Key Milestones in Women's Financial and Professional History
Women's History Month topics often highlight the first women to break barriers in finance and corporate leadership. In 1967, Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, a milestone documented by the NYSE's own historical records NYSE. In 1972, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited lenders from discriminating based on sex, fundamentally expanding women's access to credit. The first woman to lead a Fortune 500 company was Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, who topped the list in 1972. In 2014, Janet Yellen became the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. More recently, Jane Fraser became the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank as CEO of Citigroup in 2021, a fact reported by Forbes Forbes.
The timeline of Women's History Month topics also includes legislative and economic milestones. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed in 2009, was the first bill President Barack Obama signed into law, aimed at closing the gender pay gap by resetting the statute of limitations for pay discrimination claims with each new paycheck. In 2021, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules requiring public companies to disclose diversity statistics for their boards, a move detailed on the SEC's website SEC. The first all-female spacewalk occurred in 2019, with NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir replacing a battery charge/discharge unit. In the corporate world, the number of women CEOs in the Fortune 500 reached a record 10.4% in 2023, according to data from Catalyst Catalyst.
Gender Pay Gap and Economic Participation Data
Women's History Month topics frequently cite the persistent gender pay gap across industries. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, the global gender pay gap is estimated to take over 130 years to close at the current rate of progress. In the United States, women earned approximately 82 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2022, a figure reported by the Pew Research Center Pew Research Center. The gap widens for women of color, with Black women earning about 63 cents and Hispanic women earning about 58 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. In finance, a 2023 study by Deloitte found that women hold only 21% of C-suite positions in financial services firms.
Economic participation rates for women vary significantly by country and sector. The International Labour Organization reports that the global labor force participation rate for women was 47% in 2023, compared to 72% for men. In the tech sector, women held 28% of professional computing jobs in the United States in 2023, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology NCWIT. Venture capital funding tells another story: all-female founding teams received just 2% of total venture capital investment in 2022, as reported by PitchBook PitchBook. In contrast, companies in the S&P 500 with at least three women on their boards have outperformed those with no women directors on metrics like return on equity over the past decade.