There are more Marks than women leading NZX companies, RNZ reported this morning. The Spinoff can now reveal that there are way more Marks than bogans.
It’s not exactly breaking news that women are underrepresented in business leadership, but RNZ found a funny and inventive way of demonstrating that this morning, by reporting that there are more Marks (nine) than women (six) leading NZX companies. “There are also six Davids and six Michaels”, RNZ reported. This appellative oddity shows how far we are from reaching gender parity in the field of business leadership (and, of course, more broadly).
Good journalism. But I found myself burning with another question: how many Souljahs, Sharlets and Lynxxes are CEOS of big New Zealand businesses? Are there more Marks than bogans?
A brief word on terminology before we begin. “Bogan” is often a term of derision, as with those horrible, snobby bogan baby names lists I have been railing against for almost a decade, but it can also be a useful, even affectionate descriptor for people in the lower classes who reject middle-class codes of dress and decorum, including naming conventions. I use it here with the greatest of affection (and loyalty), but also to allude to the snobs who don’t.
Anyway, a quick glance through the names of NZX company CEOs reveals that, yes, there are drastically more Marks than bogans: nine (9) versus zero (0) – unless you really go out on a limb and include “Darrin”, in which case, one (1). Traipsing through all the Pauls, Graemes and Johns, I could find more Suzannes than I could a single name featuring inventive spelling of a common word, like Miraccle or Ledgen – a hallmark of bogan names – and there were very few Zs and Xs, luxury brands, and gemstone names on offer like Mercedes or Krystal either, ie zero.
Why do this? Because names are a good proxy for class – not as reliable as they are for gender, but useful nonetheless – and the number of bogan names among NZX CEOs tells us something important about social mobility, like whether we have any of it. And I gotta say, based on this totally unscientific experiment RNZ forced me to conduct, our social mobility is not looking great.
What about Hones, Arohas, Siones and Sosefinas? Heaps of common Polynesian (including Māori) first names among the sea of CEOs called Simon would be a good sign for social mobility, given Māori and Pacific children are more likely to grow up with material hardship compared to European children. Alas, there are no NZX CEOs with common Polynesian first names. Other non-English, non-bogan names are thin on the ground also.
What to make of this? Perhaps the list of CEOs called Mark, Michael and John is simply stuffed with rags-to-riches tales of boys (including Māori and Pacific boys) who grew up in poor or working-class households, but whose parents had the foresight to give them nondescript biblical names. Perhaps.
Or maybe it’s just really hard to ascend into wealth when you grow up without money – even harder than it is to ascend into a leadership position when you’re born female in a middle-class family. What’s that bit from the bible about it being harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? Seems like it’s harder still for a bogan to become CEO.