The Governance Gap

As we began writing this chapter, Fortune published a story about the General Motors board, which had just become majority female with six women and five men, making it one of eleven Fortune 500 companies with majority-female or gender-balanced boards. So exceptional are boards not dominated by men that the (not quite) dozen where women are at least equally represented amounts to a newsworthy trend.⁵ But beyond this one-off story, interest in the demographic composition of boards is increasing. Over the past decade, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times have collectively published more than 260 stories about board diversity. Academic interest, reflected in research publications, has also been growing steadily since the mid-2000s, and business educators have taken up the charge.⁶ Our own institution and other business schools offer executive education courses for women seeking board seats. Case studies about efforts to achieve board gender diversity proliferate, while search firms and consulting companies churn out reports and recommendations.

Are boards listening? Not everyone has been embracing the need to diversify. In 2019, well under half (38 percent) of directors agreed that board gender diversity was important, according to a survey of more than seven hundred public companies. Racial and ethnic diversity has even less overall support; just 25 percent of directors agreed that it is important.⁷ In 2020 these numbers rose, with 47 percent of directors believing that gender diversity was very important and 34 percent saying the same about racial diversity—almost certainly a consequence of worldwide protests against racial injustice that arose in the summer of that year.⁸ Renewed focus on inequality seems to be convincing more board members that it matters, but just how much emphasis boards will put on recruiting directors of color remains to be seen. To date, there have been fewer studies, news stories, and initiatives addressing the lack of board racial diversity, and progress toward gender diversity has primarily benefited white women. However, more than twenty Black directors joined the boards of publicly listed companies in September and October of 2020—more than the total for all of 2019.⁹ The coming years will reveal whether that surge in racial diversity, which could boost the proportion of Black women in the boardroom, was a one-time phenomenon or the start of a trend.

Unless attitudes evolve, we are unlikely to see significant progress toward diversity of any kind. About a quarter of directors feel that a focus on diversity is leading to the nomination of unneeded or unqualified candidates, according to the same survey.¹⁰ Other research has found that people perceive the appointment of a female board member to mean prioritization of social performance at the expense of shareholder interests.¹¹ (Evidence from countries that have implemented gender quotas has not borne out these fears. In Norway, women appointed to boards after a 40 percent quota took effect actually had stronger educational and professional backgrounds than women appointed prior to the law.¹²) Lingering skepticism about the importance of diversifying boards is likely one reason all the attention has yet to result in a sea change. Even new companies are stuck in an old mindset: Among two hundred venture-backed private companies, just 7 percent of board seats were held by women. On 60 percent of these boards there were no women at all.¹³

When asked about this slow and limited progress, current boards often point to a dearth of women in the roles considered natural antecedents to directorships. The United Kingdom’s Hampton-Alexander committee heard this sentiment from board chairs it interviewed; one common refrain was “there just aren’t enough senior women” to fill available seats.¹⁴ Yet boards tend to return to the same predominantly white and male candidate pools when they search for new members. Just 25 percent of boards that added a new director in 2018 elected someone who had not previously served on a public company board.¹⁵ There is also evidence that when women do start gaining access to directorships, the opportunity is restricted to a handful of token women or strategically contained so that men still dominate individual boards. A 2019 analysis of the top two hundred companies in Australia found that an overall increase in board gender diversity was driven by just eight women who served on multiple boards.¹⁶ A series of studies of the S&P 500 found that a disproportionate number of boards have two female directors; once there are two women directors, boards are statistically less likely to appoint any additional women—an apparent ceiling the researchers termed “twokenism.”¹⁷

No matter how many women executives are capable of serving, if boards remain insular there is little opportunity for them to step forward in large numbers. “It’s sometimes easy to find excuses why a woman doesn’t fit on a board,” said Bill George, who has served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and the Target Corporation, among others. George has seen firsthand the tendency for directorship opportunities to circulate within closed networks: “I’ve heard so many times, ‘Oh, I know a great guy from the club.’ Selection has to be done through a wider range of people over a period of time, and much more professionally, and you have to have a lot of women in that mix, and people of color. You’re not serving the company if you have an old boys’ club with all the same voices.” Likewise, Cindy Fornelli, former head of the Center for Audit Quality, pointed out in an interview that companies aren’t going to source a diversity of candidates if they keep relying on the proverbial usual suspects: “We hear this argument that there is a supply issue with diverse candidates. There are plenty of diverse candidates, but it does require folks to go outside their individual networks, and particularly smaller companies who may have only recruited their friends are going to have to go other places, like a Women Corporate Directors’ event. We hear it a lot—‘There aren’t any women, or any people of color.’ Well, not if you only look at your normal haunts.”

