Little to No Gains for Women in California - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Californian women saw a drop in their share of board seats and a continued exclusion from about a third of boards and C-suites, the fifth annual state survey found.

• The share of women on board slipped to 10.6% from 10.9% in 2008 and is still very similar to the 10.2% first recorded in 2005.

• Of the 400 largest companies, 118 had not a single woman on the board or holding an executive officer post. Needless to say, no company was lacking men in those positions.

• One bright spot concerned CEOs at those companies, with the number of women in the post rising to 15 from 13.

• But, overall, the authors of the University of California, Davis, annual survey said there had been little improvement not just from 2008 but since the census started in 2005. “Our findings paint a disappointing picture,” said Steven Currall, Dean of UCD’s Graduate School of Management.

• Those Californian companies that do well in gender balance, however, do pretty well. The survey’s top 25 companies featured 10 of those 15 CEOs and women held at least a quarter of top jobs at those 25 winners.

• At the top-ranked company in the survey, Bare Escentuals of San Francisco, women hold 60% of board seats. The CEO, Leslie Blodgett, said, “Being that our company creates products for women, it makes sense that we are comprised of over 90 percent women.”

• Among all firms, those in consumer products were the most diverse, averaging 20% women directors. High-tech was the laggard, with almost three in four telecoms having all-male boards, never mind a woman in the C-suite.

• As a result, women holding Executive Committee jobs were rarest in Silicon Valley, at 8.9%. They were least uncommon, at 17.3%, in San Francisco.

Sources: Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle

To read the census