The cover of the 2024 OnBoard study says it all: “Parity is Here.”
Georgia now has eight major public companies with at least as many women on their boards as men. As recently as 2021, there were zero Georgia companies with gender parity on their boards.
Even more impressive, three of those companies have more women directors than men.
OnBoard has been tracking the number of women on Georgia’s public company boards since 199,3 when only 4 percent of all board seats were held by women. Today, more than 27 percent of board seats are held by women — a marked improvement over the past 30 years, but still shy of OnBoard’s 50 percent goal to have as many women directors as men on the boards of Georgia’s public companies.
That’s why it’s so impressive that three Georgia companies have exceeded parity. Of Coca-Cola Co.’s 11 directors, six are women. Intercontinental Exchange Inc. has 10 directors, and six are women. And of National Vision Holding Inc.’s nine directors, five are women.
By the way, since the cut-off date for the 2024 study, Coca-Cola has added another woman director — Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer at Netflix. That means that seven of Coca-Cola’s 12 directors are women.
“Parity is no longer an outlier,” said Grace Nelson, CEO of Magenta, who coordinates the annual study for OnBoard.
Reade Fahs, CEO of National Vision, is proud to have played a role in building the board of the company he has led since 2002. When National Vision went public in October 2017, Fahs brought on Virginia Hepner as the first woman director of the company. He had gotten to know Hepner when she was CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center, and he was on the board of the Alliance Theatre.
Since then, National Vision has added four more women to its board, and three of the five are from Atlanta. Now women outnumber the company’s four male directors.
In an interview, Fahs said the $2.2 billion company did not set a goal of having a majority female board.
“As we formed our board, it just kind of happened,” said Fahs, explaining that the fast-growing eye retailer kept selecting candidates based on the skills it wanted on the board.
It just so happens that 76 percent of National Vision’s 14,000 associates are women, and about 58 percent of its of its customers also are women. Given its business profile, Fahs does not believe it should be unusual or exceptional for women to make up a majority of National Vision’s board.
“It’s a stupendous board,” said Fahs, who also is an OnBoard advocate. “Boards really do matter.”
Lisa Robinson, CEO of OnBoard, said a number to track is the “fill rate” of available board seats. In the past year, 37.6 percent of the open or new board seats were filled by women. Until more than 50 percent of board seats are filled by women, men will continue to hold a majority on Georgia’s public boards. But it’s important to have a historical perspective. In 2015, the fill rate was only 11.5 percent.
To help move the needle, OnBoard has a database with nearly 130 women who are “board ready.”
“These women have been vetted,” Robinson said. “We have spent a lot of time with them. They are available to anyone who is interested in bringing women on their board.”
OnBoard often works with companies to help the right woman director for their board. “We do an average of 30 searches a year,” said Robinson, who added that OnBoard has started working with privately held companies to add women to their boards.
But the annual OnBoard study focuses on publicly held companies because financial and governance information is part of the public record. For its most recent study, there were 115 public companies in Georgia. There was at least one woman director on 102 of those companies. Thirteen companies, however, had no women directors.
Most of those companies tend to be smaller enterprises. The track record is better among major companies.
Of Georgia’s 17 Fortune 500 companies, all have women directors. In fact, 16 of them have at least three women directors. OnBoard refers to those as “Power of 3” companies. The one Fortune 500 company not in the Power of 3 is Mohawk Industries Inc., which has one woman director.
Georgia has 86 companies that have revenues of more than $100 million a year. Only one of those companies does not have a female director — Wheels Up Experience Inc. Several smaller public companies, though, have no female directors. Those include:
Affinity Bancshares
Edge Data Solutions
Guided Therapeutics
Luvu Brands
Mastermind
Parks! America
Regional Health Properties
SunLink Health
Tautachrome
Virios Therapeutics
Volato Group
A good rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the more likely women will be well-represented on its board.
Another interesting data point is that there are 49 Georgia companies that qualify as “Power of 3” entities. In 2016, only 11 of Georgia’s 125 public companies had at least three women on their boards.
Again, OnBoard’s study provides the data to show where progress is being made. For example, the number of Georgia’s public companies has gone from 239 in 2000 to 115 in the 2024 study. Having fewer public companies translates into having fewer board seats. “That impacts the available opportunities for women to get on boards,” Robinson said.
One data point that was disappointing in this year’s OnBoard study is the percentage of board seats held by women of color in Georgia’s public companies. Women of color held 6 percent of public board seats, the same percentage as last year. OnBoard points out that women of color make up more than 20 percent of Georgia’s population.
The annual OnBoard Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Award Dinner will take place Nov. 7. The honoree of the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Award will be Julie Schertell, president and CEO of Mativ, who is also a director of the Ingersoll Rand Co. Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, the Jennings-Hertz artistic director of the Alliance Theatre, will give the keynote address at the dinner.
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