Women CEOs Slowly Gain on Corporate America

— -- That's a record. But it's only one more than last year, a year when Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin missed becoming the first female president and vice president, and a year when frustration continued to mount on the corporate side over the plodding progress of women.

It's not just that the number of female CEOs is barely inching up. Women now receive about six in 10 college degrees, yet near the top there remains slow progress in the number of female directors, officers, highest paid — and women in the pipeline, according to research by Catalyst, Corporate Library and others.

USA TODAY has tracked the stock performance of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 for years. The annual examination began in 2003, when female CEOs so out-performed men, and again in 2004, that it looked like there might be something to the gender advantage, or at least something to the theory that the glass ceiling was so difficult to crack that the women who made it to the top were more talented than their male counterparts.

Then came 2005, the ouster of Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, the decline in the number of female CEOs from nine to seven, and a 12 percentage-point stock market under-performance among the women who remained. In 2006 and 2007, performance of men and women was almost identical.