How athletic hobbies benefit women’s leadership

When I decided to work on a PhD in leadership, it didn’t take long to settle on a research topic. As an ex-CEO and a marathon runner, I had to find out if there was a connection between leaders’ effectiveness and their passionate non-work interests.

The subject of “serious leisure” was not new to career coaches and to the popular press, but academic research had been virtually silent about it. With my research team, we started by inventorying public information on the serious leisure of top CEOs (those leading companies included in the S&P 500 index, the largest listed corporations in the US) and on how these CEOs see the contribution of their passionate hobbies to their leadership.

I then conducted private research interviews with over 20 CEOs of major US companies on this subject. But, while their hobbies were diverse, the vast majority of the CEOs in our study were men. When we shared our insights, many female leaders wrote to ask “where are the women?”

Women are still rare at the top of the corporate ladder, with only 24 females among the CEOs of S&P 500 companies. Eight among them are known to either practise a sport passionately or to have a history of athletic achievement in high school or college, from Anthem CEO Gail Boudreaux, who is in the New England Basketball Hall of Fame, to Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman with her black belt in taekwondo.