Lack of data. If I could find the historical lists of the S&P500 including CEO gender, or the entire list of Fortune 1000 companies by year, I'd look at any of the alternatives you suggest. The reality is getting the data is pretty tough, so we work with what we have. I've actually just gotten a dump of data from Morningstar that should allow me to expand the scope, but as with everything, there is work involved to make it usable....so stay tuned.
stolio|11 years ago
First, sorry but no excuses for releasing questionable studies that will spread like wildfire due to confirmation bias. Just because something is 'girl positive' doesn't mean we should all abandon our critical thinking skills. It's a small fraction of these feminist studies that go viral that can withstand any amount of scrutiny which makes the movement look worse.
I figured out how to get Fortune 1000 companies arbitrarily far back, and the S&P500 back to 2005. But the information is under copyright. I spent a long time thinking about the implications of helping you subvert copyright and decided that it's not something I'm going to do even though I'd like to see the study done better.
If you want the 2014 Fortune 1000 with contacts (i.e. CEO names) it costs $1799 from Fortune, the historical data from 1996-2013 costs $399/yr though it's unclear if that includes CEO names. (http://www.fortunedatastore.com/) Fortune's contact for historical data is female, she may be sympathetic to your cause. The S&P500 data might cost another $5-10k.
Since what you're doing is commercial your company has a responsibility to go through the proper channels to get your data. Really, the project is being used for advertising and brand-recognition. I also think your company has a responsibility to make sure you have the data you need to do proper analysis when you're representing the company.
Honestly I can't believe a company focused on quantitative market analysis doesn't already have this data!
Once you have CEO names it should be fairly straightforward to assign gender.