HARTFORD — At the 1,500 largest publicly traded companies in the nation, 85 percent of board members are men, down from 89 percent seven years ago.
Two women who serve on prominent boards along with an author about gender diversity on boards, spoke Wednesday night in front of an audience of 500 at The Bushnell on why so few companies have made an effort to integrate their boards and what can be done to change that.
Connecticut Treasurer Denise Nappier, who has been pushing for more racial and gender diversity in corporate boardrooms for years, organized the panel, which was co-sponsored by the University of Connecticut and The Connecticut Forum.
Moderator Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, asked Aaron Dhir, author of “Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity” and a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, whether quotas work to change the composition of boards.
Dhir said in Norway, the first country to institute quotas, the law was quite controversial, and board members said they were against the idea of requiring 40 percent of board seats to be held by women.
But, once they made the change, they became believers. Dhir said Norwegian companies found women were much more likely to engage in rigorous monitoring and to break up groupthink.
Dhir cautioned, however, that studies cited by advocates — that companies with at least three women on the board have better financial performance — are inconclusive.
“Correlation may not be causation,” he said.
Irene Chang Britt, who’s on the board of Dunkin’ Brands Group, said even on boards that want to increase the number of women, female candidates often make the long list, but not the final cut.
Britt said one issue slowing change is there are no term limits for corporate boards, and directors tend to stay on past traditional retirement age.
“There’s only about 250 board seats that come up any year,” Britt said. If there were more turnover, she said, change could come faster.
Dhir expressed pessimism that U.S. firms will move any faster. He said passing a quota rule is “not politically viable,” and, he said, disclosure has been ineffective in bringing change.
Nappier, along with her counterparts in California, New York and Illinois, petitioned the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year to require companies to list gender, race and ethnicity of board members.
Britt, who was president of Pepperidge Farm, a unit of Campbell Soup Co., encouraged the heavily female audience to be direct in asking high-level men to recommend them for advancement.
Brzezinski asked: “Were you afraid of being called the ‘B’ word?”
“I love it,” Britt said with relish, and the audience clapped and whooped in approval.