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Methodology
This page sets the editorial line. It is the most important page on the site for assessing what we publish and what we deliberately do not.
What the dataset is
A list of institutional events. Each row is one appointment of a woman to a senior position in an institution where, at the time of the appointment, no woman had previously held the role. Each row carries the name of the appointee, the organisation, the role, the start date, the end date if applicable, and the public source documenting the appointment.
What the dataset is not
It is not a judgement of any individual’s qualifications, character, competence, achievements, or fitness for the role they hold or held. The unit of analysis is the institution, the date, and the rate at which institutional firsts have occurred. Whether a given appointee is the right person for the job is a separate question that this site does not engage with.
It is also not a comprehensive catalogue of every senior woman in every institution. It is restricted to firsts — the first woman to occupy a named senior position in a named organisation — because firsts are the events most likely to reflect the selection mechanism rather than ordinary staffing.
Scope
- Senior position. Heads of state and government, cabinet ministers, supreme- and constitutional-court justices, central-bank governors, intelligence-agency chiefs, military service heads and unified commands, presidents of major multilateral institutions, directors of major museums, and equivalent.
- First. First woman in the named role at the named institution. Subsequent women in the same role are not separate rows unless otherwise noted (e.g. consecutive female directors of a regulatory agency, where the consecutive pattern is itself the analytical point).
- Geography. Initial focus is Western institutions where the dataset can be sourced robustly. Coverage of non-Western institutions is being expanded; gaps reflect sourcing constraints, not editorial judgement.
- Time horizon. 1979 to present. Earlier firsts (Margaret Thatcher 1979, Vigdis Finnbogadottir 1980) are included as anchor points for the time-series.
Sourcing
Each entry should be supported by at least one publicly verifiable source — the organisation’s own announcement, official biography, or reporting in a reputable outlet. Where multiple sources disagree on a date, the official organisational source takes precedence.
Where biographical details are included on an individual entry, they are restricted to what the appointee’s own employer, government, or biographers have made public.
Documented vs. speculative
This site distinguishes carefully between:
- Documented mechanisms — written policies, eligibility rules, and institutional commitments that demonstrably affect outcomes. Examples include institutional-investor diversity mandates from the largest pension funds and university endowments, BlackRock and Vanguard proxy-voting policies on board diversity, Goldman Sachs’ 2020 IPO diversity requirement, the Academy’s 2024 Best Picture eligibility criteria, and pipeline organisations such as the College of Europe and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. These are verifiable from the institutions’ own publications.
- Speculative claims — assertions about coordination, intent, or hidden direction that go beyond what public sources support. The site does not publish speculative claims about named individuals. Where the broader interpretation of the data is itself speculative, it is labelled clearly as interpretation.
Counterexamples
Counterexamples are tracked with the same care as cluster members. The Catholic papacy, the Bank of England governorship, the Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Fields Medal’s record after 2014 are examples of senior positions in which the first-woman appointment has not occurred or in which the cluster trend is not observed. See counterexamples.
Editorial line
- No diagnostic or psychological claims about named individuals.
- No insinuation by association. Family backgrounds of appointees are mentioned only when documented by the appointee’s own employer or by mainstream reporting at the time of appointment, and only when directly relevant to the institutional question being analysed.
- Counterexamples receive equal editorial weight.
- The data is the artefact. Interpretation is labelled as such.
Corrections
The dataset will contain errors. Where an appointment is misdated, misattributed, or wrongly classified as a first when an earlier appointee held the role, the entry will be corrected and a brief note added to the about page. Public sources for corrections are welcome.
Update frequency
The dataset is appended as new firsts are documented and as historical firsts are added. The site is built from a single CSV; charts and indexes regenerate from that source.