International Women’s Day: CEO gender parity will take another 90 years
It will take another 90 years to reach global chief executive gender parity and another 50 years to reach the same parity for chairs of boards with the current speed of development.. Just 8.4% of the world’s boards are chaired by women and 6% of CEOs are women, according to a report from consultancy Deloitte on International Women’s Day.
EU commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen in a short statement noted some positive developments: There are women at the helm of the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Investment Bank.
Deloitte’s Women in the Boardroom shows that women hold less than a quarter (23.3%) of board seats globally, a 3.6 percentage point increase since the report’s last edition was published in 2022.
“Despite initiatives around the world to increase the number of women serving on boards, gender parity is unlikely to be achieved before 2038. And, there is no clear path to gender parity in the board chair or CEO role.”
“For parity to become a reality, a wide range of stakeholders would need to devote greater focus and action to help corporate boards more accurately reflect the societies in which they operate. And boards themselves would need to continue to take action and ask the right questions.”
The report is based on more than 18,000 companies in 50 countries and geographies,
“The business case for diversity is clear: companies with more diverse boards have shown that they tend to perform better financially. Despite that, it is clear that a tangible increase in momentum is needed to reach gender parity in the boardroom. With women currently still underrepresented on company boards globally, that step change in momentum will require organizations and investors to do more to realize the benefits that diverse boards can bring,” says Anna Marks, Deloitte Global Chair.
The report says that government action has yielded results in advancing parity at the board level.
“For instance, five of the top six countries with the highest percentage of women serving on boards in the study have some sort of quota legislation, ranging from around 33% (Belgium and the Netherlands) to 40% (France, Norway, and Italy).”
“But quotas are not the only vehicle for progress. Continued government initiatives, such as the use of targets and disclosures, have also driven progress. For example, in the UK and Australia, women now hold more than a third of board seats. And while there is no magic number of board seats an individual director should hold, the geography-level data shows that the movement to increase gender diversity on boards has not caused “overboarding” as some may have feared.”
Across regions, particularly Europe, more women are chairing board committees. For instance, in Italy and France women hold a majority of board committee seats or committee chair roles, and more than 40% of European compensation committee chairs are women.
In 30 of the countries, the financial services industry (FSI) was the first or second most gender-diverse industry in that market—nearly double that of the next highest industry.
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