The Missing Piece in the Push for Boardroom Diversity

Of the 4,700-some board seats at those companies over the same period, only 49 have been held by Black directors, according to new research by the Board Diversity Action Alliance.

Let that sink in for a moment. That’s only 1 percent of thousands of positions, spanning more than 20 years.

Those diversity gains, minuscule by any measure, have taken place very recently: 21 of the 23 seats held by Black directors of venture-backed companies in the past 20 years were filled in the past decade, the research reported. Similarly, all 15 board seats held by someone with a Latino background were gained in the last 10 years.

“These organizations are started by white men. They start the company with their friends and their family. Their friends and family look exactly like them, right?” said Ursula Burns, a former chief executive of Xerox and still one of the very few Black leaders of a Fortune 500 company. Today, she sits on the boards of Exxon Mobil, Datto and Uber and is the chairwoman of Teneo. She is a founding partner of the Board Diversity Action Alliance along with Gabrielle Sulzberger, who is also a senior adviser to Centerbridge Partners.

“I didn’t know how bad it would be, but I knew it was bad,” Ms. Sulzberger said of the research. She is one of the few Black female directors; she sits on the boards of Eli Lilly, Mastercard, Brixmor Property Group and Cerevel Therapeutics, and she is a strategic adviser to Two Sigma Impact, a private equity fund in New York. She is also a senior adviser to Teneo. The influence of private equity and venture capital firms on the companies they invest in, she said, “cuts through such a large piece of our economy.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/business/dealbook/board-diversity-private-companies.html