ION Reports
ION’s members continue to engage in research to track women directors and executive officers of public companies based in their respective regions. These research data provide a breadth and depth of information not available anywhere else and supplement the work of organizations such as Catalyst, which focuses on the Fortune 500. ION’s members include not only the Fortune 500 companies in their geographic areas, but also many of the smaller businesses that comprise the backbone of the country’s regional economies.
In this way, ION provides a comprehensive picture of the reality and pervasiveness of male-dominated corporate leadership. By including this wider range of companies, the ION report (and those of its members) also can identify more opportunities for women to obtain board seats, as smaller-cap and mid-cap companies often extend their board searches to include accomplished women who may not yet appear on the radar screens of those seeking to fill directorships for larger global corporations. And by the same token, we highlight opportunities for more companies to improve their corporate governance and performance by bringing more women into their boardrooms.
Gender Imbalance in the Boardroom: Opportunities to Change Course
Because the data that ION has reported in each of the past eight years have shown little improvement, we decided to try to see whether and to what extent companies had the opportunity to change the numbers by making new board appointments. Accordingly, we asked each ION member to look at the rate at which women were elected to fill open or newly created independent director seats in its respective region during the past year. The results of that analysis follow.
As was the case five years ago, companies had a relatively high number of opportunities to transform the composition of corporate boards in the regions represented by ION’s members. Unfortunately, very few of them took advantage of these opportunities and a disappointingly low number of women joined their boards during the past year. The data strongly suggest that a great gender imbalance in the composition of public company boards throughout the U.S. is likely to continue for quite a while.
Women comprise such significant percentages of the professional workforce, the markets in which U.S. companies sell, and the ownership of the wealth that fuels the economy, that they simply cannot continue to be ignored. Even those companies with all-male leadership that claim to be satisfied with their performance to date could benefit by taking advantage of opportunities to add some diversity to their top ranks.
To take action, please download ION’s “Opportunities to Correct Gender Imbalance in the Boardroom.”
Past ION Reports
