Interesting, if only for the confirmation that companies responded to pressure to increase gender diversity on their boards not through appointing women to directorships formerly held by men, but by creating “pretend directorships” for poorly-qualified women – almost all of the women were (and are, still) appointed as non-executive directors, tellingly – which for major companies would cost the equivalent of a rounding error in the annual accounts. An extract:

“While the data from the first quarter of this year represents a meaningful dip in representation, nothing about how women have been gaining board seats over the last decade suggests it can’t go even lower.

“The pace of change has already been incredibly slow,” Cooper says. “There was a bright spot. And now we may see real backsliding. It’s one step forward and two steps back, but this time it could be many steps back.” [J4MB: One can but hope we’ll see “many steps back” but I doubt we shall. It would be welcome if only for the sake of financial performance, given the long-established causal link between increasing gender diversity on boards and financial decline as reported on our associated website, established in 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business.]

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