When diversity proponents point to the low percentage of women in places like boardrooms, a common response is that qualified candidates are few and far between.
Profiles like these are what theBoardList uses to match companies up with qualified female directors.
theBoardList
Take, for instance, a survey of CEOs conducted by theBoardList, which is a marketplace of sorts for connecting tech companies with qualified female directors. Only half felt there is enough female talent available, and it's estimated by research group Catalyst that women hold just a fifth of the board seats among S&P 500 companies.
To counter this perception, the organization on Thursday launched three new initiatives, including a feature called Assisted Search, which is essentially extra help from a talent executive in finding candidates and going through the placement process; theBoardList Index, which is quarterly data on the number of board seats filled by women; and the Pay it Forward Scholarship. Partnering with online survey tool Qualtrics, every time a woman is placed on the board of a company, theBoardList will give a scholarship to a girl from an underrepresented community.
For the last year, theBoardList has not only been trying to address the situation, but lea about it. Its answer to the conce that there isn't enough talent: 1,200 qualified potential board members -- all women. Forty-two percent already have board experience, the others come with endorsements from C-level business leaders and investors.
"There's really a discovery problem and a perception of the breadth of candidates, more than a problem in reality with whether there's a big enough pipeline of candidates," said founder and CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy.
The tool allows companies looking for women board members to search for candidates with expertise in areas like digital/social media, e-commerce, IT, and software, and who have held roles in fields like finance, growth, marketing, or worked as CEOs.
So, why should it matter if your board has any women on it?
Accounting firm Grant Thoton found that companies with diverse boards performed better than those without across the UK, US, and India-- it compared companies with and without diverse boards. Another study from Peterson Institute for Inteational Economics found a correlation between companies with women in executive leadership positions and higher profits. "For profitable firms, a move from no female leaders to 30 percent representation is associated with a 15 percent increase in the net revenue margin," the study said.
One reason Singh Cassidy thinks companies do better is because having more diversity on a company's board means better odds of representing other viewpoints.
"[Women] offer a perspective from your customers and your employee bases that may be missing entirely," Singh Cassidy said.
Data collected by theBoardList also highlights some reasons why many women don't make it onto boards. Fifty-nine percent of CEOs surveyed said they got board referrals from investor networks and 39 percent said they used their own networks. The problem with that, Singh Cassidy said, is those networks tend to be homogenous.
Getting women onto boards is just a piece of the bigger conversation about diversity in tech at a time when numbers reflect low percentages of diversity in computer science programs, in technical roles, and in leadership positions.
"[Finding board members] is a process that requires not just availability of candidates, but I think there's room for optimization of that entire process," Singh Cassidy said.
- - , . .
en apple news...
ما را در سایت en apple news دنبال میکنید
برچسب: نویسنده: استخدام کار بازدید: 259 تاريخ: پنجشنبه 24 تير 1395 ساعت: 20:33