Representation and the Power of Randomness
If you study power, as I do—or, if you have eyes—you might notice a depressing fact about modern society: the people in charge aren’t representative of who they lead.
This is true in every conceivable way: our leaders are far richer, of course, but they’re also from a tiny slice of professional backgrounds, life experiences, and upbringings. More bad news: they’re more likely to be psychopaths, too.
But there are also alarming racial and gender skews.
If you just look at gender, for example, the average percentage of women in national legislatures globally is 26 percent. Across the world, only 1 in 4 elected officials is a woman.
Toward the bottom of the league table, there are some truly atrocious cases of gender imbalance: Oman at 2%; Nigeria at 4%; Sri Lanka at 5%; and Japan at 10%.
But the United States isn’t doing great either. As of 2022, the figure stood at 29%, just three points above the global average. Canada is marginally better at 30%; the UK at 35%; and Australia at 38%.
(The highest proportion is in Rwanda—61%. Depressingly, it’s a dictatorship run by a man, Paul Kagame, who has packed his rubber-stamp parliament with women who aren’t allowed to challenge him, in the hopes that his commitment to faux gender representation will dupe donors into giving him more foreign aid money and ease pressure on him to resolve other glaring human rights issues. His gamble has paid off).
The power representation problem is dire in the business world. When I crunched the numbers for the US a few years ago, the figures were staggering. About thirty percent of the US population are white men, but of the Fortune 500 CEOs, 431 out of 500 were white men. The number of white male Fortune 500 CEOs named John or Jon (27) equaled the number of Asian CEOs (16) and Latino CEOs (11) combined. There were four black CEOs. None of the Latino or Black CEOs were women. Here’s the data for the Fortune 500 CEOs (from 2020), from my book Corruptible…
