Who gets more negative media coverage, male or female CEOs?
Can AI give us new insights?
The 8th of March is the International Women’s day and in Norway the focus is particularly on equality in business. We thought it would be interesting to take a deeper look at the sentiment on male and female CEOs in the media. Here is what we found.
Sentiment on female leaders vary less
First off, our analysis shows that the sentiment on female CEOs fluctuates less than the sentiment on their counterparts.
Company sentiment correlates with CEO sentiment
Second, if we take a look at the sentiment on the corresponding companies we uncover something interesting:
They correlate!
While it is easy to assume this is due to similar data sets, our data shows that this is not the case.
In fact there’s a significant lack of overlap between CEO- and company-related news. This means that the sentiment on companies are not necessarily based on the same stories as the sentiment on the CEOs.
Sentiment varies more for CEOs than for companies
It turns out that when media writes about the CEOs, they have a stronger polarity than when they write about their corresponding companies. Perhaps this means that it is easier to express emotions when talking about people, rather than companies?
The Data
This analysis is based on editorial media coverage extracted for a representative selection of companies on the Oslo Stock Exchange and their corresponding CEOs— a task easily done with the Mito.ai knowledge graph.
By picking an equal distribution of female and male CEOs, and choosing a wide spectrum of companies — ranging from small to large, and from bio-tech to sportswear — we believe we’ve created a solid foundation for this analysis.
The time period covered spans from the 8th of March, 2018 and up until today. As a preprocessing step, the data was been run through our ML pipeline, which include relevance filtering among other things, to make sure only articles that are in fact relevant for each CEO and company are included in this sentiment analysis.
There is of course a lot more under the hood, not described here. If you are interested in tech details, get in touch! We are hiring :)
