- The average age of C-suite executives at Fortune 100 companies is 57, according to a new study.
- C-suite executives had been getting younger since 1980, but that’s no longer the case.
- The new C-suite is “older, with broader industry experience and increasingly female,” wrote Wharton professor Peter Cappelli.
There’s a demographic shift occurring among today’s top executives: they’re older, and more likely to be female.
That’s according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school and Madrid’s IE University, published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
The average age of C-suite executives at Fortune 100 companies is 57, the same as it was four decades ago. The study looked at C-suite leaders at these companies from 1980 onwards.
“It’s a reversal of a long trend.” wrote Peter Cappelli, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Penn’s Wharton School of Management. The average age of C-suite executives was trending downwards after 1980, to an average age of 51 in 2001, he added.
The study also found that C-suite executives at Fortune 100 companies were more likely to have jumped across industries, and have backgrounds in law or finance. They were also more likely to be women, compared to levels seen in 1980. In 2021, 28% of Fortune 100 C-suite leaders were women.
“Here’s the face of the new C-suite: older, with broader industry experience and increasingly female,” wrote Cappelli.
Diversity has long been an issue within America’s top boardrooms, with more than half of board seats at Fortune 500 companies being held by white men in 2022, according to a report by consulting firm Deloitte.
Cappelli’s study found that C-suite executives at America’s biggest companies also tend to be older Gen X-ers — those born between 1965 and 1980.
This age trend can also be seen in Fortune 500 companies, where CEOs had an average age of 57.7 as of June, according to Fortune.
Spencer Stuart’s Board Index for 2023 found that the average age of independent directors in S&P 500 companies was 63. Further, the proportion of younger, next-generation directors — those aged 50 and under — appointed to these boards in 2023 declined to 11%, down from 18% last year.