Even large corporations with more structured and formal board processes can experience this feedback loop if no real effort is made to expand the pool. A small subgroup will typically oversee the process of identifying new directors, and when these nominating committees do not include any women, the likelihood of the new director being female plummets.¹⁸ Henrietta Holsman Fore, a former director at General Mills and other public companies, pointed out that disrupting networks is key to bringing in new members who are different from the typical director:

The committee is a subset of the whole board, and the board itself is already small. It just does not lend itself to surfacing more women’s names. The more that boards become diverse, the better the informal networks become. If you can get more diversity on the nominating committee, then the informal networks begin to become much broader, and more candidates are seen and evaluated.

Window Dressing or Culture Renovation?

Why should boards—or for that matter shareholders, consumers, legislators, and the public—care that female directors are scarce? In his 2020 letter to shareholders, famed investor Warren Buffett called out the continued underrepresentation of women in the boardroom. While the year marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment “guarantee[ing] American women the right to have their voices heard in a voting booth,” he observed, “their attaining similar status in a board room remains a work in progress.” Buffett went on to emphasize the importance of board independence, noting that rubber-stamping CEO decisions can be all too tempting and that groupthink often charts the course. Can disrupting the homogenous makeup of a board help it govern more effectively? Scholar Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues that it most certainly can: “Lack of diversity can lead to a kind of crony capitalism in which insiders favor other insiders, surround themselves with people who look and think like them and rarely hear other points of view,” she explained in a 2020 op-ed.¹⁹ Directors need to be inquisitive, independent, and willing to ask hard questions—all of which can be hard to do in a clubby context where everyone looks like you. (We should note that Buffett resisted a shareholder proposal that would have formally required his own company to diversify candidate slates by race and gender when conducting searches for directors and CEOs, although he affirmed support for its ultimate goal.)²⁰

Of course, board members are stewards acting on behalf of everyone who holds shares in a company and in so doing hopes to make money. Might greater gender diversity not only help guard against mismanagement but also lead to stronger financial performance? Although the so-called business case for diversity claims that it will lead to better returns, evidence for a causal link is inconclusive. Some studies have found a positive effect of more women on boards, while others have found it to inhibit performance, and still others have found no effect at all. The performance implications of racial and ethnic diversity on boards have been studied far less but with similarly unsettled results.²¹ All such explorations of the relationship between board composition and performance confront the challenge of many unobservable and unknown factors that likely influence both board makeup and financial outcomes, making that relationship exceedingly difficult to measure.

An emphasis on adding women to add profits, we would argue, does not actually help boards become more diverse and inclusive. In fact, it is preventing a richer and more meaningful discussion about the benefits that diversity truly can confer and the reasons it remains so difficult to cultivate. Lip service about the “value of diversity” is not translating into widespread change, and too little attention is paid to why. One recent study of directors’ views on gender and race in the boardroom found that while nearly all endorsed diversity in the abstract, most could not clearly articulate the reasons for that support, falling back on minor anecdotes about contributions by white women or people of color that were rarely about high-level strategy or other domains of board decision-making.²² All the attention the business case has garnered doesn’t seem to be leading to a clear understanding about how boards can leverage a more diverse group of directors. Boards would be better served by asking a more sophisticated question: What prevents us from fostering diversity and making the most of it?

