New York – May 1, 2013 – GMI Ratings released today its annual report on Women on Boards. Based on data for almost 6,000 companies in 45 countries, and including historical data, the survey provides a broad and detailed assessment of global progress on gender diversity among corporate directors. The survey finds extremely slow progress [...]
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GMI Ratings’ Women on Boards Survey Finds Legislation Major Driver of Change; Countries without Mandates Lag
May 1, 2013 in Board Diversity, Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint, GMI Press Releases
GMI Ratings’ 2013 Women on Boards Survey
May 1, 2013 in Board Diversity, Daily Viewpoint, Research Reports - GMI
Summary of Findings Based on data for almost 6,000 companies in 45 countries, GMI Ratings’ 2013 Women on Boards survey provides a broad and detailed assessment of global progress on gender diversity among corporate directors. The survey finds extremely slow progress, largely due to countries without legal mandates for the representation of women on corporate [...]
Caltex: Leading on Gender Equity
April 1, 2013 in Board Diversity, Daily Viewpoint
by Kimberly Gladman It’s spring at GMI Ratings, which means we’re digging into a new crop of annual filings from companies in many of our major coverage regions. A highlight of this week’s research came from Australian oil refiner Caltex, whose annual report documents unusually strong efforts to support women in the workplace. In the [...]
Diversity = Downside Protection
December 14, 2012 in Board Diversity, Boards, Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint
By Kimberly Gladman, CFA, Ph.D., Director of Research and Risk Analytics The Wall Street Journal reported recently on a fascinating academic study about the effect of gender on accounting oversight. A team led by Susan Parker of the Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business found that small-cap US firms with at least one woman [...]
GMI Ratings Launches Global LeaderBoard
December 4, 2012 in Board Diversity, Boards, Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint, ESG Ratings & Research, GMI Press Releases
Relationship-mapping Tool Deepens Analysis of Corporate Governance and Extra-financial Issuer Risk New York – December 4, 2012 — GMI Ratings, the leading provider of research on environmental, social, governance (ESG) and accounting-related risks affecting the performance of public companies, announced today the launch of Global LeaderBoard (GLB), an online research and data-visualization tool that maps [...]
Global LeaderBoard: Why Should We Care?
December 4, 2012 in Board Diversity, Boards, Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint, ESG Ratings & Research
By Paul Hodgson – Chief Research Analyst Global LeaderBoard (GLB) is an online research and data-visualization tool designed to deepen the analysis of corporate governance practices that can materially affect issuer risk. GLB maps complex relationship patterns at the individual, organizational, industry and regional levels. Among many other insights, GLB allows subscribers to identify corporate [...]
Director Polling and the Gender Gap
October 24, 2012 in Board Diversity, Boards, Corporate Governance, Daily Viewpoint
By Kimberly Gladman, CFA, Ph.D., Director of Research There’s a lot of discussion these days about political polls that show strong differences between men and women. In the governance world, Heidrick and Struggles and Women Corporate Directors have brought us something similar with their recently released 2012 Board of Directors Survey. The survey illuminates differences [...]
Gender parity strides “just too slow” for the EU?
September 27, 2012 in Board Diversity
by Michelle Lamb, Senior Research Associate European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding proposed EU-wide gender quotas earlier this month that would require state-owned enterprises to fill 40 percent of their supervisory board seats with women by 2018. Publicly traded companies would have an additional two years to meet the threshold. A group of nine countries [...]
New Research on Gender Diversity in the Boardroom
September 13, 2012 in Board Diversity, Daily Viewpoint
Kimberly Gladman, Ph.D., CFA, Director of Research The recent Credit Suisse report about women on boards (Gender diversity and corporate performance, August 2012) takes the discussion of gender and company performance to a new level. For years, there have been reports claiming to link gender diversity to improved operational or stock price performance, but many [...]
Facebook adds a female director to the board – sort of
June 26, 2012 in Board Diversity, Daily Viewpoint, News and Opinions
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate Facebook’s response to criticism that its board was, as GMI Ratings founder Nell Minow is fond of saying, male, pale and stale, has been to appoint Sheryl Sandberg to the board. There are a number of problems with this offered solution. First, one woman on the [...]
