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Boardroom bound: Efforts to bring more women into biomed industry's top ranks

Nature Medicine volume 23, pages 141–143 (2017)Cite this article

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One of the solutions put forth in this letter was to pursue executive-board appointments for women. The board of directors of a company has a key role in helping to manage the firm, including making financial decisions on behalf of shareholders, overseeing the recruitment of upper-management positions at a company and helping to set goals for the firm as a whole.

Current statistics paint a dismal picture when it comes to the presence of women on company boards. In 2015, a gender-diversity index of Fortune 1000 companies, published by the 2020 Women on Boards campaign, revealed that women make up only about 19% of corporate directors across all industries1. Another survey, conducted in 2014 by the life-sciences executive-recruitment firm Liftstream, found that among nearly 1,500 public and private, small-to-medium-sized biotech companies in Europe and the US with a focus on developing therapeutics or diagnostics, there were ten men in a US biotech boardroom for every woman.2 A follow-up study conducted by the same firm and published last month focused on more than 170 biotech companies that had gone onto the public market between 2012 and 2016. It similarly found that women held only about 10% of all board positions3. Many people in pharma and biotech are particularly dismayed by this one-to-ten ratio because more women than men have entered the biomedical talent pool in recent years: according to statistics from the American Enterprise Institute, over the past seven years, more women than men in the US are receiving doctorate and master's degrees in the biological and health-science fields.

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References

  1. 2020 Women on Boards. The 2020 Women on Boards Gender Diversity Index. (2020 Women on Boards, Jamaica Plain, 2015).

  2. French, A. Diversifying the Outlook: The X&Y of Biotechnology Leadership (Liftstream, London, 2014).

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  3. Patel, R., Stasiak, L. & Simpson, K. A Public Reality For Women In Biotech Boardrooms (Liftstream, London, 2017).

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  4. Barta, T., Kleiner, M. & Neumann, T. Is there a payoff from top-team diversity? (McKinsey Quarterly, New York, 2012).

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  5. Carter, N.M. & Wagner, H.M. The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women's Representation on Boards (2004–2008) (Catalyst, New York, 2011).

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  6. US Government Accountability Office. Corporate Boards: Strategies to Address Representation of Women Include Federal Disclosure Requirements (US GAO, Washington, DC, 2016).

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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar is Nature Medicine's associate news editor based in Boston.,

    Shraddha Chakradhar

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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar
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Chakradhar, S. Boardroom bound: Efforts to bring more women into biomed industry's top ranks. Nat Med 23, 141–143 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0217-141

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