International Women’s Day: A Call for Broad Support for Women on Boards

As we take a moment to mark International Women’s Day on 8 March 2023, we review the progress women have made in the boardroom. The Deloitte Global Boardroom Program’s Seventh Edition of the “Women in the Boardroom: A global perspective” report includes updates from 72 countries on gender diversity in the boardroom. The report published in 2022, shows that although progress has been made, overall progress remains “slow and uneven”¹.
On a global level, women hold just under 20% (19.7%) of board seats, an increase of only 2.8 percentage points over a 2 year period. Extrapolating this pace of change, parity for representation of women on boards would not be reached until the year 2045, another 20 years. This is unacceptably slow, especially when the research shows that greater gender diversity in senior positions is associated with higher profitability of firms. More specifically, “replacing one man by a woman in senior management or on the corporate board is associated with 8–13 basis points higher return on assets”².
 

Percentage of Women on Boards

Source: Deloitte, 2022.

Source¹: “Women in the Boardroom: A Global Perspective”, Deloitte, 2022.
Source²: “Gender Diversity in Senior Positions and Firm Performance: Evidence from Europe”, Lone Engbo Christiansen ; Huidan Huidan Lin ; Joana Pereira ; Petia Topalova ; Rima A Turk, IMF Working Papers, 2016.
 

MarketVector Indexes GmbH has partnered with Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) to use ISS ESG data in designing targeted Thematic ESG indices.  The ISS Director Data set covers over 330 data points for over 25,000 issuers across over 100 countries to examine director profile for key experiences on a given company. It can uncover potential risks and opportunities to structure investment outcomes. This data set includes data on Ratio of Women on Boards, allowing MarketVector to disclose index weighted average percentage of female board members for our ESG indexes. These Governance disclosures can be found in our Benchmark Statement Supplement for ESG Factors, on our website.

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About the Author:

Joy Yang is Head of Product Management and Marketing at MarketVector Indexes^TM. She is responsible for managing MarketVector Indexes^TM products and services to accelerate innovation in financial index design and adoption. Joy brings more than 25 years of investment experience to MarketVector Indexes^TM, having led teams delivering index and quantitative-active investment solutions at Arabesque Asset Management, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Vanguard, Aberdeen Standard Investments, AXA Rosenberg, and Blackrock. Joy has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering.

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