Only seven of the 61 companies Rallis examined had two or more women on their boards, while only four listed two or more women executives. In total, women represented only 12% of the 349 directors and 11% of 205 executives identified in the filings. Stubhub listed one female executive on its team of five, and one female director on a board of seven. Bullish listed two executive leaders, both men, and one woman on its six-person board.
Despite these policy shifts, most investors have come to expect companies to form diverse boards and C-suites as part of optimizing a leadership team. The bar is lower for “starter boards” of newly IPO’d companies, says Matt Moscardi, cofounder of Free Float Analytics. But he says he was still surprised that today’s fledgling public companies are not even nodding at market norms. Instead, they’re leaving out 50% of humanity.
“You’d expect them to look and say, ‘Well, you’re going to IPO, what do other publicly traded companies look like?’” Moscardi told Fortune, “and there is basically no effort to do that.”
