Chart of the Day: More large companies are run by men named “John” than by women

Inspired by a recent report that calculated that there are more men named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on the boards of large companies, an economist at the New York Times has applied this index to a variety of institutional contexts. 

Chart source: Execucomp via NYT

Turning to the CEOs of those major companies, for example, reveals an even more egregious stat: For each woman CEO, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James. In fact, the number of companies run by men named John exceeds those run by women. (Same with David.)

Of course, the index isn’t a particularly accurate gauge of gender inequality in all contexts — in institutions that are more ethnically diverse, for example, or that draw from a younger generation with more Jacobs and Tylers than Johns and Bobs. But it’s still a revealing/depressing experiment.