What Did We Learn From News On Women.com in 2005?
News On Women.com (newsonwomen.com) has provided us with more data to evaluate the trends in the advancement of women on boards of directors of corporations across the U.S. There are approximately one dozen individual state efforts underway to tally how many women hold top board of director seats. News On Women.com gives us something of an "early tabulation" of what we might expect in the coming proxy season of 2006.
Champion Boards.com examined the press release postings at News On Women.com, specifically the section reporting women nominated to boards of directors. We found that
companies located in 20 states nominated a total of 54 new women to their boards of directors in the 6 months July to December 2005, according to NewsOnWomen.com.
California-based firms named the largest share, 18 women to their boards of directors, followed by 6 female nominations to boards at New York-based firms. Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia-based firms each named 3 women to their corporate boards.
Six other states each named 2 women to boards of directors on local firms. They are: CO, CT, MA, MN, NJ and WI.
Nine other states each named 1 woman to a corporate board position. They are: AZ, IA, KS, MI, MO, NC, PA, SC and TX.
All but 2 of the California women named to boards were added to companies located in Northern California. Broadcom is the only Southern CA firm (located in Irvine) to add women to their board.
The largest share of female nominations to boards, 37%, were added during the month of November, while October and December added 24% and 22% respectively. This is consistent with the general practice of late year board nominations in preparation for the spring 2006 proxy season.
Many might assume that California naturally would be in the lead, because it is a large and industrialed state. In fact, the number of top U.S. corporations -- Fortune 1000 firms -- located in the top 3 states is quite close. According to the April 17, 2006 issue of Fortune Magazine, California had 110 top Fortune 1000 firms, Texas had 102 and New York had 92.
Based on an examination of the nominations, it appears that at least part of the increase in the number of women on boards is related to California's technology firms finally "getting religion" and realising the wealth of female talent they have among their top management tiers. Sun Microsystems, Google, Broadcom, Salesforce.com and Covad are just a few of the notable technology and communications firms adding one or more women to their boards of directors.
