Women At The Top In Biopharma: The Odds And How To Beat Them

There is little overt controversy about the representation of women among the senior management tiers of life sciences companies in pharmaceutical and biotechnology, but perhaps there ought to be more. Without industry-wide gender data, it impossible to say definitely that women are underrepresented in the senior management teams of pharma and biotech companies. However, where gender data are available for total employment rosters, near equality is usual in pharma and biotech.

Fully 50% of employees at AbbVie Inc., for instance, are women; Johnson & Johnson employees are 45% female worldwide and 46% female in North America; and the number is 52% at Biogen Inc.Merck & Co. Inc.'s internal staff survey shows that 48.7% of its employees in 2013 were women. The proportion will vary from firm to firm, but the available data suggest that the pharma/biotech sector in North America is an equal opportunity employer.

It is not, however, an equal opportunity promoter. Relative to their representation at the "grunt" level, far too few women make it on to the senior management teams in biopharma, according to a survey of 316 US and Canadian publicly held pharma and biotech firms conducted by the Pharma Data Unit at Informa, IN VIVO's parent company.

The survey is industry-wide in North America. It encompasses most of the pharma and biotech companies with operational bases in the US and Canada (even though some of the firms may now or soon have tax domiciles in Europe). It reaches from multinational firms such as Merck, J&J and Pfizer Inc. to the tiny, shiny IPO-wave surfers of 2014. Between them, they represent over 740,000 employees, $295 billion in annual drug sales and $65 billion in annual R&D spending. Data from companies based in Europe and the rest of the world are available, but are less complete and not presented here.

The survey was conducted in October 2015 using advanced biological analysis of visual and literal data (we looked at photographs and biographies on company websites).

According to the survey, it appears that only 19% (423/2,231) of senior executives/senior managers/visionary team members/key employees are women. Only 19 (6%) of the firms have a female CEO. Worse still, only 12% (271/2,268) of directors of US and Canadian companies are women.

No matter how the situation is analyzed, the statistics pose challenging questions to an industry that insists it is gender-neutral.

The majority of US and Canadian companies (198/316; 63%) have either no female executives or just one: 106 companies have zero women senior executives and 84 have one. The number of companies diminishes as the number of women increases: 65 companies have two female execs, 29 have three women, and just 24 have more than three. (See Exhibit 1.)

The same pattern exists in large and small companies: no matter the size of the company (under 100 employees, 100–1,000 employees, or 1,000–10,000), firms with no women on their executive team outnumber those with just one, which outnumber those with two, and so on. The only exception to this "rule" is seen in the largest companies (more than 10,000 employees) where two or more women are present in 12 of the 15 firms in this group.

Exhibit 2 shows the importance of the relatively high representation of women among the management teams in the largest pharma companies. Most employees of US and Canadian biopharmas (610,000/740,000; 83%) work in companies with two or more female executives, even though most companies (198/316; 63%) in the US/Canadian biopharma universe have fewer than two female executives.

That does not mean, however, that the large multinational firms have got the gender balance right. Only 19.3% of executives in the biggest firms are female, virtually the same as firms with under 1,000 employees or fewer than 100. (See Exhibit 3.) They are doing better than firms with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees (where only 13.5% of the senior executives are women), but that's not saying much.

In any case, larger companies tend to have larger executive teams. Whereas firms employing under 100 people have around six executives each on average, the largest firms have teams of just over 12 senior executives on average.

A likely explanation of relatively high female executive numbers within larger companies lies not with the success of their gender diversity policy but, more simply, with the size of their executive teams.

Larger executive teams tend to have more female executives.

In executive teams of six or fewer, a majority of teams have no women. Teams of seven and above have two or more women executives more frequently than they have zero or one. Above executive team sizes of 12, there are no teams without women. (See Exhibit 4.)

There is a correlation between the number of women directors (or supervisory board members) and the number of female executives in a company. (See Exhibit 5.) As noted, of the 2,268 directors of the companies surveyed, just 271, 12%, are women.

There are 135 companies where no women sit on the board of directors: of those, 58 ( 42%) have no female executives. When one woman sits on the board, as is the case for 95 companies, the proportion of men-only executive teams falls to 36% (34/94). Among 72 companies with two or more female board members, only 11% (8/72) have no female executives.

So, if you are a woman and you want a top-tier job in pharma or biotech, it might be a good strategy to join a company that has appointed multiple women to its board of directors: your chances of making it are more than doubled.

Source for all exhibits: Informa