Benefits do emerge under certain circumstances that are highly relevant to corporate governance. For instance, when groups must wrestle with complex tasks and decisions or harness the collective thinking of a group to problem-solve and generate ideas, gender diversity is a boon.²³ When a company’s strategy focuses on innovation, performance does improve with more women in leadership.²⁴ There is also compelling evidence that both racial and gender diversity spur teams to think more creatively, consider alternative viewpoints, and become less prone to groupthink.²⁵ But it is vital to understand that these positive effects are not inevitable. Boards, like any group of individuals tasked with a common purpose, must know how to reap the benefits of having a variety of voices in the room. Contributions from those who speak differently—literally or figuratively—can all too easily be lost or reduced in impact and importance. Approaching diversity not as a superficial add-on but rather as a primary input can generate real learning. With this kind of approach, differences are viewed as sources of deep knowledge and insight, and people in both the majority and the minority believe their perspectives are respected and valued.²⁶ But when diversity is accepted begrudgingly or is viewed as morally correct but unrelated to the “real work,” it can’t be leveraged to benefit the group’s problem-solving, creativity, or decision-making. The best-case scenario might be that of the directors described above who endorsed diversity but couldn’t think of a way it actually enhanced their boards’ primary tasks. More troublingly, this kind of surface-level support can bolster stereotypes that are ultimately unhelpful and even undermining to racial or gender equality. In 2010, French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH responded to a proposed gender quota by appointing former first lady Bernadette Chirac and citing her regular attendance at fashion shows as her key qualification.²⁷

If boards aren’t fully embracing the diversity they already have, directors in the minority are less integrated and less able to exert influence. They are also less likely to be in roles with the most formal power, such as chair or lead director. Even as the overall proportion of women on boards has edged up, there has been little to no change in the extent to which female directors are in leadership positions. According to a 2019 analysis, the vast majority of board chairs are men.²⁸ Among the five hundred largest (by revenue) public companies in the United States, the percentage of women lead directors, board chairs, and CEO chairs increased by less than 1 percent (to 7.5 percent) between 2015 and 2019.²⁹

Even when their qualifications and experience are identical or superior to that of their fellow directors, white women and people of color are less likely to be in key leadership roles such as chair, lead director, and committee chair.³⁰ These leadership opportunities can be powerful, as reflected in the experience of Monique Leroux, a Canadian banking executive. In 2008 she was elected president and board chair of the Desjardins Group, the leading bank in Quebec, and seized the opportunity to address the lack of women in leadership at the institution: “I decided to put diversity on the agenda very strongly internally, because we were essentially not diverse at all. We had less than 20 percent women in senior ranks and I said, it’s not acceptable. So, I put a target. We agreed as a board on a target of at least 30 percent, though the goal was 40 percent. Without targets that are widely communicated, you cannot make real progress.”

Appointing white women or people of color as directors but effectively sidelining them may actually impede further progress toward diversity; being overlooked for influential roles makes women and minority directors more likely to depart their boards.³¹ Marginalization can also take more subtle forms. In a study we conducted, women directors described being treated as outsiders, a dynamic that their male peers seemed oblivious to. More than half of male directors in the study did not believe that women faced hurdles based on their gender, yet women’s experiences told a very different story. They recounted having their contributions ignored or dismissed in meetings, being excluded from informal gatherings and outings, and having their expertise questioned or their perspective treated as intrusive.³² Sadly, this insight isn’t new. More than seventy years ago, Wilma Soss founded the Federation of Women Shareholders to advocate for the representation of women in corporate governance; in 1954, she told the New Yorker that “one woman on these big boards isn’t enough. What can one woman do against thirty men?”³³

Today’s corporate boards are not so large, but the principle holds. Phyllis Campbell, a director at Alaska Air Group, told us about her past experience serving on a range of boards and noted how easily women’s contributions could be minimized: “When I was one of only two women, our voices would usually get drowned out.” Indeed, research has shown that sole women speak up less often than women in more gender-balanced groups and that women are seen more favorably in professional settings in which there are at least two of them in a group.³⁴ One study identified a clear tipping point in board dynamics when female directors numbered three or more. Women described being stereotyped or excluded when they were the sole woman or even one of two, but they exerted more influence and felt more comfortable and effective in raising questions when there were at least two other women on the board. These dynamics were observed not only by women directors themselves but also by CEOs who saw the pattern play out in the boardroom.³⁵ In this light, the implicit “twokenism” we referenced above is a new barrier erected before the women who actually make it into the boardroom.

