More Businesswomen Land Spots On Boards Of Top U.S. Companies

NEW YORK Growing numbers of women are joining corporate boards, and about a third of the nation’s largest companies now have more than one female director, according to a survey released Wednesday.

“America’s business leaders are heeding calls for more women,” said Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, the non-profit consulting and research group that conducts the annual survey.

According to the data, 81 percent of the nation’s largest companies now have at least one woman director. A year ago only 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a woman on their board; in 1993 that number was 69 percent.

Furthermore, 166 of the nation’s top 500 companies now have more than one female board member - an 18 percent increase from 141 last year.

“America’s leading companies know it’s time to move beyond a quota of one woman,” said John Bryan, chairman and chief executive of Sara Lee Corp. and chairman of Catalyst’s board of directors. “… It takes the presence of two or more women for a company to fully benefit from the perspectives of its female directors.”

Despite the growth in their numbers, women directors hold only 9.5 percent of the 6,274 corporate board seats, Catalyst said. Still, that was up from 8.7 percent last year and 8.3 percent in 1993.

The perception that there are not enough qualified women still keeps many out of the clubby and almost exclusively male upper echelons of American business, Wellington said.

Part of the problem, she said, is that chief executives tend to look to their peers to fill spots on corporate boards and that leaves out women since only two are chief executives of Fortune 1,000 companies.

Still, since women now comprise almost half the work force, increasingly are entering senior level positions within companies and are starting firms of their own, that trend is helping them make it onto corporate boards.

At the same time, 60 percent of purchasing decisions are made by women, James E. Preston, chairman and chief executive of Avon Products Inc., said at a breakfast to announce the results.

“To exclude women when they represent that share of the market is not good business sense,” Wellington said.

Indeed, of the top 100 companies ranked by revenue, 95 have at least one woman board member, according to Catalyst.