Women in the boardroom | Deloitte Insights

For parity to become a reality, a wide range of stakeholders will need to devote greater focus and action to enable corporate boards to more accurately reflect the societies in which they operate. And boards themselves will need to continue to take action and ask the right questions.

Government action has driven impact at the board level

One thing that has become apparent is that government action yields results. Five of the top six countries with the highest percentage of women serving on boards in our study have some sort of mandatory quota legislation, ranging from around 33% (Belgium and the Netherlands) to 40% (France, Norway, and Italy). And continued government initiatives in the United Kingdom, through the use of targets, for example, (the 2011–2015 Davies Review³ and the 2016–2020 Hampton-Alexander Review⁴), have also borne fruit: Women now hold over 40% of FTSE100 board seats in the United Kingdom⁵ and over 34% of all board seats in our sample. Similar efforts in Australia, through voluntary targets and disclosures,⁶ have also moved the needle—women’s representation on Australian boards has more than doubled since 2014 (15% to 34%). Yet the recent political climate in some geographies may be starting to waiver on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which could challenge this momentum.

Concerns that quotas drive “overboarding” may not hold water

Some have criticized the practice of implementing gender quotas and targets for boards because they fear it would result in the same small circle of women being “overboarded”: being asked to serve on a large number of boards.⁷ To assess this concern, in 2014, Deloitte Global developed the “stretch factor,” a research tool that measures the average number of board seats an individual holds in a particular market. The higher the stretch factor, the more seats are held by any single director in a given market. This year’s stretch factor remains unchanged for both women (1.30) and men (1.17) at the global level.

While there is no magic number of board seats an individual director should hold, the geography-level data shows that the movement to increase gender diversity on boards has not caused the kind of overboarding that some may have feared. Of the 20 geographies with the highest stretch factor for women, only four were in a geography with quota legislation for publicly listed companies. In Norway, the first country to introduce gender quota legislation for boards, the stretch factor has steadily declined from 1.15 in 2014, falling to just 1.04, well below the global average. While variations at the geography level do exist, it appears the initial fears have not come to fruition.

Investor voting policies are also motivating action

Government action alone is insufficient to reach parity. Investors need to remain vigilant in setting expectations around gender diversity, despite recent changes in the political climate and the number of matters competing for investor attention.

In looking at the voting policies of over 100 large investors, Deloitte Global⁸ found that two-thirds of UK and US institutional investors had a voting policy that set a target for gender diversity. 

These proxy voting policies may also be creating impact in some markets. In the United Kingdom, for example, the appointment rate for women on FTSE100 boards stood at 47% in 2023, up from just 30% in 2017.⁹ In the United States, in 2023, across the Russell 3000, 38% of newly joining board members were women.¹⁰ Recent subtle language changes in these proxy voting policies, though, may signal a softening of investor expectations. It is important that investors remain clear on their diversity, equity, and inclusion expectations for the companies in which they invest. Continued improvement is needed to change the mathematical implications of current appointment patterns: As long as men hold the majority of board seats and continue to gain the majority of new board seats, parity will continue to be elusive.