Like many of us, I’ve found aspects of the last 18 months hard. For me, a pinch point came at the start of this year when I was struggling with an echoey feeling in my head – an empty space with billowing tumbleweed where I was used to a hive of activity. I now realise that this is the part of my brain usually occupied with the logistics of a busy five-person household – the place where I hold details of rugby, scouts, karate and basketball timings along with who needs transport, kit or feeding in time for these various activities! In the quiet January of home school, remote work and zero activities there was nothing to fill this mental space and so a project found its way in instead.
I had been momentarily distracted by a twitter furore over behaviour at a local council meeting in the UK and the interventions of Jackie Weaver who “became an internet star” according to the Guardian, for her efforts. The twitter thread discussing Jackie’s exploits led me to Sue Montgomery, mayor of the Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough in Montreal, who was knitting during council meetings to help her concentrate and to demonstrate that men speak more than women at the meetings. Seeing the evidence of her observations as a visual piece of craft was compelling and got me thinking about knitted data sets!
Since I share an interest in gender balance and how it plays out in leadership, that seemed as good a place to start as any. For my initial data set, I picked the Fortune 500 as it seemed a ready made set and sure enough I could download the spreadsheet and then it was only a matter of looking up each company, finding the gender of their CEO, and the membership of their Board to calculate the gender balance thereon. Quite transparent and accessible if a little tedious and time consuming (but remember time was in plentiful supply).
I acquired some yarn from the great selection @VibesandScribes and I was off! The pattern was simple – cast on 102 stitches, knit a few rows of ribbing as a base and then begin: first two stitches represent the CEO and the remaining 100 are the Board knit in proportion to gender. Women stitched in a red variegated yarn and men in blue (traditional choices I know!). The resultant throw/wrap proved to be both attractive and enlightening:
In the end, I knit the first half of the Fortune 500 list – the 250 largest US corporations for which revenues are publicly available, as compiled by @FortuneMagazine.
What I learned in the process proved fascinating:
- 30% – the average of female board members across the set
- 67% – the highest percentage of women on a single board
- 0% – the lowest percentage of women on a board – there are four
- 31- the number of companies with >40% female board members
- 9 – the number of companies with <10% female board members
I then got curious about patterns I was noticing in name frequency so I reviewed the data to discover that, within the top 250 CEOs, you are equally likely to be a man named Michael as a woman (there are 20 of each!). Moreover, the top 12 names account for over 100 of the CEOs and the top 18 names account for more than half of the set!
Top Twelve Names:
Michael (20) James (13) David (12) Thomas (10)
Stephen (10) John (8) Brian (7) Richard (6)
Robert (6) William (6) Mark (6) Jeffrey (5)
Total 109
Remaining Repeated Names:
Daniel (5) Charles (3) Joseph (3)
Douglas (2) Larry (2) Gregory (2)
Total 17
I’m not an anthropologist but it seems to me that, aside from gender, this list may speak to a lack of diversity in leadership – whether of age, ethnicity or both.
I confess, I was quite thrilled with my first ever knitted data set. It looks good, tells an interesting story and I learned alot in the process. I also discovered that “knitted data sets” are more properly called “creative data visualisation” and I’m not alone. In fact, according to Bonnie Barrilleaux, data scientist, “there are enough knitted data visualizations out there to form a true art subgenre” and she had compiled her own list of favourites a full year before the idea landed in my brain!
My next two endeavours were more personal and less data heavy – I knitted a scarf for a friend, charting the rainfall and temperature on her birthday for the first half-century of her life and I then created a timeline scarf for a loved one, with a nod to Dr Who, charting their changes of job and address over the decades.
They proved to be momentary breathers however, as the gender in leadership theme drew me back in with gusto. I decided it would be interesting to see how Ireland compares to the US in gender balance terms.
I also have a long-standing interest in cross-sectoral themes so I wondered if I could create a comparative data visualisation showing the gender balance across the top organistions from the Public, Private and Charity Sectors in Ireland?
The short answer is that I could:
In this piece, you’re looking at the gender balance on the Boards of the top 85 State Boards, Charities and Private companies in Ireland (reading left to right).
The long answer is that, for this piece, the process of finding the data was almost as telling as the data itself.
