Amid headlines about girls losing ground in the workplace throughout the pandemic, Equilar is releasing new knowledge on girls’s progress in the direction of fairness on company boards. Equilar’s new Gender Diversity Index, simply launched at the moment, finds that 23.5% of all board seats on the Russell 3000, which tracks the efficiency of the three,000 largest public U.S. corporations, are held by girls, as of the fourth quarter of 2020. That’s up from 21.5% within the fourth quarter of 2019, from 18.5% on the finish of 2018, and from 15% on the finish of 2016.
But whereas the proportion continues to inch up, 6% of these Russell 3000 boards don’t have any girls on them in any respect, and on the opposite aspect of the spectrum, solely 8% of boards are no less than 40% feminine. Only 71 corporations have boards which are no less than half feminine — simply 2.4% of the full. That provides as much as a mind-bending truth: there are greater than twice as many corporations that don’t have any girls on their board, as there are corporations with half-female boards.
The challenge: girls had been appointed to 39% of all new director seats in 2020, down from 44% the prior 12 months. Equilar warns that on the present fee, boards won’t hit gender parity until 2032; that is two years later than what the agency projected a 12 months in the past.
Other research present the speed of change for racial variety on boards additionally slowing: Spencer Stuart reports that the proportion of new administrators within the S&P 500 that had been racial and ethnic minorities was 22% final 12 months, down from 23% the prior 12 months.
Equilar factors to different traits that might point out company wariness to search for a wider vary of board candidates. In the fourth quarter extra director appointments had been males serving on their first board, 52.4%, in comparison with 49% of girls. Women usually tend to serve on a number of boards — 25% of girls are on a number of boards, in comparison with lower than 17% of males — indicating that corporations are going again to the identical group of girls, somewhat than dramatically increasing the aperture of what sort of girls or expertise they is perhaps on the lookout for.
But there are indicators of a motion to closing gender gaps accelerating. Equilar stories that within the fourth quarter, 44% of all new board seats had been stuffed by girls, an acceleration from the full-year common. And in January, 22 girls had been added to S&P 500 boards, in keeping with a Bloomberg report, the most important improve in nearly two years. This 12 months there have been some notable CEO appointments from underrepresented teams. Roz Brewer and Thasunda Brown Duckett, each Black girls, had been each appointed as CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. Duckett was simply appointed to change into CEO of TIAA on May 1, a task she’ll take after serving as CEO of the Chase Consumer Banking division of JP Morgan. Roz Brewer is the new CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance.
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