All Aboard?

By Bahar Gidwani

Are enough women being brought on board – that is corporate boards?  Our partners at GovernanceMetrics International (GMI) recently released a new study on this subject.

Their work is incredibly comprehensive (like the rest of their data!). They studied 4,300 companies in 45 countries. For the first time, more than 10 percent of corporate board members are women. And also for the first time, the number of companies with no female board members at all has dropped below 40 percent.

Read the study for full details. For instance, would you expect developed country corporations to be much better than those in less-developed countries? (I’ll hint that they are a bit better, but not much.)  What percent of company boards have a female chairperson? (The number is shockingly small.)

This new report is a valuable extension into an area we target on CSRHub with a special issue we call “Diverse Board.”  The many CSRHub members who care about this subject should thank GMI for bringing focused attention to the lack of women “on the bridge.”

Bahar Gidwani is a Cofounder and CEO of CSRHub. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor Web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.