Benesch's inaugural "Corporate Governance Trends and Best Practices Among Mid-Market Public Companies" focuses on mid-market public company governance practices based on the firm's analysis of proxy disclosures by 194 S&P Small Cap 600 companies (listed in the Appendix) with market caps between $200 million and $1.50 billion.
Key findings include:
- Board Leadership: 81% of companies have either an independent chair or lead independent director - about evenly split between the two.
- Board Diversity: 68% of companies have boards with 20% - 30% female representation. About 10% voluntarily disclosed their diversity initiatives with respect to board diversity.
- Board Evaluations: Almost 49% of companies disclosed conducting board evaluations. Of those that disclosed conducting annual evaluations, most indicated that such evaluations were conducted internally as opposed to externally facilitated.
- Virtual Meetings: 7% of companies offer virtual annual shareholder meetings, the vast majority of which are virtual-only.
- Shareholder Proposals: Only 1% of companies (3 companies) received shareholder proposals - two of which were social responsibility-related and one of which was governance-related.
For more small and mid-cap company benchmarking, see the Society/Deloitte: Board Practices Report, and additional resources on our Board Practices/Governance Practices page. This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!