Women makeup 24% of colorado company boards
Up from 7% a decade ago
Lisa Zúñiga Ramirez is part of a trend that proponents of seeing more women in the boardrooms of Colorado companies are celebrating.
In 2021, Ramirez, who has 30 years of experience in institutional investing, was appointed to the advisory board of Denverbased Bow River Capital.
She was among the women of color that a new analysis of public companies in Colorado estimates made up about a third of new board members.
Of the new directors who could be identified, about one third in 2021 were Latina and Black and Asian women, according to the analysis by Boardbound of the Women’s Leadership Foundation.
“This is very important because women of color have been a rarity on boards in Colorado,” Barbara Bauer, executive director of Boardbound, said in a statement.
Overall, the research shows that 23.5% of the board seats of Colorado public companies were occupied by women, up about 3 percentage points from 2020. Progress has been significant since the first report in 2011, when women accounted for just 7% of board membership, said Jo Lynne Whiting, a member of Boardbound’s board of directors.
“Back in 2011, if you looked around the boardroom you would find 13 men for every one woman. Now, it is three men for every one woman,” said Whiting, who prepared the report.
However, after reaching numbers in 2020 that were on par with the national average, Colorado’s overall percentage of female board members slipped slightly in 2021. The state percentage fell about 3 percentage points behind the national average of 26.7%.
Colorado’s ranking among other states dropped to the19th spot from the 16th in the percentage of women on boards of directors.
For comparison purposes, Boardbound uses the benchmark of the Russell 3000 Index, which tracks the performance of the top 3,000 U.S. publicly traded companies.
“It’s just another indication that while we’re proud of our improvement, we want to be a leader so we need to do better,” Whiting said. “If you look at the top state, California, they’re 6 percentage points more.”