Isabelle Marcoux, chair of the board of Transcontinental, a publicly traded media company headquartered in Canada, affirmed the importance of critical mass: “When you’re three, you’re part of a group and you’re no longer tagged as the ‘woman’s voice.’ So, I really, really believe in numbers. To me, three is the minimum; boards should have at least three women, and four or five is even better because then you get a more diverse group of women.” And the more women there are, the more likely it may be that the board will move further toward gender parity. A lone woman advocating for greater diversity can have an impact, particularly if she is board chair or head of the nominating committee, but a chorus of voices is even harder to ignore, as Herta von Stiegel, head of a clean-energy developer and director at several large European corporations, explained: “When it got to the point where I was able to really have a very direct influence on board composition either as chair or on the nominations committee, I strongly pushed for diversity. And not just gender diversity but diversity in terms of ethnic and cultural background as well as race, although I have not been as successful with respect to the latter. The healthiest environment that I’ve experienced is truly a diverse environment where you have at least 40 percent women.”

Pressure from All Sides

In an ever more complex global economy, wasting the talent and insight of women, whether they are excluded from meaningful debate among directors or excluded from the boardroom altogether, surely can’t be a strategic advantage. But not only does the homogeneity of boards look like a potential handicap for companies, it is also becoming increasingly untenable as multiple stakeholders criticize the predominance of white men in corporate governance and demand, through public pressure as well as legislation, that companies act to diversify their boardrooms. Over the past fifteen years, governments around the world have stepped in to mandate greater representation of women. These efforts have been concentrated in Europe but also extend to Israel, Malaysia, and India, where boards of large or publicly listed firms must include women, and to Quebec, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates, where state-owned companies are required to have female directors. In 2018, California passed legislation requiring companies headquartered in the state to include women on their boards, and the state of Washington followed suit in 2020.³⁶ Also in 2020 the European Union announced that it would revisit a proposal, tabled in 2012, to mandate a 40 percent quota for women on the boards of companies in its member states.³⁷

These kinds of legislative quotas are varied in both kind and effect. Some are “hard” and carry sanctions that impede or block a company’s operations. In Norway, companies that fail to meet a 40 percent quota can be delisted from the stock exchange, and in other European countries, director appointments can be voided and companies can be fined for noncompliance. But some quotas are nonbinding; companies might be named and shamed but face no sanctions. Spain’s 40 percent quota sets incentives whereby companies that comply may receive preference in the award of government contracts but face no fines or other measures for failure to meet the quota.³⁸ Other countries, such as Australia and the United States, have opted for an even lighter touch, with consortia of business and government leaders advocating, with some success, targets for women’s representation.

In 2011, a government-commissioned review committee examining gender on UK company boards recommended a voluntary target of filling 25 percent of FTSE 100 board seats with women by 2015, a proportion that would double women’s share of seats. Calling on regulatory bodies, executive search firms, and companies themselves to rally around the effort, the committee urged all stakeholders to remove barriers to appointing women. Concurrently, a group of female executives formed the 30% Club to advocate for increased representation. Together, the club and the committee, known as the Davies Review, leveraged the media to bring attention to companies’ action (or inaction) and conducted personal outreach to board chairs and other powerful stakeholders. The target was missed in 2015, but by the following year 26 percent of FTSE 100 seats were held by women.³⁹ By 2020, the proportion hit 33 percent.⁴⁰

There has been little appetite among officials in the United States for establishing quotas, with the California and Washington state mandates being major exceptions. In 2019, Illinois passed a bill requiring companies headquartered in the state to have at least one woman, an African American, and a Latinx director on their boards, but the requirement was ultimately dropped; instead, Illinois companies must publish the race and gender composition of their boards and executive management teams on their websites.⁴¹ A disclosure approach has been in place at the federal level since 2010 via a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule compelling companies to explain whether and how nominating committees consider diversity when appointing new directors. While an analysis of Fortune 500 boards covering the years 1996 to 2015 identified an upward trend in the proportion of women after 2010, for most companies the increase had already begun prior to the SEC rule, making it unclear that the rule meaningfully changed boards’ approach. Meanwhile, a multicountry study has found that targets and quotas are more effective than disclosure requirements.⁴²

