Data on a thousand utilities’ CEOs tell a tale of uneven progress

A decade ago, I published a national study of American water utility chief executive officers (CEOs) with data gathered in 2011. That study yielded important insights about the people who hold these critical leadership posts. Twelve years later, I’m back with a follow-up study of water CEOs, thanks to the outstanding assistance of Wisconsin PhD student Natalie Smith and the generous support of Spring Point Partners’ Delta initiative.

In 2023 Natalie and I gathered demographic, educational, and professional background information for the CEOs of more than a thousand water utilities.* Our sample included all community water systems that served populations of 75,000 or more, plus a randomized sample of systems that serve populations between 25,000-75,000.** The dataset is now complete, and it’s yielding fascinating findings about the people who lead America’s water systems. This is the first in what will likely be several occasional posts over the coming year reporting on who water CEOs are and the career paths that led them to positions of leadership.

This post gets the ball rolling with a look at gender in the CEO position.^† There are at least three reasons to be interested in the relative share of men and women in executive posts. First, there’s a general interest in equity and representation in water sector organizations. Second, voluminous research on organizational behavior in other industries also finds that, on average, men and women tend to bring different styles, behaviors, and priorities to the job. Third, as I’ve observed before, gender strongly predicts attitudes and consumer behavior related to water in studies of the mass public. It stands to reason that women could bring those perspectives to their water sector work in ways that enrich the field.

What share of water utility CEOs are women? What kinds of utilities are more or less likely to have a woman in the corner office? Let’s see what the data say.

A growing minority

Women in leadership posts were pretty rare when I started working in the water sector back in the late 1990s. When I first started attending national water utility conferences, the gender imbalance was pretty obvious. Our 2011 CEO survey showed just how lopsided the gender distribution in water utilities’ executive ranks was: 94% of American water utilities were led by men. In that first study, there were so few women CEOs that I couldn’t even analyze correlates of gender statistically.

Casual observation of convention center corridors at more recent conferences suggests that women have made significant inroads. Our data confirm that impression: the share of utilities led by women has more than doubled over the past twelve years.

Today, about 13% of the nation’s water utilities have a woman in charge. For context, that proportion is lower than the share of women executives in school districts (24%), but roughly the same as city managers and energy sector CEOs, and ahead of law enforcement (8%), and the Fortune 500 (10%). Although women are nowhere near parity in water utility leadership, our findings show a dramatic increase in women’s representation over a relatively short period of time.

The important question looking ahead is whether this rate of increase will continue. Future posts analyzing CEO career paths will offer reasons for both optimism and pessimism on that score (hint: the typical route to the corner office looks a lot different for men and women).

Sex by sector

Size matters, again

The smallest utilities in sample, serving populations of around 25,000, have a roughly 10% chance of having a woman CEO. That likelihood climbs to more than 13% for a population of 100,000 and all the way up to 20% for a utility that serves a million people.

Progress, but not everywhere

Although women still occupy a small fraction of the top executive jobs in American water utilities, our findings demonstrate clear and encouraging progress toward parity over the past twelve years. Water sector organizations that have worked to improve opportunities for women should be proud of that progress. But the improvement has been uneven: gender differences across utility size and organizational structure suggest that differences in recruitment and promotion processes lead to gendered differences in top leadership posts. Future analysis will seek to identify those differences.

*It was mostly Natalie, TBH. She’s pretty great.

**We stratified the randomized sample to ensure sufficient numbers of investor-owned utilities for analysis.