Amit Batish is Content Manager at Equilar Inc. This post is based on an Equilar memorandum by Mr. Batish, with data analysis contributed by Courtney Yu, Lyla Qureshi, and Hailey Robbers.
For a third consecutive quarter, the Equilar Gender Diversity Index (GDI) increased. The percentage of women on Russell 3000 boards increased from 16.9% to 17.7% between March 31 and June 30, 2018. This acceleration moved the needle, pushing the GDI to 0.35, where 1.0 represents parity among men and women on corporate boards.
One of the primary drivers of this steady GDI increase is the number of new directorships that have gone to women over the last few quarters. The chart below illustrates a consistent pace of growth of female directorships. In Q2 2018, more than one-third of new directorships went to women—this is a near three percentage point increase from the previous quarter and a pace that has almost doubled since 2014.