Focused Effort to Narrow the Gender Gap on Corporate Boards

The dearth of women on corporate boards has been a persistent issue for decades. Yet little has changed over the years, despite much public hand-wringing over the stubborn gender gap.

Men hold most of the 5,488 board seats at American companies, according to the Alliance for Board Diversity, a group of leadership organizations. Women lag at 16.6 percent, a level that has remained nearly constant since 2004, when the alliance started monitoring the figures.

It has been a Sisyphean challenge to nudge the numbers and create a clearer path for women to obtain seats as corporate directors. Even as more women become chief executives and studies highlight the paucity of female directors, boards remain a largely male preserve.

The latest effort to attack the problem, a program at George Washington University School of Business, is trying a two-pronged initiative: helping women make it onto the short lists to be considered for open seats and training women to be ready to step into those posts.

The approach is being supported by influential women, including financing from Linda Rabbitt, founder of the Rand Construction Corporation, a construction firm based in Washington with more than $263 million in annual revenue.

The program, called On the Board, has 15 female executives in its first class, most of whom have little or no experience sitting on corporate boards but are top managers at major corporations.

The program may soon be chalking up its first success story. One of its first fellows, Anita M. Sands, a group managing director at UBS Wealth Management Americas, was nominated and elected on Tuesday to the board of the global security software giant Symantec Corporation.

The scarcity of women at the highest corporate rung struck Ms. Rabbitt last year when she realized she was the only woman being honored at an awards ceremony for board directors.

“It was 10 men and me,” said Ms. Rabbitt, who is also the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and sits on the boards of the Greater Washington Board of Trade and Towers Watson & Company. “I’ve been in a mostly all-male environment for nearly 30 years. But I have encountered very few women around board tables, and I wanted to do something about it.”

She decided on a two-part approach, she said, because “women are newer at this. It’s not just skills; they also need a network and know how to use it to find the right board fit.”

Women are overlooked because companies often favor sitting or retired chief executives for their boards, said Caryl Athanasiu, chief operations risk officer for Wells Fargo, who is a program participant. “If a woman doesn’t have that C.E.O. moniker, it’s that much harder to be considered.”

Also hindering women is the traditional recruitment practice of tapping established corporate networks, which often exclude qualified women.

“You don’t apply; you have to be invited on a board,” said Brande Stellings, head of corporate board resources for Catalyst, the nonprofit group that focuses on women in the workplace. “Subtle stereotypes or latent bias mean women are often overlooked.”

To overcome this barrier, the George Washington project stresses networking to tackle a major sticking point for female candidates: the decision-making process that determines how board seats are filled. Too often, diversity advocates say, company executives recruit familiar business colleagues to fill a seat instead of casting a wide net.

Unspoken barriers derailed Penny McIntyre, former head of the consumer group of Newell Rubbermaid, three years ago when she was being considered for an empty board seat. Rather than inquiring about her experience, interests or even her golf handicap, the company’s directors, all men, spent the interview lunch parsing their own golf games.

“When I asked if they had any questions, one replied, ‘No, the C.E.O. likes you and you’ll be just fine,’ ” she recalled. “It felt like a throwback to the 1950s.”

She decided not to pursue the post but remains interested in joining a board and is participating in the George Washington effort to create a cadre of women for board openings.

The United States trails some developed countries like Norway, a nation that has intensive programs and quotas to increase women on boards. Now, 36.1 percent of its corporate directors are women, according to a GMI Ratings survey. (Sweden and Finland followed close behind).

In the United States, few women â€" less than 2 percent â€" have joined board ranks since 2009, according to GMI. And nearly 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have no female board members at all, according to Catalyst, the workplace research group.

The On the Board program is holding several three- to four-day sessions over the course of the year for its fellows, who were selected from 90 applicants. In-depth sessions include topics like cybersecurity and the duties of independent auditors.

The program, which includes meetings with federal officials to help participants better understand government regulations, is heavy on financial topics, which helps combat the perception that women’s lack of financial experience â€" real or perceived â€" disqualifies them from directorships.

“Financial reform laws have put a focus on having financially astute people on boards,” said a program fellow, Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, a senior vice president at Charles Schwab & Company, who is the daughter of the firm’s founder, Charles Schwab. “The program exposes you, for example, to what regulators are thinking and what to look for when you are serving on the board.”

Ms. Rabbitt turned to the International Women’s Forum, where she is one of 5,000 members, for female executives to mentor each program fellow.

The mentors, who have corporate board service, provide guidance and help create networks with people, including executive recruiters, who scout for potential directors. One mentor is Maria M. Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College in California and a director at both Microsoft and Broadcom.

“Too often,” Ms. Klawe said, “there’s a feeling that you’ve got one or two women on the board, so you don’t need another.” In reality, “the number of women directors is tiny, and there is a lot of room for more.”

Even when women reach the top of possible directorship lists, they still face the glacial pace of board turnover, said Doug Guthrie, a professor of international business and management at George Washington’s business school, who worked with Ms. Rabbitt, also a university trustee, to create the program.

Board retirement age can be flexible, and the six-figure pay and travel are incentives to sit at the board table for a long time. Two-thirds of Fortune 500 company directors have occupied their seats for 10 to 15 years, according to a recent report from Stuart Spencer, the executive recruiting firm. That means only a few hundred such slots change hands annually.

“The average number of women joining boards is about 16 each year,” said Professor Guthrie, who said the program, which is financed for at least four years, aims to substantially raise that number.