32
Median age of women founders, at founding
47
Median age of women CEOs
52–54
Median age of women in top political roles
<1 yr
Age gap between women and men in each sector
What I found
- Age depends on the role. Women founders started their companies at a median age of 32, and 74% were under 40. Most women CEOs and political leaders reached the role between 40 and 59.
- Sector decides the age, not gender. Women and men arrive at the same age. Far fewer women arrive.
- Women are still rare at the top: 14% of CEOs, 7% of founders, under 5% of heads of state and government in this data.
This is what Wikidata has, not every woman leader. The full method and limits are in the report.
- Role
- Solo analyst: data collection, cleaning, star schema, SQL analysis
- Team
- Solo
- Timeline
- Oct 2026
Background & Impact
Background
There is no ready-made list of women leaders, so I built one. I came in through companies and offices: who founded or ran each company, and who held each head of state and head of government office. That gave me about 24,000 leadership milestones, loaded into a MySQL star schema and analysed with 12 SQL queries.
The key choice was measuring age on the date of the milestone itself. That made the sectors comparable, and it showed that age depends on the role: starting a company and reaching the top of an institution are different milestones, about 15 years apart.
Impact
- Age gap between women and men, in every sector
- <1 yrAge gap between women and men, in every sector
- Women's share of leadership roles
- 3–14%Women's share of leadership roles
Women and men reach leadership at almost the same age. The gap is in how many get there.
Technical Foundation
MySQL 8
Star schema and 12 analysis queries: CTEs, window functions, conditional aggregation and a hand-built median.
Python
Cleaned the raw exports before loading them into MySQL.
Wikidata
Open data source for founders, CEOs, heads of state and heads of government.