An annual tracking of board diversity within private companies reveals slight change when it comes to gender and none when it comes to women of color.
The 2021 study, a partnership between Crunchbase and Him For Her, reveals that women now hold 14% of board seats of the most “heavily funded” private companies compared to 11% in 2020 and 7% in 2019.
However, there is massive ground to make up with 40% failing to have any women on the board, although it's some improvement on the 50% figure the previous year.
The study goes on to highlight that only 3% of all directors are women of color, which has not really changed on the 2020 figure.
Meanwhile, more than 75% of boards do not have a single woman of color while 19% of all board seats are held by men of color.
Travel technology companies do not fare much better according to recent research.
Only 12.5% of the top 350 travel technology companies are led by a woman.
The study, from PR agency Belvera Partners, reveals that business travel-related technology companies have one of the highest percentages of women CEOs at 26%.
Phocuswright’s 2021 Gender Equity Study reveals that 46% of mean feel the travel industry is good or excellent with respect to gender equity for career development and management opportunities compared to 26% of women.
In addition, 59% of men believe more leadership opportunities available to all versus 29% of women.
More recently, the Castell Project, a non-profit organization revealed women are now in one top position in the hotel industry for every 10.3 that men occupy compared to 2019 when it was one woman in a leadership role compared to 11.2 men.
At the Global Business Travel Association conference last month, Carol Fergus, director of global travel at Fidelity International, urged the industry to take action rather than waiting for data to prove there’s an issue.
Announcements made by the investment community should help to bring some balance going forward, at least among public companies.
Last year, Goldman Sachs increase its requirement for taking a company public to two diverse board members, including at least woman.
It had originally announced the year before that it would require at least one diverse board member to take a company public.
And, just over a year ago Nasdaq proposed new listing rules for companies to publish diversity statistics on their board of directors and require most Nasdaq-listed companies to have at least two diverse directors.
The Securities & Exchange Commission approved the proposals in August last year.