Panelists agree: Women board representation growing, but more needed

By Brice Wallace

A recent panel discussion had one goal: more people on board with the idea of more women on boards.

The discussion, organized by the Women’s Leadership Institute, revealed that many companies are seeking women to serve on their corporate boards and panelists encouraged women to seek board membership.

“It has definitely increased, but it is by no means where it should be,” said Gretchen McClain of GWMcClain Advisory Services. “We’re still less than 20 percent across the board.”

A recently study by Catalyst indicates that woman held 19.9 percent of board seats on S&P 500 companies. About one-fourth had only one woman director and 2.8 percent had none.

The organization “2020 Women on Boards,” pushing for the percentage of women on U.S. company boards to be at least 20 percent by 2020, said at the 810 U.S. companies on its index, women held 19.7 percent of board seats, up from 18.8 percent in 2015 and 14.6 percent in 2011. It found that 61 of the index companies had no woman on their boards and 41 percent had not had a single female director in the past five years.

Several panelists said statistics show that having more women on boards leads to more-successful companies.

“This isn’t just about ‘let’s have a woman on the board,’” said Peggy Thompson, founder of Summative, a search firm specializing in board, CEO and vice president searches for tech companies. “This is about ‘let’s make our business be more successful, more profitable and grow faster.’”

Ron Jibson, former president, CEO, and board chairman of Questar Corp., said companies today do not have the luxury to make bad decisions and that women can help companies make better ones.

“What I learned most importantly in engineering school was that when making a decision, gather all the input that you can get in the time you have to make the right decision, and you need a diverse amount of inputs,” he said. Companies need diversity of thought, ideas and perspectives, “and I think women bring that to a board,” he said.

“As a CEO or the chairman of the board, the very best thing that we can do is gain the experience of those board members, to get that input, and women bring a perspective to decision-making that is different than a man’s perspective,” Jibson said.

Jibson said he once served on a board consisting entirely of white men. “Groupthink was a real thing. Being a ‘yes’ person was a real thing. The CEO would say, ‘This is what we need to do,’ everybody nodded their head and then we went and played golf — not the way to run a company,” he said.

Some companies have a CEO or board chairman who has served in that position for many years and who develop a tendency to believe they know all the answers and need no help. “That’s a big risk and it’s a very dangerous risk,” Jibson said.

Tanie Binder, a member of Spencer Stuart’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications, Private Equity and Digital practices and leader of the firm’s Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Seattle offices, said a recent national study indicated that having more women on their boards was the top priority for companies. And opportunities to serve do exist. Binder said that the U.S. has 4,333 public companies that have a total of about 2,000 board openings each year due to turnover.

Binder said 60 percent of board members get onto their first board through relationships with board members, the CEO or another company executive — meaning that networking is important — but sometimes because they were found by search firms or had experience on advisory, community or nonprofits boards. Thompson said some women board members simply moved up the ranks of a company.

In addition to boards, McClain said women’s roles in the overall economy also are growing. Women are at least 50 percent of the consumer base and more women are getting involved in supply chains as vendors and suppliers. Companies need more women on boards and, should a company go global, it should look to add people with international expertise, she added.

“Any company who’s not seeing that, in my mind isn’t looking broad enough,” she said, “and, in my mind, it will hurt them in the long term and they’re going to have competitors pass them by.”