At least 15 companies based in California have added a female director to their all-male boards and 35 have indicated a willingness to do so after a board gender diversity campaign launched by state pension giants CalSTRS and CalPERS targeting 131 companies in the state.
CalSTRS, the largest educator-only pension fund in the world with $187 bn in assets under management, along with CalPERS, which manages some $301 bn, began the campaign four months ago to target companies in its home state with all-male boards.
As part of the campaign, the two pension funds sent a letter to the companies offering their expertise to help them appoint women to their boards. Along with the letter, the campaigners included a copy of the National Association of Corporate Directors report ‘The Diverse Board: Moving from Interest to Action’ to illustrate the potential advantages of appointing women to a board.
The campaign was based on information from a 2013 UC Davis Graduate School of Management study of the 400 largest publicly traded companies in California. It concluded that only 11 percent of director and high-paid executive positions are held by women, more than a quarter of the companies had no women on the board and only two companies had a female majority on their boards. Thirteen of the 400 companies had female CEOs.
‘We are pleased that a number of companies we contacted recognized board diversity as an important governance practice. In fact, ServiceNow added two women to its board this July,’ CalSTRS director of corporate governance, Anne Sheehan, says in a press release announcing the results of the campaign. ‘These companies took rapid action proving that change doesn’t take millennia – it can happen quickly if there’s a process and the requisite will.’
