Very few women oversee US companies. Here’s how to change that

Women’s participation in the labor force has soared over the past 50 years, rising from 32 percent in 1948 to 56.7 percent as of January.

Yet those gains have not translated into the U.S. corporate boardroom, where women held just 16.6 percent of seats in 2015, according to a Credit Suisse analysis of the world’s largest 3,400 or so companies. That’s up a little from the 12.7 percent five years earlier but still disappointingly low.

As scholars of corporate governance, we felt the answer to this puzzle might require a bit of digging beyond this simple percentage. So we crunched the numbers on individual states over an 11-year period to see where women fared better in the boardroom and why.

Our findings were startling but also suggest a solution.

More on the topic following the link.

Original source: “The Conversation”; Thams, Y., Bendell B., & Terjesen, S.

Scholarly insight on gender diversity following the link. All the papers are free for downloading and sharing.