Just 18% of the executives at the 100 largest medical device companies are women, and those companies average only 15% female composition in the C suite, according to an analysis of Medical Design & Outsourcing’s annual Big 100.
Of the 969 leadership roles in the companies on our list, only 171 are held by women, for an average of 15%. Nearly a quarter of those companies have no women in executive leadership roles.
And only three companies on the list have a female CEO: B. Braun Melsungen, Insulet and Paul Hartmann.
Those three companies, plus Cardinal Health, also employ women in more than a quarter of their executive roles – Cardinal Health at 43%, B. Braun Melsungen at 33%, Insulet at 33% and Paul Hartmann at 25%. Convatec ranks last, as only one of 16 (6%) of its executives is a woman.
Twenty companies have no women in leadership roles and another 24 have only a single woman executive.* The remaining 49 firms have at least one woman in a leadership role, with Baxter leading that subset with eight women leaders.
The following companies have no women in leadership positions:
- RTI Surgical (0/9)
- Masimo (0/8)
- Conformis (0/7)
- Bruker (0/6)
- Nihon Kohden (0/6)
- NuVasive (0/6)
- Drägerwerk (0/5)
- Steris (0/5)
- Ambu (0/4)
- Coloplast (0/4)
- Demant (0/4)
- Ra Medical Systems (0/4)
- Carl Zeiss Meditec (0/3)
- GN Hearing (0/3)
- Siemens Healthineers (0/3)
- EDAP (0/2)
- Fukuda Denshi (0/2)
- Miraca (0/2)
- Nipro (0/1)
- Utah Medical Products (0/1)
JMS Co., Omron, Terumo, Hoya, Konica Minolta, Nikkiso and Topcon were excluded from this analysis, which does not take into account the composition of boards of directors.
The top 20 medical device companies have a slightly higher number of women in leadership roles than the rest of the list. There is an average of 21% of women in leadership roles within the Top 20, which includes giants like Medtronic, Stryker and Johnson & Johnson. Ranking the lowest was Siemens Healthineers, which employs 50,000 people, where all three key personnel are men.
A note on our methodology: We use each company’s leadership/management pages on their website to find the executives at each company. We do not include directors and board members in the mix.
Here is how our top 20 Big 100 companies rank in women in leadership roles:
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* This article was corrected to reflect that Abiomed replaced one woman in an executive leadership role with another, but hasn’t published the change on its website. Olympus also said they have four women in leadership roles, but did not reflect it on their website. Olympus said it plans to improve the corporate leadership information it makes publicly available. A previous version of this article miscalculated the percentage of B. Braun Melsungen top leaders who are women; it’s 33%. ↩
