As required by SB 826, California’s board gender diversity law, the California Secretary of State has posted its March 2020 report on the status of compliance with the new law. The report combines information gathered in the...more
Remember California’s SB 826, the board gender diversity mandate? That law requires each public company with principal executive offices located in California, no matter where they are incorporated, to have a minimum of one...more
What’s the news from Davos? Well, the new Goldman Sachs CEO made some news when he told CNBC that, starting July 1, in the U.S. and Europe, Goldman will take companies public only if there is “at least one diverse board...more
SEC Chair Jay Clayton has streamlined the Regulatory Flexibility Act Agenda to limit it to the rulemakings that the SEC actually expects to take up in the subsequent period. Clayton has previously said that the short-term...more
There’s now another legal challenge to SB 826, California’s board gender diversity statute, filed today in the federal district court in the Eastern District of California. In Creighton Meland v. Alex Padilla, Secretary of...more
And speaking of the NYC Comptroller’s Boardroom Accountability Project, as I just did in this PubCo post on the Project’s push for proxy access, on Friday, Stringer announced the the newest phase of the Project, Boardroom...more
ISS recently released the results of its 2019 Global Policy Survey. In this year’s integrated survey, the topics included board gender diversity, overboarding, sunsetting of multi-class capital structures, combined chair and...more
It was only a matter of time. As reported here on Bloomberg, a conservative activist group has filed a lawsuit, Crest v. Alex Padilla, in California state court on behalf of three California taxpayers seeking to prevent...more
As reported by the WSJ, a new milestone has finally been reached for board gender diversity: there are no longer any companies in the S&P 500 with all-male boards!...more
As reported on thecorporatecounsel.net blog, the California Secretary of State has published on its website two spreadsheets, dated July 1, 2019, which apparently together constitute its mandated “report” under SB 826,...more
Here is the lede from this WSJ article: “A stubborn paradox reigns across U.S. boardrooms: Companies are appointing more women to board seats than ever, yet the overall share of female directors is barely budging.”...more
As discussed in this article in Bloomberg Businessweek, a new analysis conducted by Bloomberg explores the potential impact of California’s new board gender diversity mandate, SB 826. And what does it show? The impact on ...more
Is board stability always a good thing? A new study from consultant Spencer Stuart showed that, in 2018, 428 new directors were elected to boards of companies in the S&P 500, the most new directors since 2004, representing an...more
As discussed in a post from February, a California bill, SB 826, addressing the issue of board gender diversity, has been making its way through the California legislature. Today, Governor Jerry Brown signed that bill into...more
According to consultant Equilar’s Gender Diversity Index, for the second calendar quarter of 2018, the percentage of women on the boards of companies in the Russell 3000 increased from 16.9% to 17.7%, representing the third...more
As discussed in this article from the WSJ, the UK government is conducting a review of the reasons underlying the low proportion of women in top executive positions at companies in the FTSE 350 index. According to the...more
According to a new report from the EY Center for Board Matters, 54% of the 2017 class of directors of Fortune 100 companies served in non-CEO roles and 40% were female. More than half of the Fortune 100 added at least one...more
Happy International Women’s Day!
According to the latest Equilar Gender Diversity Index (GDI), based on the current rate of growth, board gender parity for companies in the Russell 3000 is now expected to be achieved by...more
The EY Center for Board Matters has identified investors’ top priorities for companies in 2018, based on its annual investor outreach involving interviews with over 60 institutional investors with an aggregate of $32 trillion...more
The lede from the WSJ is that “for the first time,” BlackRock (reportedly the largest asset management firm with $6.3 trillion under management) is “stating publicly that companies in which it invests should have at least two...more
In its Annual Corporate Directors Survey for 2017, PwC surveyed 886 directors of public companies and concluded that there is a “real divide” between directors and institutional investors (which own 70% of U.S. public...more
ISS recently released the results of its 2017-2018 global policy survey. The respondents, mostly from the U.S., included 131 investors, 382 corporate issuers, 46 consultants/advisors, 28 corporate directors and 13...more
At the final meeting yesterday of the SEC Committee on Small and Emerging Companies (apparently soon to morph into the Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee), the Committee finalized the discussion draft of its...more
While more and more institutional holders and asset managers are noisily promoting board diversity among their portfolio companies—including, most recently, the NYC Comptroller and the NYC pension funds—hedge fund activists...more
In 2014, NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, who oversees the NYC pension funds, submitted proxy access proposals to 75 companies—and ignited the push for proxy access at public companies across the U.S. The form of proxy access...more