The SEC approach allows companies themselves to define “diversity” and to specify how they believe it can be furthered. One effect of this more expansive and malleable concept could be to encourage companies to consider multiple dimensions of diversity at once. As noted above, boards are extremely homogenous when it comes to race: Men of color lag white women in representation, and women of color hold a tiny fraction of directorships, yet gender diversity alone has long dominated the conversation. That emphasis has meant that the challenges faced by women of color are obscured or overlooked. Unfortunately, the open-to-interpretation definition of diversity can easily become overly broad. Research on the SEC rule’s effects has found that companies actually tend not to cite gender or racial diversity in their disclosures but instead discuss candidates’ prior experience and expertise as forms of diversity, an approach that has clearly not led to major change when it comes to boards’ demographic composition.⁴³ Similarly, only about half of the board diversity policies at FTSE 250 companies specifically mention racial and ethnic diversity, and the vast majority set no measurable objectives around it.⁴⁴

In the absence of public policy, other US stakeholders have attempted to exert influence and pressure. Major investment firms and pension funds have asked companies in which they invest to disclose the gender and/or racial makeup of their boards and describe their strategy for advancing diversity. Several, including BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, have withheld votes or voted against director candidates to protest companies’ lack of progress on board diversity.⁴⁵ In 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would not underwrite the initial public offerings of US and European companies with all-male boards.⁴⁶ As this book went to press, the Nasdaq stock exchange filed a proposal that would require listed companies to have on their boards at least one woman and one director from an underrepresented minority or who identifies as LGBTQ+.⁴⁷

Shareholder proposals pressuring companies to increase race and gender diversity are increasingly popular. One firm alone, Trillium Asset Management, put forward more than fifty diversity-related proposals between 2016 and early 2019.⁴⁸ We analyzed shareholder proposals in the S&P 1500 from 1997 to 2018 and found more than 330 related to diversity. In addition, we found that proposals aimed at increasing diversity averaged 8 percent more “yes” votes than other proposals. Reflecting this interest from shareholders, diversity has become a frequent topic in companies’ securities filings. Analyzing proxy statements filed with the SEC, we found a more than 10 percent jump in the number of statements that discussed diversity between 2009 and 2010 and a steady uptick in the decade since. In 2018, over 20 percent of proxies included some mention of diversity. The trend is also garnering widespread public attention outside the business press and the C-suite. In 2018, Amazon received a wave of backlash from its own employees after initially rejecting a shareholder proposal that it implement a “Rooney Rule” requiring board slates to include women and minority candidates. Not long after the outcry was picked up in the media, the company reversed course and said that the board’s nominating committee would indeed adopt such a policy.⁴⁹

All this attention may have helped spur some recent gains. 2017 saw the largest-yet single jump in the appointment of women to boards, when 38 percent of Fortune 500 director appointments went to women (up from 27 percent in 2016). Women’s share of appointments climbed slightly higher, to 40 percent, in 2018.⁵⁰ The California mandate, which was covered widely in the US media, led to the appointment of 511 women to board seats at companies headquartered in the state, many of which had previously never had a female director. Yet we should once again note that white women dominated this shift toward more gender diversity, making up 78 percent of these new directors.⁵¹ (In 2020, California expanded its diversity mandate to include quotas for racial and ethnic diversity on boards.⁵²)

The Power of Corporate Sisterhood

Despite more conversation, it isn’t clear that the push from investors and the public is fostering a sense of urgency on the part of current directors, especially those in the majority. A study we conducted with over five thousand directors at companies headquartered in more than sixty countries revealed that men were apt to attribute the continued underrepresentation of women to a lack of qualified female candidates, an explanation pointed to by far fewer of their female peers (more than a third of men versus 7 percent of women). Rather than this supply-side rationale, women directors cited the persistence of male-dominated networks and said that despite all the talk, diversity is not a priority when it comes to recruiting new members.⁵³ In another study we conducted with male and female directors based mostly in the United States, almost 30 percent of men cited a lack of experience and knowledge as an impediment to women’s access to board seats, yet just 4 percent of women directors agreed.⁵⁴ And the traditional view that the ideal director has CEO experience, an approach that dramatically limits the pool of women candidates, persists. In 2018, current and former CEOs made up 60 percent of all appointees to Fortune 500 boards, an all-time high. “It’s clear,” one search firm pointed out, “that companies aren’t consistently casting their nets widely.”⁵⁵ Boards have yet to undergo a paradigm shift in how they think about, leverage, and value diversity.

