After historic
Black Lives Matter protests last year and an
economic crisis that disproportionately sidelined women, corporate America
vowed to be more inclusive. It threw its weight behind policies, like child
care, that would foster an equitable recovery from the pandemic, promises that
seemed to represent a sea change in what has until recently been an apolitical
corporate landscape.
اضافة اعلان
But in corporate boardrooms, little has changed; boards have
been, and continue to be, predominantly male and white, according to a new
study that was released last week.
The study, by the Alliance for Board Diversity and Deloitte,
found that white women gained the most number of seats, increasing their
presence at Fortune 100 companies by 15 percent and at Fortune 500 companies by
21 percent.But, in total, they still represent just about a fifth of all board
seats. And minority women — which includes Black, Hispanic and Asian women —
represent the smallest slice of boardrooms at both Fortune 100 (around 7
percent) and Fortune 500 (around 6 percent) companies. More than half of
directors newly appointed to board seats last year were white men.
Notably, the report found that 36 percent of diverse board
directors (the report uses “diverse” to describe women, including white women,
and people of color) sat on multiple Fortune 500 boards.
“One way to look at it is that these boards are basically
fishing from the same pond instead of looking at the broader ocean,” said Linda
Akutagawa, chair for the Alliance for Board Diversity and chief executive of
Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics.
The ABD and Deloitte report, however, analyzed data only until
last June. Other more recent data from the research firm Institutional
Shareholder Services found that since last July, the number of Black directors
on boards of S&P 500 companies surged by nearly 200 percent, representing
32 percent of all newly appointed directors, up from 11 percent in 2019. Almost
half of them were new to publicly traded company board services.
ISS, which didn’t break down the data by gender, attributed the
shift to “the widespread racial justice protests last summer.”
Even before the protests, there was growing pressure for
boardroom diversity from financial institutions, like Goldman Sachs, BlackRock
and Nasdaq, driven in large part by a growing body of evidence showing that
diverse leadership correlates with better business performance. And as a result
of 2018 legislation in
California, almost all of the more than 600 public
companies based there now have at least one female board member, according to
researchers at Clemson University and the University of Arizona.
“The ideal scenario is for companies to increase their diversity
without external pressures,” Akutagawa said. “But what gets measured, gets
done.”
Substantial change, though, will still take time, experts said.
A typical tenure of a board director is eight years and adding more seats can
be costly, with director pay often reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And looking for directors beyond the “pond” might not help much
either: As boards try to diversify, directors have started recruiting from
lower down the corporate ranks, beyond the C-suite that is also white and male.
But, as The New York Times’ DealBook column reported in February, many
companies don’t allow their employees, particularly their lower-level managers,
to join outside boards, citing the commitments that board seats require, which
could take away from employees’ focus on their jobs, and potential conflicts of
interest.
The ABD and Deloitte report noted that, at the current rate of
change, it would take decades for boardrooms to reach representation proportional
to the demographics of the American population. Women of color, for example,
make up 20 percent of the
US population, but it would take until 2046 for them to
make up 20 percent of Fortune 100 board seats.
“The fact remains,” the authors of the report write, “progress
has been painfully slow.”
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