The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sun, 13 Sep 2026 11:30:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.10 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Gender Composition of Boards Important for Competitiveness – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Gender Composition of Boards Important for Competitiveness https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/07/24/gender-composition-of-boards-important-for-competitiveness/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gender-composition-of-boards-important-for-competitiveness https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/07/24/gender-composition-of-boards-important-for-competitiveness/#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:25:48 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=30930?d=20150113141158EST Posted by Scott Hirst, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Editor's Note:

The following post comes to us from Beth Brooke, Global Vice Chair of Public Policy at Ernst & Young, and discusses a report from the Committee for Economic Development, titled Fulfilling the Promise: How More Women on Corporate Boards Would Make America and American Companies More Competitive. A blog post about the report is available here; the full report is available here.

Corporate America often says we are facing a pipeline problem when challenged with the troubling reality that women occupy only 16 percent of Fortune 500 board seats. Yet to bump the percentage of U.S. board seats filled by women up by one percentage point, it would only take about 50 women joining the boards of these companies. There is no doubt there are far more than 50 qualified women interested in U.S. board seats right now.

Despite a professed desire by many U.S. companies for greater diversity and female representation, there has been virtually no improvement in recent years in the senior ranks. In the meantime, on goes the brain drain — as senior women are now being competitively recruited to serve on the boards of non-U.S.-based companies.

The situation is urgent. U.S.-headquartered companies are failing to meet the career needs of half their available highly skilled labor and falling behind international competitors that are taking aggressive action to increase the number of women on their boards. That is the central finding of a new report, Fulfilling the Promise: How More Women on Corporate Boards Would Make America and American Companies More Competitive, from the business-led Committee for Economic Development (CED).

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