Women are losing ground in business leadership positions across Utah, according to a leadership study.

The Utah Women & Leadership Project released its four-year update of the research brief, “The Status of Women Leaders in Utah Business: A 2018 Update,” this week. The study found, surprisingly, the number of female CEOs and executive board members has dipped since 2014.

According to the report, women are less represented the higher up in an organization they go, and their gains in these positions have backtracked in the past four years. The research looked at Utah companies from various industries and found that only 6.4 percent of top leadership roles within these companies were held by women in 2018, compared to 11.6 percent in 2014.

“Hence, in the past four years, a substantially lower percentage of women are serving in top leadership roles in Utah businesses with 100 employees or more,” authors said in the report.

There also was a slight decrease in women serving in local companies’ board of directors seats. In 2018, females only make up 12 percent of these boards, compared to 14.2 of women in 2014. Interestingly, the report found that companies with female board members are also more likely to have a female CEOs, company presidents and more female directors.

Susan Madsen, founder of the Utah Women & Leadership Project, said the drop in females holding top-level positions is important to the push for parity in business leadership by various groups in Utah.

“We would have expected — in four years with more discussion about these topics — that the numbers would have at least slightly increased,” Madsen said.

Madsen postulated that the decrease is due to the influx of tech companies to Silicon Slopes. The study found that women are more likely to be in C-suite level positions in the health care, social assistance retail or administrative support industries. There are very few female CEOs in Utah’s tech industry.

“We continue to struggle getting women to major in tech, STEM, and business fields, so there is a worry about the pipeline. Tech companies tend to have male leadership and boards in general, so it makes sense that this may be one of the reasons,” Madsen added.

The study suggested that company leaders take steps to effectively change these numbers across all industries. Suggestions included the following: creating a pipeline of women leaders by providing developmental opportunities for females through mentoring and training; educating top company leaders to become change agents for diversity; considering at least one woman candidate for every director opening; and having at least one woman on the board of directors.

These suggestions are not new, and have been discussed by Madsen and others for the past few years. Statistically, these efforts have not yet led to better female leader numbers.

“Our hope is that this study will continue to motivate discussion in companies, associations, groups like Silicon Slopes, chambers of commerce, and others,” Madsen said.

The full report is available at https://www.uvu.edu/uwlp.