Women are getting more seats in the boardroom
The number of women sitting at the table in corporate boardrooms across the country is rising very slowly, but it’s rising. Just over 15 percent of all director seats at publicly traded US companies were held by women as of Dec. 31, according to a study by Equilar, a corporate research firm. That’s up from 14 percent a year earlier and from 12 percent in 2013. So, the trend is toward more equal representation on boards, but parity won’t happen until the end of 2055 unless the pace picks up, according to Equilar. That’s nearly 40 years away, which may be about when girls born today begin sit- ting on corporate boards.
Demonstrating how far remains to go toward gender parity, 738 companies still have no women on their boards. Last year, nearly 60 companies that had no female directors since at least 2011 added one or more women. Even so, it’s still much easier to find a woman in the boardroom than in the corner office, according to a separate, global survey of 3,400 companies by Credit Suisse. While women occupied nearly 15 percent of board seats at the end of 2015, only about 4 percent of CEOs are women. Companies in other countries have gotten closer to gender parity than the United States, and government pressure has played a big role. Several European countries have set quotas and targets for how many corporate board members should be held by women. That’s why women held 24 percent of European board seats at the end of 2015, the highest rate in the world. Investors are taking note.
Companies with at least one female director tend to have higher stock returns and better corporate performance than those with allmale boards, Credit Suisse says. Of course, this may be a case of correlation rather than causation, and better-performing companies may be more welcoming to women rather than vice versa. —AP