The all-male board is alive and well for private companies

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March 1, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Renee Montgomery makes history as a WNBA team owner, Taylor Simone Ledward brings the Golden Globes audience to tears, and all-male boards are alive and well for private companies. Have an awesome Monday.
– Board of it. Last week, Claire wrote about some good news: the all-male board is pretty much dead when it comes to top U.S. initial public offerings. Many companies today won’t dare go public with only men on their boards of directors—a practice that was relatively common as recently as 2019 (remember WeWork?).
But a new report covered exclusively in Fortune this morning finds that before companies reach the IPO stage, the all-male board is alive and well. Just under half—49%—of U.S. private companies that have raised more than $100 million in funding don’t have any women on their boards, according to Crunchbase and the organization Him for Her. These are the companies, with nine figures of capital behind them, that are well on their way to IPOs or other exits—but they have not achieved inclusive leadership at the board level in the years before facing the scrutiny of the public markets.
Private company boards are often smaller than public company boards, and the few seats available are often reserved for founders and investors. But women are underrepresented in all categories of board member, holding 9% of investor seats, 7% of executive director spots, and 20% of independent director roles.
The numbers for women of color are even more dismal. Eighty-one percent of these late-stage private company boards didn’t include a single woman of color. Only 3% of total board seats were held by women of color; 11% were held by women of any race or ethnicity. That’s because, while half of these boards have at least one woman, only 18% had more than one.
Despite how low these numbers are, they are an improvement from last year, when 60% of these private companies had zero women on their boards. “There’s good progress,” says cofounder of Him for Her Ann Shepherd, “but still so much work to be done.”
Read the full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman.

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