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September 14, 2015 Other Voices

Women underrepresented on corporate boards

Lucy Gilson
By Lucy Gilson

The role of women in leadership has, over the last few weeks, received a great deal of media attention. For example, is Hillary Clinton a presidential candidate, or a woman running for president? Should she play the gender card? Would Donald Trump have reacted to the GOP debate moderator in the same way if Megyn Kelly had been Mike Kelly?

A recent article in the Huffington Post by Emily Peck sparked much debate when it likened women CEOs to shark attacks, “extremely rare, but so well-covered by the media we think they're pretty common.” However, CEOs, television-debate moderators, and presidential candidates are all women in the limelight, but what happens behind the scenes? What is the role of women in leadership positions that are less visible, like being on corporate boards?

Unlike a shark attack, women on corporate boards are more like the elusive Great White. We know they are there, lurking under the waters, part of the inner workings of many corporate machines, but are there many of them or only a few? Are they found in groupings or do they work alone? Because we so rarely see them, we keep searching with the hope of better understanding who they are and how they got there, and which organizations have women chairing key board committees. But do we really know what the numbers look like?

Unlike presidential candidates or even CEOs, most people are not reading corporate prospectuses, noted Kathy Caprino, an executive women's leadership coach, in an Aug. 8, 2014 Forbes article. She began one of her training sessions for women executives by asking, “Where in the pipeline are your emerging female leaders falling out, and why is it happening?'' and there was dead silence. We just don't seem to know where the next generation of senior women leadership is going to emerge. Can this, in part, be attributed to the fact that so few corporate board positons are filled by women?

According to Catalyst only 16.9 percent of U.S. corporate board seats are filled by women, ranking the United States behind Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Great Britain and South Africa. Germany, where 14.1 percent of board seats are currently held by women, has mandated a national quota system stating that by next year, 30 percent of supervisory seats must be filled by women. Norway, Spain, France and Iceland already have quotas set at 40 percent (which only Norway has achieved with 40.5 percent). Interestingly, Great Britain has a voluntary arrangement, more of a “gentlemen's agreement” if you like, called the 30-percent club, which has been in place since 2010.

The debate as to why having women on corporate boards is beneficial for business gets surprisingly contentious. There are those who argue that the importance of women is good for bottom-line business results, while others argue that the benefits are rooted in having organizations that engage the entire work-age population with more family-friendly policies. Management professors will further argue that a diverse leadership team will result in better conflict resolution, decision making, creativity, and innovation. However, one of the strongest arguments to be raised in recent months is that of generating unconscious awareness that women can hold these roles.

Another reason the absence of women on boards receives less attention is the composition and size of boards themselves. Many boards have fixed numbers of members who, once elected, can remain in office until age 75, indicating that turnover takes a long time. Many women today who are in their 60s, prime board member age, were not CEOs of public companies. What this means, is that the pool of board candidates is a small, “closed shop'.”

So, how do women break in?

Beyond political capital and CEO experience, people get asked to join a corporate board based on their functional expertise. Boards need people with specific skills such as finance, compensation, risk, turnaround or governance. Boards of public companies are hugely regulated by Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley so they need members with the expertise to advise the CEO. Women with such functional expertise are prime candidates to join boards, but they need to network and market themselves better.

Here, research tells us that many women are potentially at a disadvantage, taking generalist, middle-management positions too early in their careers and thus, never gaining the functional expertise necessary to rise to the top of a company or to be asked to join a corporate board. We continually read that women are better at dealing with diverse individuals at work, arriving at consensus, and enabling a group to work together — but, it is precisely these skills that are holding them back.

In fact, it behooves women to reject middle management positions early in their careers, or the lateral move to help a department that is struggling to get back on its feet. By developing functional expertise, women will place themselves in a positon to be part of the network that is the next wave of corporate board members. 

Lucy Gilson is the head of the management department and a professor at the UConn School of Business.

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