Michele Hooper, whose profile appears after this chapter, is impatient with the notion that a lack of candidates is the major impediment to board diversity. “This whole argument that we can’t find qualified candidates is just so much hooey. Our markets, customers, and employees are becoming more diverse. There are well-qualified diverse people available for our boards. We have to expand the pools in which we search for those candidates. We need to seek skills and experiences regardless of sex or ethnicity.” Fatima Al Jaber, who has served on the boards of several companies headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and was the first woman elected to the board of directors of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce, argues that even in the Persian Gulf region, where women are less represented in the labor force compared to many other parts of the world, “We’re qualified. We have the experience, and we have the right candidates. But the problem is we need the door to open.” And women executives are trying to make their way through the narrow openings that currently exist. Numerous academic institutions and nonprofit centers offer formal training, mentoring programs, and access to headhunting firms, all with the aim of preparing women to navigate board search channels and step into directorships with the skills to be effective. Efforts to make female candidates more visible to companies and search firms proliferate. Initiatives such as the 30% Club and 2020 Women on Boards focus dialogue and attention on the underrepresentation of women on boards and advocate for accelerating the pace of change.

The Women on Boards program at our own institution has seen runaway enthusiasm, igniting a network of past participants committed not just to their own board service but to one another’s success. When the program launched in 2016, seats filled up at a faster rate than usual for the school’s executive education courses, and demand has continued apace. To date, more than four hundred women from around the world have been through the program, and interest exceeds capacity each year. Beginning with the inaugural cohort, participants began holding monthly conference calls after the course ended, to keep the momentum going by trading referrals, advice, and professional connections. An active social media network is a forum for still more strategic support, as well as a way for participants to remain rooted in a global community of female leaders. The women who have thus far secured board seats are working to pay it forward to their fellow participants and create a movement that extends far beyond their time on campus.⁵⁶

This ever-expanding HBS-based network builds on a precedent set more than two decades ago by another organized effort to get more women onto boards, Women Corporate Directors (WCD). The evolution of WCD offers a kind of case study in why such groups continue to be necessary as well as some measure of optimism about their effects. Founded in 2001, WCD was at first simply a forum for women already on boards. They rarely encountered fellow female directors.⁵⁷ In an interview, WCD founder Susan Stautberg explained how the need for such a group became clear to her:

I was on a board, and I was seeing how hard it was to get more women onto boards. I also saw that women were constantly trying to get together informally to talk about how to be effective in the boardroom. How do you ask the difficult questions? Where do I go when I want to know more about a certain topic? And how to handle the gender issues that did come up. What do you do when the CEO puts his hand on your knee? The women who were on boards at the time didn’t really have any place to turn.

A friend of Stautberg’s, Edie Weiner, was one of those women, having resigned from a board where her expertise was questioned and her advice unheeded. “I couldn’t get the guys to listen to me,” Weiner, head of a strategy consulting firm, told us. “The CEO was really not interested in anything I had to tell him.” Weiner had already served on other boards quite successfully but felt disheartened and frustrated at encountering such retrograde bias in the twenty-first century. “I called up Susan and said, I know the next group of women that you’re going to put together. Female directors need to be able to talk to each other.”

Over the next two decades, WCD grew from a handful of women who gathered at Stautberg’s New York apartment to many hundreds of women at chapters in more than forty countries. It wasn’t long before the directors assembled around Stautberg’s dining room table and later at conferences in various US cities were talking about the women missing from their ranks, as founding member Elaine Eisenman described:

It started off in the beginning as a dinner group that provided mutual support, education, and experience-sharing about how to best contribute as the only woman on our respective boards, more than anything else. We were fellow travelers in the same room, sharing stories about navigating the foreign land of the boardroom. But it also became a political force to say there should be more women on boards. As time went on and slowly but surely more women joined boards, it started to morph beyond simply the support and sharing function, recognizing that there’s more women who sit on boards—asking why aren’t there even more of us? There’s extraordinary talent out there, and the need for diversity is critical, especially in terms of today’s turbulent marketplace. You can’t have singular vision for growth and impact.

