Women make little progress toward company boards, executive offices

The lip service paid to diversity by many large U.S. companies has done little for actual progress toward putting women on their boards, a new study shows.

Women were named to about 27 percent of open board seats at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index in 2015, according to a report by Catalyst, an organization that advocates for workplace inclusion for women. That leaves women with 19.9 percent of board seats at S&P 500 companies, inching up from 19.2 percent in 2014.

"Companies have been espousing equality for a long time," but women didn't even increase their representation on boards by 1 percentage point, said Jan Combopiano, Catalyst's senior vice president for research. "That feels like a big disconnect to us."

Catalyst's report finds that just 14 percent of companies had women filling 30 percent or more seats. Only a small number of companies have reached gender parity on their boards, with equal numbers of men or women.

Last week, Etsy's stockholders elected another woman to its board, bringing its numbers to three men and three women, one of the few publicly traded companies to reach gender parity. General Motors is another, with six men and six women on its board.

A few companies actually have more women than men on the board, including American Water Works of Voorhees.

Groups including the 30 Percent Club and the 30 Percent Coalition - which count many big U.S. companies among their members - are fighting to increase the representation of women on corporate boards. They have been spurred by research showing that diversity improves the bottom line. In February, a report from Ernst & Young and the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that companies with at least 30 percent women in leadership may boost profit margins by 15 percent.

About 10 percent of roughly 5,000 S&P 500 board seats typically turn over each year, Combopiano said. With a few more new seats going to women than they currently hold, "at least the numbers are moving in the right direction," she said. Only about 14 percent of companies had 30 percent or more female directors.

"Even less progress has been made in the pipeline for women officers and directors," Catalyst chief executive officer Deborah Gillis said in the report, which was just the latest to detail the glacial progress women are making toward equality in business. The study examined 2015 proxy data compiled by Ernst & Young.

Women held a quarter of executive and senior-level positions in the S&P firms, 36 percent of first and mid-level manager positions, and made up 44 percent of all employees, the study showed. Women hold just 4.2 percent of CEO positions in the S&P 500 - a number that will shrink when Xerox's Ursula Burns, the only African American CEO, steps down this year.

A study released Monday that analyzed 381 companies showed a similar trend for women in financial services. Women make up 20 percent of those companies' boards and 16 percent of their executive committees, up slightly from a year earlier, said Oliver Wyman, a London-based management consulting firm.

In another study released Tuesday, the LedBetter research group highlighted companies that market to women with little to no female representation on their executive teams. Among them were Mattel Inc., maker of Barbie dolls, and L Brands Inc., which owns Victoria's Secret.

And in January, the Government Accountability Office estimated that it would take 40 more years before women reach parity in board seats among the S&P 500, even if they filled seats at twice the current rate.