Antique Boardrooms

Believe it or not, until July of this year there was an S&P 500 company that had no women on its board! Interestingly, in a recently article the Wall Street Journal reported that a REIT CFO, Diane Morefield joined the board of Copart, an online car-auction company based in Dallas. Achieving this important threshold within the S&P 500 has taken years. Believe it or not, in 2012, one in eight S&P 500 boards were all-male, a number that dwindled to just a handful of companies by the beginning of 2019. Much of the credit for this change goes to big investors such as State Street, BlackRock and state pension funds who have withheld proxy votes if women were not added to all-male boardrooms. In addition, the new California law requiring all publicly traded companies with headquarters in the state to have at least one female director by the end of this year also righted a number of wrongs. Of the 94 public companies in California with all-male boards when the law passed in late 2018, about 60% have added at least one woman to their boards. The good news is that the situation is improving, but it is amazing to me that withheld proxy’s and state legislation has been necessary force boards to address the remaining antique boardrooms.