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Counterexamples
A complete picture of the dataset includes the institutions in which a first-woman appointment has not occurred, or in which the cluster trend is not observed. These cases are not anomalies to be explained away; they are part of the dataset and they constrain the interpretations the pattern can support.
Religious leadership of the Catholic Church
The papacy and the College of Cardinals remain all-male. Catholic sacramental authority — bishops, priests, deacons in most traditions — remains restricted to men by current doctrine. Administrative and advisory positions in the Curia have seen women appointed in increasing numbers, but the sacramental and governing offices have not been opened. The Catholic Church is the most resistant of the major institutions tracked.
The United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman)
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the senior uniformed military position in the United States. As of this writing, no woman has held the role. Several US military branches have appointed first-woman chiefs in recent years (the Coast Guard in 2022, with women at the head of unified commands such as SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM in the same period), but the Chairman’s position remains a counterexample.
The Bank of England (Governor)
The Bank of England’s governorship has not been held by a woman. The current Governor, Andrew Bailey, took office in March 2020, in the same window during which the European Central Bank, the United States Federal Reserve, and the IMF were headed by women. The Bank of England is therefore a notable absence from the central-bank cluster.
The Bank of Japan (Governor)
The Bank of Japan’s governorship has not been held by a woman. Japan more broadly remains an outlier within the developed economies on senior institutional appointments of women.
The Fields Medal after 2014
The Fields Medal in mathematics had its first woman recipient in 2014: Maryam Mirzakhani. She died in 2017. Subsequent Fields Medal cycles (2018, 2022) included no further women among the recipients. If the award were operating under a coordinated diversification pressure, the pattern would have been expected to continue. It did not. The Fields Medal therefore stands as a counterexample to the broader awards-system pattern visible elsewhere.
The World Health Organization since 2017
The Director-General of the World Health Organization was held by women twice (Gro Harlem Brundtland 1998–2003; Margaret Chan 2006–2017), well before the principal cluster window. Since 2017 the position has been held by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. WHO is therefore an institution in which the first-woman appointment occurred well before the cluster and has not been repeated within it.
Major pharmaceutical companies after GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline appointed Emma Walmsley as Chief Executive Officer in April 2017 — the first woman to lead a major global pharmaceutical company. She left the role on 31 December 2025 and was succeeded by Luke Miels (male). No other major pharmaceutical company — Pfizer, Roche, Merck, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Takeda — has had a woman Chief Executive Officer either before or since. The pharmaceutical industry's first-woman CEO line consequently consists of a single institution and a single individual, and reverts to all-male leadership in the largest US-and-EU firms following her departure.
The United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Already noted above, but worth re-emphasising in the post-2024 context: several US military service branches have now had first-woman heads (Coast Guard 2022, SOUTHCOM 2021, TRANSCOM 2021, AMC 2020). The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the senior uniformed position by precedence — has not. Nor has the Vice Chairman.
What these counterexamples do and do not show
They show that the rate-acceleration visible across the broader dataset is not universal. Some institutions appear unaffected; some, including the most doctrinally rigid, show no movement at all. This constrains any interpretation that posits a single, uniform mechanism affecting all institutions equally.
They do not, however, refute the principal observation. The cluster documented elsewhere on this site remains a real feature of the dataset. What the counterexamples establish is the limits of its reach.