Researching each sector was a unique experience. For the private sector, my first job was to find a data set sorted by size. Fortunately the Irish Times 1000 does a similar job for the Irish market that the Fortune 500 did for the US so that gave me the list. I then began working through the process of looking up each company to ascertain their CEO and the gender makeup of their Board. This proved less straightforward – not all the companies are publicly listed so the information isn’t necessarily on their own website. Some of the larger multinational companies don’t make clear whether there is a separate Board of Directors for their Irish operations and, if so, who sits on it. Some data could be accessed through the CRO, others I pieced together from various public sources. In the end, I compiled the data but it was certainly not as transparent as the Fortune 500.
I then moved to building the list for the Charity sector. Here, the existence of the Charity Regulator was helpful in that they have a publicly accessible list of all registered charities. It’s quite an unwieldy data set to work with however so I was extremely grateful for the assistance of The Wheel, who review that data annually and were willing to share a more manageable list of the top 200 charities. My next surprising discovery was that the top 200 registered charities doesn’t tally particularly well with what we, in the general public, have in mind when we think of the “charity sector”. For example, the largest registered charity in Ireland is the HSE, followed by the Higher Education Authority, the Education Training Boards, the Public Hospitals and all the Universities in the country. In fact, you’re at number 20 on the list before you get to Concern Worldwide – the first “charity” people might generally think of as such. In the end, to build the list of the top 85 charities by my definition, brings us down to 151 on the list of officially registered charities. This is important to note because the scale of the ones that were left are a fraction the size of those that I excluded as being really public services (i.e. not organisations run voluntarily which the public can support through donations).
When it came to the public sector, I had additional decision making to determine what portion of the public sector made a reasonable comparator. In the end, I opted to use StateBoards.ie as my primary source since it is essentially Board membership that I am interested in. Their website also gave me access to a full list of the 212 individual Boards from which to build a list of the top 85 by turnover. That’s where it got a little tricky. I enquired of StateBoards.ie if they had the list sorted by turnover and they directed me to the press office of the Department of Public Expenditure who cheerfully informed me that they wouldn’t know that information! So, like the little Red Hen, I did it myself. By pulling up the 2019 Annual Accounts for each board, I charted the turnover figures and then sorted for the full set of 212 to identify the top 85. Once again, the HSE is top of the list and the last one to make the cut is the National Council for Special Education with a fascinating array of Boards in between.
The Data at a Glance:
So this table is the summary of what I now know about gender balance in Irish Board rooms. If gender equity were a competition, clearly the Charity Sector is winning! The Irish Private Sector falls behind its US equivalent (26% vs 30%) as well as lagging both public and charity sectors here. While the public sector lands in the middle ground across all metrics.
Comparing the three sectors in this way also sparked my curiosity as to how much I was comparing like with like so I revisited the data to explore what the scale of operations are for the top 85 in each sector. As can be seen in the above table, if it were a Venn diagram, it would be more like a tower of overlapping bubbles with the top end of the Charity sector overlapping with the lower part of the Public sector and falling well outside the bottom of the private sector which overlaps with the top portion of the public sector spread.
In terms of other patterns, at first glance I didn’t see the recurrence of common names to the same degree in the Irish data as I had for the US. However, given the smaller sample size of each sector, at the last minute I thought to sum across the sectors and a small pattern did emerge. The top seven most frequent CEO names do in fact account for just over 20% of the total set (of 255 organisations) and the total list of repeated names comprises one third of the total list. While this isn’t as dramatic as the Fortune 500, it may still reflect a similar bias in terms of age/ethnicity. The top names, in order of frequency are:
Top seven names Remaining repeated names
John 13 Sean 3 Mark 2
Paul 10 Chris 3 Denis 2
Michael 8 Denise 3 Ian 2
David 7 Siobhan 2 Shane 2
Mary 6 Declan 2 Donal 2
Gerry/Gerard 6 Audrey 2 Niall 2
Pat 5 Joseph 2 Liam 2
Total 55 Total 31
After all of that, what have I really learned? I think I appreciate the power of visual data now in a way that I hadn’t previously – while the statistics I unearthed didn’t really shock or surprise me, seeing them represented in living colour made them more real. Overall, I was probably pleasantly surprised too – we’re in better shape than I might have thought in terms of gender balance – not quite as “pale, male and stale” as I might have feared. That said, I think we’re a long way from the Board rooms of Ireland truly reflecting the diversity of talent, perspective and experience that makes up our little country at this point in time. Finally I’ve discovered that craft, creativity and thinking differently about a well-worn topic provide a better way to spark conversations characterised by curiosity and a willingness to engage.
So that is the saga of my own personal lockdown lunacy and if you’ve stayed with me all the way to here then I appreciate your interest and would love to hear your thoughts.