It depends how you define dominance.
The following information is from a presentation at BABAT with my colleagues Ashley Williams, PhD, LABA, BCBA-D Candice Colón, PhD, BCBA-D, LABA Hanna Rue.
86% of Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) certificants identify as female. So if you define dominance by that metric alone, then perhaps.
By most definitions however, dominance has to do with influence and power. That’s why it’s pretty well accepted that the “top 1%” in our country have an imbalance of control over the market than the other 99%.
We started looking at data from a random sample of provider agencies from the The Council of Autism Service Providers including both for-profit and non-profit companies. To date, we’ve included 120 companies including 400+ leaders in our data set.
Among the companies from our data set, females represent about half the CEOs. Is that adequately representative of the workforce?
For annual salaries among the non-profits in our data set, women receive about $40k less than men on average. This trend is consistent across other leadership positions included in the analysis.
In private equity (PE) owned companies, females held 81% of CCO roles, 15% of CFO and CEO roles, and 39% of COO roles. When you consider reporting structure, does this equate to dominance?
Across PE owned, single and multi-state, and non-profit companies, CEO roles are occupied by females in 15% of PE owned companies, and between 41% and 59% for the others.
This is the beginning of a deeper analysis, and extends well beyond a binary gender distinction.
We’ll continue to dig into the data!
Again, I thank my colleagues listed above for their leadership in this analysis and extend a special acknowledgment to Dr. Williams for taking the lead on this project.
Partners Behavioral Health: improving standards in the discipline of ABA.
Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D
