Here is a brief excerpt from a three-part series of article by Bob Sherwin for Business Insider, Sherwin, the COO of leadership consultancy Zenger Folkman. He examines women’s leadership effectiveness, representation in corporate America, and solutions for increasing their ranks, building upon the firm’s research first published in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article.

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Images courtesy of Zenger Folkman

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In today’s large organization, as women climb up the corporate ladder they vanish. While the statistics vary slightly around the world, this is an extremely consistent pattern.

At the lowest levels, more than half of the employees in organizations are female. As you move to each successively higher level in the organization, the number of women steadily shrinks. At the CEO level, worldwide, there are only 3% to 4% who are women.

We find this to be a puzzling, even mysterious phenomenon when you examine the hard data that describes the overall success that women have when placed in successively higher leadership positions. It is even more curious when you analyze the success they have in those functional areas that have traditionally been dominated by males.

For more than a decade, our organization has been collecting 360° feedback data from leading organizations worldwide. We now have 450,000 feedback instruments pertaining to about 45,000 leaders, covering a wide variety of industries. The studies that follow include our most current data collected in 2011 and 2012. The sample we have used includes just under 16,000 leaders of whom two-thirds were male and one-third female. Each participant had on average 13 respondents, including their manager, their direct reports and their peers.

Overall effectiveness

An aggregate look at how women leaders compared to their male counterparts shows the following.

Because of the large sample size for this study the difference shown here is statistically significant and does not occur by chance.

Differences by Age

To better understand the differences between males and females it is instructive to look at overall leadership effectiveness by age. The effectiveness of women as leaders appears to change over time. As women and men begin their careers there is very little perceived difference. Then men soon are perceived to be slightly more effective than women. As women mature they are perceived in an increasingly positive way and more effecting than their male counterparts.

The gap between them and men continues to diverge, until they reach their 60’s, when the gap begins to narrow. At its peak the largest difference between males and females is 9 percentile points. The following graph shows the average percentile gap between males and females.

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Bob Sherwin is the chief operating officer of Zenger Folkman, a provider of leadership research, assessment, development and implementation programs.