Purpose: "Where Are All the Women CEOs?" (Fuhrmans, 2020) is a corporate question describing the growing sense of gender diversity and women's discrimination in top leadership positions. Nowadays, gender equality is an important topic and plays a strategically important role in corporations. However, women remain underrepresented and are treated differently than men counterparts in top executive positions. Thus, this research aims to provide insights into the major themes and critically reflect on the literature regarding women/female CEOs of the past two decades.

Design/methodology/approach: A Structured Literature Review (SLR) was conducted. All included articles stemmed from the ABS or ABDC journal rankings, resulting in 162 relevant articles. The time frame was 2000 through 2020 (20 years). Databases included in this review were: Scopus (Elsevier), ProQuest, Emerald Insight, JSTOR and ABI/Inform. All results were limited to English-only peer-reviewed scientific journal articles.

Findings: The analysed literature on women/female CEOs addresses their personal and professional characteristics (outer appearance and leadership style), their appointment and hierarchical advancement, their effect on different business organizational aspects (such as firm performance and governance), the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling/cliff. Furthermore, the findings suggest that women are underrepresented in CEO positions, face various discrimination statuses, and bear with cultural and ethnic barriers to elevating hierarchy.

Research limitations/implications: The coding process, in particular, the code grouping, could be influenced by the researchers’ subjectivity. In addition, not all collected data was analysed, as some codes and data were not considered beneficial for this research. 

Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, such research regarding female leadership, namely the CEO position, is limited, and no structured literature review within the AJG/ABDC ranking was found during the data collection phase. Hence, such an effort can serve for future research to dive deeper into the topic of female/women CEOs. The method has been described in detail to ensure transparency and researchers’ reproducibility of the results.