But Fortune has found that mixed-gender co-CEO pairs are exceedingly rare, recently and historically. Although women co-CEOs are not unusual among women-founded startups, female co-CEOs at large firms are even rarer than women running companies solo.
Our findings reflect a leadership pipeline problem that has been well-covered by Fortune over the years: Women are still not sitting in the most powerful roles within the C-suite, namely the CFO and COO jobs, which are more likely to produce future CEOs. Boards and executive leaders are not doing enough to put women on the path to the top job. The few women who do crack the C-suite tend to hold roles like CHRO, CMO, or general counsel.
According to their analysis of securities filings, 86% of the executives at companies that filed to go public in that time period were men, a significant hike compared to 2024, during which men made up 63% of executives at companies making their trading debut. (They found one co-CEO pairing in the IPO data. The co-CEOs were both men.)
“I see it as male dictators with so much power and ego that they let their male prodigies fight it out to see who will become top dog,” Rallis says.
“In some part of the zeitgeist,” Brown says, “there’s this backlash to the sense of femininity being brought into the workforce.” There’s a feeling, she added, “that we’ve softened the workforce and it needs to get some grit back and some guts back.”
But she also suspects this batch of appointments may be part of a more familiar story— when a man in power says, “I get to choose my buddies. I get to choose what’s comfortable.”
