 | | Gaia Stella |
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"The ideal scenario is for companies to increase their diversity without external pressures. But what gets measured, gets done." |
— Linda Akutagawa, chair for the Alliance for Board Diversity |
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. |
But in corporate boardrooms, little has changed; boards in corporate America tend to be, and continue to be, predominantly male and white, according to a new study published today. |
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. |
 | | By The New York Times | Sources: Deloitte, Alliance for Board Diversity |
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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 A.B.D. 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. |
I.S.S., which didn't break down the data by gender, attributed the shift to "the widespread racial justice protests last summer." |
"The ideal scenario is for companies to increase their diversity without external pressures," Ms. 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's 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 A.B.D. 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 U.S. 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." |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | At the Ovation Awards, which nominated the actor Jully Lee for an award, the ceremony displayed a photo of Monica Hong, an Asian colleague of Ms. Lee's.Philip Cheung for The New York Times |
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- "We have to do more to stand out from any other Asian we might be mistaken for in order to advance." The root of underrepresentation of Asian Americans in leadership roles could stem from the all-too-common experience of being confused for someone else. There's even a term for it: the interchangeable Asian. [Read the story]
- "She's a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we're starved of that a bit." Kate Winslet talks to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd about playing the unglamorous, flawed and broken Mare Sheehan in the HBO limited series "Mare of Easttown." [Read the story]
- "I was just sitting there surrounded by everything wrong." Being a teenager is hard. And so is becoming a first-time parent. Some students have been juggling both of those identities during a pandemic. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Judith Levitt. |
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