A recent collaborative study of 200 of the most heavily funded, venture-backed private companies (115 headquartered in California) on their board gender diversity as of Q3 2019 revealed these key findings:
- Just over 60% of companies had no female board representation compared to just under 11% of Russell 3000 all-male boards and zero all-male S&P 500 boards.
- Women occupy 7% of board seats compared to 20% of Russell 3000 and 26% of S&P 500 board seats.
- Of the 39.5% of boards with at least one female, 76% had only a single woman director as shown here:
- Boards are composed of investor-directors (56%), executive-directors (24%) and independent directors (20%). Independent directors (the smallest proportion) are the most gender-diverse. Relatedly, less than 3% of US companies that received venture capital funding between 2011 and 2013 were founded by women and ~ 10% of the partners (who make investment decisions) are women
- Based on a comparative analysis of 98 US venture-backed companies that have gone public since the beginning of 2018, board gender diversity accelerates as companies prepare to go public, as 82% of these companies had at least one female board member and 41% percent had two or more, and females occupied 18% of all the board seats for these 98 companies - nearing the Russell 3000's 20%.
Each of the companies included in the 200-company analysis had about $100 million or more in funding and was founded since 2004, or was valued at over $500 million. The study was the result of a collaboration between Crunchbase, Him For Her, and Kellogg School of Management.
See this Forbes article, and additional information & resources on our Board Diversity page. This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!