The share of Fortune 500 companies led by female CEOs held steady at 10.4% over the past year.
On the 2024 Fortune 500, Fortune‘s 70-year-old ranking of the top 500 U.S. companies by revenue, 52 businesses are run by women. At the beginning of 2023, the share of Fortune 500 businesses led by female chief executives crossed 10% for the first time—and that stat hasn’t budged since. Meanwhile, the impact of the Fortune 500 has continued to grow; together, the companies on the list account for two-thirds of U.S. GDP with $18.8 trillion in revenues.
“Let’s just call it what it is: the pace of change is so glacially slow,” says Jennifer McCollum, CEO of the workplace gender equity organization Catalyst. Still, 52 female CEOs is more than double the number of women leaders who ran Fortune 500 businesses six years ago—and a 2,500% increase from 1998, when only two Fortune 500 companies were led by women.