Where are the Women?

AuthorStewart, Heather Dawn
PositionFrom the Editor

"Why don't you have more women in your magazine?" This is a question I am asked on a fairly regular basis. For good reason! From our monthly roundtables, which, depending on the industry, feature anywhere from majority women (nonprofits) to no women (I'm looking at you, construction), to our monthly awards programs, women are not well represented in the pages of Utah Business.

I've been involved with Utah Business in various capacities since 2005, and its persistent gender disparity is something I am deeply, painfully aware of. The current Utah Business editorial staff is entirely comprised of women, and this is an issue that we continually think about and discuss.

So what are we doing about it? We actively seek out women to invite to our roundtables. We carefully source stories, looking for women who can add perspective to our articles. Each month we write Spotlight profiles of two standouts in the business community, and we make sure that at least one of them is a woman. Are these efforts enough? Clearly not.

The distressing truth is the disparity you see in the pages of Utah Business is in many ways a reflection of our business community. I know there are incredible women doing amazing things in Utah. But they don't seem to make it into the upper levels of leadership in their companies. For example, our Fast 50 program recognizes the fastest-growing companies in Utah. It's based on financial data the companies submit to an accounting firm. So we're not choosing the companies-the data dictates who makes it on the list. Last year, there were no women CEOs in the entire group of 50 companies. None.

In fact, for most of our awards programs, we receive dozens of nominations for men for every single nomination we receive for a woman. For our 2018 CEO of the Year program, which will appear in our March issue, we received a total of 48 nominations. Only one of them was for a woman.

The situation is actually...

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