terms of political empowerment of women, the US ranked 63 out of 146 countries in the most recent Global Gender Gap Report.

What countries are knocking out of the park in terms of women’s leadership? Well, it turns out that the adage, “You can’t have it all,” applies just as much to gender equality as it does to work-life balance. Overall, the Nordic countries of Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden are the darlings of global gender equality ratings, achieving impressive levels of social, political, and economic equality, but when it comes to women’s leadership in business and politics, there are a few surprises.

Business Leadership

At 13.4%, Norway has bragging rights for the highest percentage of women CEOs, with Singapore, Thailand, Sweden and Taiwan rounding out the top five (5.4% of CEOs globally are women).  The Philippines earns the top spot when it comes to gender parity in senior management, with women holding 43% of senior management roles (compared to 25% globally). As for corporate boards, Norway again earns top honors, with women holding 36.7% of seats on corporate boards, followed by France (29.9%), Sweden (24.4%), and Italy (22.3%). The global average is 19.7%.

The country where you are most likely to have a woman as a manager is Jordan, where a whopping 62% of managers are women. This trend is echoed in Saint Lucia, Botswana, Honduras, or the Philippines, where your odds of having a woman as a manager are higher than having a man.

Entrepreneurship

Trends in entrepreneurship are an important part of the global narrative of women’s leadership, since levels of formal sector employment are lower in many parts of the world, meaning that citizens must find alternative paths to economic empowerment. In this regard, the presence of women is more encouraging for supporters of gender equality.

Africa is home to the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs in the world. Globally, women own 33% of small, medium, and large businesses, but in Ghana, 44% of micro, small, and medium businesses are led by women. According to the 2022 Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, Botswana, Uganda, and Ghana are the global leaders in terms of women’s business ownership.

Political Leadership

According to the United Nations, “as of January 2024, there are 26 countries where 28 women serve as Heads of State or Government, and only a third of UN member countries have ever had a woman leader.” In terms of political leadership, Rwanda takes top honors, with 67% of parliament seats and 50% of cabinet posts occupied by women. In only four other countries in the world—Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates—do women outnumber men in parliament. To date, women have not achieved equal representation in any European country, though Sweden and Iceland, with 47% and 47.6% respectively, are nearly there. Iceland’s number is particularly impressive since it was achieved without gender quotas.

Key Takeaways

These statistics only offer a glimpse of the complex picture of gender equality in government and business worldwide. Leadership at the top levels is but one measure of the influence of women in society. Nevertheless, there are several key takeaways from this brief survey of data on women’s leadership:

• With the notable exceptions of Iceland and Norway, no single country or region dominates across all categories. Women have made admirable achievements in many regions of the world despite the obstacles in their way.

•  In many cases, women’s advancement did not occur organically, but rather, was the result of quotas. Over 130 countries have implemented some form of political quota to increase women’s representation. Similarly, Norway’s impressive progress in terms of women’s representation on corporate boards is also due to a 2003 stipulation that women should hold 40% of seats on corporate boards.

•  The factors that influence women’s leadership in various domains are complex and cannot be reduced to a simple formula. We need to dig further into the successes of individual countries to identify factors that might be useful in facilitating similar results in other parts of the world.