Women directors: a CEO priority.

• Author: Manning, Donna Dillon

The numbers and the comments show that CEOs are waking up to the expertise brought to the boardroom by women.

The 1994 Catalyst Census of Female Directors of the Fortune 500/Service 500 found a 14% increase over the previous year in the number of individual women serving on corporate boards. That's progress. Yet 42% of these companies still have no women on their boards, and women hold less than 7% of all board seats, or 814 directorships out of a total of 11,790.

In the past year, Catalyst's Corporate Board Placement (CBP) service has witnessed considerable interest in adding women to corporate boards. CBP, working with CEOs, nominating committees, and boards of directors of America's largest corporations, has conducted more board searches for female directors this year than in any other in our 17-year history. It's clear that companies are discovering how many women with experience in all aspects of management are swelling the talent pool of high-level women qualified for board service.

The companies that have added women to their boards know that the workplace is changing, that markets are changing, and that other companies are changing. They know they must change, too, in order to remain competitive. Smart CEOs know that women are a powerful, growing force in corporate America. The business case for having women on the board is clear to the 64 companies of the Fortune 500/Service 500 that had no female directors in 1993 (Catalyst Census), but added one or more female directors by 1994. The bottom-line reasons have been heeded by the 198 companies with multiple female directors, up from 166 in 1993, an increase of 19%.

Catalyst recently surveyed more than one, third of the Fortune 1000 CEOs on the importance of having women on their boards and learned that 68% of them consider recruiting a female director as a priority. Of the 85% of CEO respondents who viewed female representation as "important," 86% have women on their boards.

Catalyst interviewed 25 of these CEOs to learn why this issue has their heads up. It did not come as a surprise to us that several CEOs interviewed by Catalyst focused on the strategic input brought by women to the boardroom. CEOs found that, rather than offering the view of the typical female customer, female directors generate, in the words of one Fortune 500 CEO, a "more productive discourse around the board table," one that results from traveling the business road as a woman.

CEOs spoke of the positive effect...