New women CEOs signal progress — and persistent gaps — on Long Island

Anesa Chaibi and Judy Murrah have joined a small club with historically few members — they are the newest women CEOs of Long Island publicly traded companies.

Murrah was promoted to CEO of Stony Brook biotechnology firm Applied DNA Sciences Inc. in June. Chaibi was recruited in February to lead Global Industrial Co. Inc., a billion-dollar Port Washington-based distributor of industrial supplies that is Long Island’s seventh-largest public company by revenue.

Women have made real gains in representation over the past decade, said Megan McConnell, a partner at Manhattan-based management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and one of the authors of the company’s "Women in the Workplace" research report published in 2024.

“This has been most true at the top — women today make up 29% of C-suite positions, compared to just 17% in 2015," she said.

Even with Chaibi’s and Murrah’s ascension to the CEO suite, parity in the executive offices — and often in the paychecks — is a long way off. Only 5 of the more than 60 Long Island public companies have a woman as their chief executive. The number had been six — the most ever at one time — until Wednesday, when Farmingdale biotechnology firm Enzo Biochem, whose CEO is Kara Cannon, stopped being a public company after completing a merger.

“Women have made progress in general," Chaibi said. "But I’m not convinced that all the barriers to hiring women in CEO roles have fallen.”

Gender pay disparity is also still an issue on Long Island.

In 2024, the 136 men on the highest-paid list had a median compensation package of $911,820. The median pay package for the 26 women was $547,036. Hope Jarkowski, chief legal officer for financial technology provider Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc., was the top-paid woman with a $2.8 million pay package. But that placed her only 29th on the list.

“The studies show that in general, women executives make less, so it is part of a broader trend,” said Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank critical of gender inequality in the workplace. “I think there’s still a little bit of that attitude that women should shoulder primary responsibility for caregiving and their place in the workplace is a little bit of a second-tier status.”

Long Island women combat corporate world's 'broken rung'

Among the top-paid 162 executives at Long Island public companies in 2024, only 26, or 16%, were women, according to a Newsday analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings. That’s a vast improvement from 10 years ago, when about 4% of the top executives were women and only one had the title of CEO.

Still, advancement remains difficult for women hoping to get promoted to their first managerial position, which could reverse the growth already made.

“These gains are both insufficient and fragile,” McConnell said. “The significant progress in the C-suite hasn’t translated to similar gains at other levels of senior leadership and they have not extended equally to women of color.”

The Women in the Workplace report found that for every 100 men promoted to a management position last year, only 81 women were promoted. The gap was largest among Black women, where only 54 were promoted for every 100 men, followed by Latinas, where only 65 were promoted for every 100 men.

The report said that because of this “broken rung” on the corporate ladder, “men significantly outnumber women at the manager level, which makes it nearly impossible for companies to support sustained progress at more senior levels.”

Black, Latino and Asian employees — both men and women — face daunting hurdles when it comes to getting promotions.

Separate McKinsey reports found that “workers of color receive fewer opportunities despite a higher desire to advance.”

The issue is most pronounced with Black employees, who account for about 14% of the U.S. workforce but hold only 3% of senior-level executive jobs across the entire private sector nationally. The reports said Black workers face a “double broken rung” — not only are they more likely to be passed over for promotion, they are also more likely to leave the company, which “reduces the number of Black candidates available for promotion.”

While there is no comprehensive data on how many Black employees hold executive-level positions at Long Island companies, the number may not even meet the low bar set nationally.

“I think it’s a little worse,” said Phil Andrews, president of the Long Island African American Chamber of Commerce. “We have the talent pipeline, but it’s just not happening.”

McConnell says there are “proven practices” that companies can adopt to make hiring and promotions fair, such as bias training for hiring managers and using clear evaluation criteria in the promotion process.

“Those companies that deploy the full array of practices tend to have made the greatest strides in advancing women,” she said.

She added that fewer than 25% of companies have adopted these practices.

As new CEOs, Murrah and Chaibi said they want to make it easier for women to begin a career and advance through the ranks. Murrah, long an advocate for STEM programs in Long Island high schools, has for decades encouraged girls to pursue careers in technology and science. She has seen a marked change — girls are excited about corporate jobs generally and STEM jobs specifically.

“They’re confident, they have some experience behind them,” she said. “I would say 15, 20 years ago, that wasn’t the same.”

Chaibi said companies must create a corporate culture where employees, especially women, are empowered to contribute and confident they will be rewarded.

“My experience has been that companies can help by investing in top talent earlier in their careers and instilling the confidence needed to not second-guess their capabilities,” she said. “There is nothing more powerful than identifying and nurturing young talent and seeing them launch their careers in ways that they never expected or anticipated.”