When another founding member, finance executive Alison Winter, moved to Chicago, she started a local chapter that was soon joined by chapters in Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. By 2004, the demand was clear. Women on boards were hungry for opportunities to network with one another, sharpen their skills, and pave the way for more female directors. Stautberg approached the professional service firm KPMG to sponsor the organization, and WCD began hosting regular conferences for its growing membership. Chicago-based member Joan Steel explained that WCD events both enhanced the skills women could bring to boards and disrupted the closed networks that tended to keep them out of the running for open seats:

We learn about cutting-edge, best-in-class governance practices on public and private boards from around the world. This is important to our education and growth as directors. There are also networking opportunities with other women who are on boards or who are in the C-suite seeking to expand or refresh their boards or who know of opportunities. It’s the access to potential board opportunities, networking resources, educational resources and friendships that underscore the value of WCD. WCD has helped move the dial on placing women on boards. For companies who say they can’t find qualified female directors or search firms seeking to widen their candidate field, WCD is a reservoir of talented, capable, and experienced women directors to be tapped. Whatever director requirements you have—if you’re a search professional, if you’re a corporate CEO, if you’re the chair of nomination & governance—we can provide access to our members, the best and the brightest female directors.

Getting more women “into the flow,” as founder Stautberg calls it, of opportunities in governance means taking advantage of every avenue of influence. “For instance, we are doing more and more events where we bring in private equity firms and have them meet with women,” Stautberg told us, “because private equity firms are very much putting men on the boards of their companies.” WCD hasn’t shied away from stronger persuasive tactics either. In 2016 as the group prepared for a conference in Chile, Stautberg took a call from the executive vice president of the Santiago Stock Exchange. He invited the WCD leadership to ring the opening bell, marking the first time a woman would do so. But Stautberg wasn’t satisfied with the symbolic weight such a gesture would carry, not when the board of the exchange counted zero women members. She recalled explaining to the chairman, “I can’t do that. The stock exchange board is eleven white men. When you elect women on the board of the stock exchange, we’ll come ring the bell.” The executive vice president called Stautberg the next day and promised to appoint a woman. In 2017 WCD held its Chile conference, and a local member was appointed to the Chilean exchange board as its first female director.⁵⁸

As the organization passed the fifteen-year mark, Stautberg handed the reins to Susan Keating, who became WCD’s second CEO. Just as Keating prepared to take over in the fall of 2017, the #MeToo movement took off. Asked about the group’s mission in light of this cultural shift, Keating saw an opportunity: “This is a big reckoning for many companies right now. I believe WCD can be part of the solution. We can ensure these problems don’t continue to be institutionalized and happen in the future. The solution lies with good governance, and board diversity is part of that. We need to ensure that companies have the right culture, processes, procedures, reporting and oversight.” Indeed, the #MeToo movement has made it increasingly clear that any attempts to tackle persistent gender disparities will require top leaders—who remain mostly men—to do the hard work of identifying and addressing all the ways that gender inequalities are enabled and perpetuated throughout the structures and cultures they oversee.

For its part, WCD has been clear about the value of engaging men since its early days. Stautberg noted that men’s participation has been critical to the impact achieved so far:

In the early days around my dining room table, we were often bringing in male CEOs, male board members and just talking about various issues in the boardroom and then also asking what we could do better. What do you think we can do to get more women on boards? You get them relaxed and get some ideas. And you know, men are competitive, so then it becomes, “next time we have a board opportunity, I’ll let you know.” They don’t want to be left behind. But it was also having them spend some time with women executives and see that these are competent people. Today, we do it with our chapters. Take the San Francisco chapter. Once a year, they hold a cocktail reception, and every female director who joins has to invite a male director, and ideally, they are inviting male directors who are on nominating committees. The chapter puts together a brochure of everyone’s bio which they give to everyone. And they have this cocktail party and just generally get to know each other. The men do come because other men are going to be there. And the chapter has been getting women onto boards every single time afterward, because the guys come and they see these really bright people, they have the bio, and it really works.

Hundreds of women have secured board seats through the WCD network, but CEO Keating knows there is still much work ahead:

I think some companies are leading the way. Others are recognizing the importance of board diversity, but we have a long way to go. There is some resistance. Any time you’re going against an institutional, cultural norm, there can be resistance. So how do we break through that? We take leaders that are advocates for diversity and making headway with their boards to advance diversity and give them a platform.

Changing the status quo is never easy, but when people in power act as allies and advocates, they can accelerate momentum. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the role that men, inside and outside the boardroom, can play in advancing gender equity.