2012 Women on Boards Survey Finds Progress But Slow
March 8, 2012 in Board Diversity
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate GMI Ratings’ 2012 Women on Boards survey includes data on over 4,300 companies in 45 countries around the globe. The results show incremental improvement in most measures of female board representation since our 2011 report. The main findings include: For the first time ever, women hold [...]
Women on Boards: Zale capitulates
February 28, 2012 in Board Diversity, Daily Viewpoint
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate On February 22, 2012, Beth M. Pritchard was appointed as a director of Zale Corporation (NYSE: ZLC). Zale, a jewelry retailer, was one of the companies featured heavily in reporting of GMI Ratings 2010 Women on Boards report, as it had no female representation on its board. It [...]
African-American CEOs
January 31, 2012 in Board Diversity
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate Businessinsurance.org has recently released a list of the 10 Most Successful African American CEOs of all Time. The list includes names such as Kenneth Chenault, CEO of American Express, Aliko Dangote, CEO of Nigerian conglomerate Dangote Group, Oprah (no explanation needed), and Sean “Puff Daddy” “Puffy” [...]
A Credit to Mentors Down Under? A Record-setting Year for Australian Female Directors
January 6, 2012 in Board Diversity
By Michelle Lamb, Research Associate Last month a record was set in Australia with respect to the percentage of women on company boards. According to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, as of 2011 year-end the number of women on ASX200 boards reached 65, including 12 new appointments (or 40 percent of new hires). [...]
No News is Bad News: WOB No Significant Change in Six Years
December 15, 2011 in Board Diversity
By Michelle Lamb, Research Associate Yesterday two powerhouses in the promotion of female equality in the workplace, ION and Catalyst, released their annual studies on women directors and executive officers in the US. ION’s “Gender Imbalance in the Boardroom: Opportunities to Change Course” includes data on Fortune 500 companies in 14 geographic areas as well [...]
Remake the board, don’t just repopulate, says Mr. Monks
December 2, 2011 in Board Diversity
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and senior research associate Bob Monks on our 3-D Blog yesterday proposes not that we simply repopulate boards with a more diverse set of directors, but that we remake boards altogether. The following quotations will give you a flavor of the full blog. We cannot hope to make progress until [...]
Nell Says It Like It Is
November 7, 2011 in Board Diversity
Nell Minow’s new blog on our 3-D Blog says it like it is. The blog, titled And Another One Bites the Dust takes side swipes at MF Global, Nabors, and Chesapeake Energy. She rightly blames the boards of all three and concludes that if companies keep on nominating the usual suspects, the same scandals will [...]
IBM Becomes Largest Female Run Company on Virginia Rometty CEO Appointment
October 27, 2011 in Board Diversity, CEO Pay
By Greg Ruel- Research Associate The first female CEO in the 100-year history of IBM will take office in January 2012. Ms. Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, 54 years old, is a great CEO appointment by virtually all accounts. She joined IBM in 1981 and served in various roles of increasing responsibility up to most recent appointments [...]
ION on 3D: A Good Board is a Balanced Board
October 20, 2011 in Board Diversity
By Michelle Lamb, Research Associate ION President Charlotte Laurent-Ottomane blogged this week about gender diversity in the boardroom – how a corporation needs businessmen just as much as businesswomen to have an effective, well-rounded business model. Laurent-Ottomane praises initiatives like the 3D database as tools to help companies widen their applicant pool to include more [...]
Compensation Policy: CEO Severance Pay and the Cost of Failure
October 7, 2011 in Board Diversity, Board Pay, CEO Pay, Corporate Governance, Executive Pay
By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Research Analyst What is the price of failure? With 14 million Americans unemployed, more people are paying attention to CEO pay packages. The unemployment rate has been over 9% since April 2009, but CEOs continue to collect multi-million dollar payouts, even as their companies deliver lack-luster returns to shareholders. Even though [...]